What do you think of Microsoft product names? Microsoft and Xbox weren't so bad. Even Zune was okay, but are the rest horrible? Zune was suppose to be Argo. More bad named products range from Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere and it's new service, Avalanche. David Webster, the manager, is to blame. He is suppose to come up with these nifty names.

Nobody knows. It has managed to come up with a couple of good ones down the years - "Windows" ain't bad, nor "Xbox" and you could even tip your hat a little towards "Zune", though that started out as "Argo", which at least has the benefit of being at the start of the alphabet. But we know that the product it likes to call "Silverlight" (its Flash killer) is really known inside the company as "Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere" - make sure you include that slash, now - and last week it affirmed its clunkiness by announcing that its bittorrent-alike sort-of peer-to-peer service, known as "Avalanche" while being developed in Cambridge, would be released as "Microsoft Secure Content Distribution".

Yet it has a manager whose task for the past two years, and those forthcoming, is to make its product names snappier: David Webster, the "general manager of brand strategy".

Synergized via guardian.co.uk »