Ask Paul: November 5 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and Happy Call of Duty day! Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend---and my game playing---a bit early.
Branding is hard
OldITPro2000 asks:

Are you as frustrated as I am with the constant renaming and rebranding that Microsoft does? It's always been ridiculous, but the recent past has felt exceptional. A few days ago at Ignite, they announced another rebranding effort around the Defender name. Some of these products have received a different name each year for the past 3 years.

Yes and no. Defender has certainly gone through several rebrands over time, and it has expanded into a product family that includes many solutions across multiple platforms. But at least in this case, it's a good name. There have been some truly terrible brands elsewhere. (That the security feature in Windows itself has been renamed every other Windows version is another issue. But Windows Security is, at least, a clear name.)

This goes back to the communication problem around Universal Mute you were mentioning yesterday. Why is it so hard for them to communicate clearly? Is it because they have so many product teams that are simply "doing their own thing"?

I wish I could explain the why of this. But you’re probably onto something with regards to the size and complexity of Microsoft and its many product teams. And it’s worth pointing out that sometimes corporate-level marketing will make decisions that are out of the hands of the individual product teams. The most famous example, perhaps, is Windows 2000, which was originally going to be called Windows NT 5.0. That released retired the NT branding, which I really felt stood for something important, with the sad and redundant tagline “powered by NT technology.” That still bugs me today.
Metaverse: hype vs. reality
bschnatt asks:

How successful do you think Meta's VR / metaverse thing is going to be? I wouldn't trust Meta (*cough*Facebook*cough*) as far as I can throw them, and I don't exactly relish the idea of staring at a screen 2 inches in front of my eyes for hours a day (which is why I never got into VR in the first place). I'm already half blind from staring at computer monitors a foot in front of me. Give us the Star Trek holodeck or go home!

My big question is why now? Why has this term suddenly exploded into the mainstream?

I don’t even care what Facebook/Meta does at this point. I don’t see how VR or the metaverse helps them or fixes any of their problems. We collectively need less time on social media, not some deeper integration. I think it’s time for a push back against this nonsense.

That said, Microsoft’s take on the metaverse is interesting. It’s odd how closely this happened to the Facebook ting, but that may just be a weird coincidence since Microsoft has been working towards this for several years, implicitly with efforts like HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality, and more explicitly in early 2020 when it firs...