New Delhi Times

Microsoft has announced that the next version of Windows will be called Windows Vista. The product was code named Longhorn previously and this is what I had worked on for 3 years at Microsoft. I have to admit I am rather disappointed with the name chosen by Microsoft for Longhorn.
Firstly, Vista is an English word. And that too a word not used in common vocabulary (at least I have never used that word in a sentence before today). When somebody says “Vista”, no picture comes to my mind. Morover, Microsoft earns more than 2/3rds of its revenue outside of North America. That means, a vast majority of Windows users don’t speak English. So ‘Vista’ doesn’t mean anything to them. If they wanted to really reach out to their biggest user base, they should have chosen a Chinese (Mandarin ?) word. Secondly, the word “Vista” is a fairly common trademark. A Google search returns names of several businesses and organization who use this word. So why pick a word whose branding is already diluted? Finally, for reasons that I myself don’t comprehend, “Vista” doesn’t sound sexy. XP, Xbox, ipod, flickr, vimeo sound cool and sexy but Vista kind of just represents the old fuddy-duddy image Microsoft has been starting to acquire of late.
I am curious what kind of reaction this name evoked within Microsoft. Of course in the Windows division, everybody will continue to call it “Longhorn” even years after it has shipped. Even today, everybody there refers to XP as Whistler (which was what XP was codenamed)!