Mike Nash, one of the VPs in the Windows Product division at Microsoft had a recent blog post announcing the new name of the next generation Windows operating system. Looks like this will be one of the few times that the development code name will be the full release name.
Personally, I’m not sure why I have ever known the internal development name of a product from Microsoft. In reality, it should stay internal if you have good security measures in place as the only people that need to know the name are the developers and engineers working on the project.
However, that’s not how Microsoft works. They use it as a marketing opportunity, even though it causes more confusion than anything else.
Now, what do I really think of the name? I think its rather bland, but also very smart. Microsoft is terrible at making deadlines. And since the code name is always leaked by marketing, they have to answer for deadlines that some manager comes up with years in advance. Wombat will be known as M$ Office Publishing Tool 2009 due out in early 2009 but due to delays, will most likely be released in 2010.
The customers could care less about what it is called. Do I really care that I am running OSX Leopard vs Tiger. They could have called it spotted barn cat for all that I care. Its the functionality and features that the users want to see.
Hopefully, Microsoft will do a better job of not announcing features that they can’t get into the product. I was actually excited about a few of the features that were going to come out in Vista. Unfortunately, none of those features made it in.