John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Microsoft CEO Promises to Limit Nokia Phone Names to 10 Syllables or Less

Microsoft’s proposed $7.17 billion acquisition of Nokia’s wireless device business will create “a first-rate Microsoft phone experience” for its customers — one with better device names, too.

Discussing the deal during an early conference call this morning, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that it will give the company license to pare down and polish Windows Phone naming conventions.

“I think we can probably do better for consumer names than ‘Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 1020,'” Ballmer said. “Yet, because of where both companies are and the independent nature of the businesses, we haven’t been able to shorten that. … Now, we can simplify the overall consumer branding and messaging gets much simpler. That is an efficiency of being one company.”

A nice efficiency to have, particularly given Microsoft’s tendency toward ludicrous product naming conventions. Remember, this is the company that gave us grand mountain range monikers like Windows XP 64-Bit Edition For 64-Bit Extended Systems. Nice to see Ballmer acknowledging he’d like to see some brevity around whatever new device branding emerges from this deal.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald