Every time they rebrand or kill a technology that they rolled out with great fanfare, I become less and less likely to trust them with an investment. (This is true both for consumer stuff and for development stuff ) Product rationalization is good, but there is a real cost when they change direction.
I have a cousin who works in PR for Microsoft, and he told me that since Ballmer became CEO the headcount in marketing and sales positions has tripled. (This was a few years ago and was just his ballpark estimate.) I can't help but think that rebranding moves like this are a byproduct of the change in management from engineering based leadership to marketing based leadership.
My thoughts exactly. But beyond trust there's also confusion. I'm not much of a Microsoft customer or user but from I've seen it feels like they keep doing this every few years. There used to be MSN which is now somehow rolled into Hotmail and the Live ID thing which also has something to do with Hotmail but I'm not quite sure and so on which is very confusing to me. If I don't get it as someone who is very familiar with a plethora of (not) confusing web services then I fear for the mere mortals out there who receive some sort of notification that Microsoft Service X is now Microsoft Service Y. The other thing I notice is the Applefication of MS branding in some of this. Music, Calendar, Photos? If I were a MS customer I'd be reminded of Apple's offerings and wondering how they compare with names like this. Now that last concern is pure conjecture but I think it could be reasonable to guess that the more their services sound like Apple products the worse it is for them. There has to be another way to simplify the brands. Google does it without sounding like they're trying to be Apple.
Edit: After thinking about what I just said it occurred to me that it's very easy to be a critic and while I still stand behind my statements I think there's a ton of room for me to be very wrong. After all, I don't work at Microsoft and I don't have complete information. They're a multibillion dollar company so they must know something. Meanwhile I'm just some asshole making flip judgements in my pajamas, dreaming of my business being successful one day.
It's not just that, it's this frenzy they have to rebrand themselves as an 'online' experience/company.
I ask my friends freely and naturally, "Do you have a google account?".
The thought of asking my friends "Do you have a microsoft account, yeah those guys, the ones that deliberately put the web into stagnation for years with their shitty IE5/6 browsers, and killed many cool technology companies through monopoly abuse because they was scared of them, and those guys that continue to try and subvert technology by proxy because they cannot innovate online?"; that thought fills me with dread.
I don't want to ask my friends if they have an account with these guys. Maybe the xbox360 crowd do... shrug
