Monad gets renamed to PowerShell

“If *nix had a shell that allowed you to write pseudo-Java that called into compiled Java classes andprovided the ability to modify or monitor every part of the OS locally or remotely, with automatic authentication and easy piping of .Net objects between processes, then we could talk. ”

OK, so its more like a Smalltalk workspace. Nifty. And the language is something like C# script? That’s really unfortunate but I guess the users will be “familiar” with it.

I agree that “PowerShell” is UltraLame.

Wasn’t Monad a codename anyway?

“Shell” means nothing to a non-developer, and to the new generation of visual developers out there.

I’ve though about the piping of non-text between apps and it could be pretty handy if app1.msh emitted a Foo object and app2.msh expected that on STDIN. That does have some advantages over piping text, having the OS do the serialization of the object for you. That carries on in the unix tradition of writting small apps that do one thing well and chaining them together.

Wow, blast from the past. I wrote “the original” PowerShell that a few people above have mentioned.

They can have the name - I agree that it sucks (hey, what do you want from me? I wrote it when I was 19, and I was probably drunk at the time

The name is horrible. Truly, completely, horrible. Couldn’t have been worse if they’d named it “Norton Desktop.”

The product kicks ass, though.

I agree the name is horrible! Scobes, don’t acquiesce so easily. They took a name which was unique, clever, and showed some differentiation, and made it bland. No, worse, “PowerShell” is boring. It’s so obvious, it’s like they’re not even trying. Using “Power” as a marketing prefix was something Apple did in the last decade. It’s tired and it’s worn out. A little creativity - just a smidgen! - would be SO welcomed. Or, if you must use a boring name, grab a utilitarian aesthetic, just call it “Microsoft Shell,” and be done with it. Don’t even pretend that attaching “Power” and smooshing the words together makes anyone anywhere more likely to use it.

I just totally fail to see any rational reason for this name whatsoever. It’s less clever and more boring than the original, but not utilitarian enough that I don’t feel stupid calling it that in front of other geeks. If they ever implement true performance based compensations, the marketing employees should be paying Microsoft.

Marketing should FIRST make sure it jazzes with CORE AUDIENCE user, and then kick it up to the general audience, so that it spreads. Now a great danger in that, in that you can create something so niche, that it becomes seriously isolated and unable to be marketed beyond a limited geeky demographic. But Adobe has gotten hits, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator becoming commodity words for a whole grouping, yet still pleasing the hardcore users.

Which is what it is all about, pleasing the real users and yet having a sexy marketingese name with some imagination is the goal. Monad and Powershell both fail. And the bland corporate-dead 6-or-7-words naming convention doesn’t help either. So wrong 3 ways to heaven, only Microsoft.

“Shell” doesn’t work for the non-CL types…and anything .NET is a tar-pit, (.NET itself is horribly confusing). And “Power” says Power Users only need apply.

I came up with a list of 10 names in no time, that would work much better, with core audience and still has the marketing spark. But you don’t get to milk this cow for free. Plus I would have polled the audience, jazzing it up with a contest, so that the final name, even if sucked would have been at least in some sense voted upon. Niche’s need to feel as part of a team.

Microsoft’s great grand sin, is soliciting all this feedback for free, and then doing what they always intended to do, basically wasting everyone’s time on a pointless marketing hoop jump. Feedback if asked for and given, needs to be taken into consideration, not abused for own purposes. Thrice bitten, once shy.

Microsoft’s marketing overhaul can’t come soon enough. Big expensive marketing guys, yet they have never really successfully launched anything beyond Windows or Office, billions and billions wasted.

PS - Why when you need Adam Barr the most does he go off on wild pointless blog splatterings. Common Microsoft blogger tactic, retreat in the face of incoming “barbarian hordes”.

Well, I’ve installed it on an XP box I look after at my local CTLC, and guess what: it told me that Microsoft Corp. was an untrusted source when it loaded the startup xml file. From the mouth of babes, or is it right from the horse’s mouth?

“PowerShell” never did anything for me - I think of conches if I seriously think of shells with power - conches are the Polynesian/Melanesian trumpet. But the symbols that Unix uses are always clams, scallops and suchlike.

I myself would prefer MSH - easy to remember, distinct, fits in with the Unixish tradition of sh, csh, ksh, bash, zsh, ash, sash, ssh, need I go on? The only Unix-ish shells that don’t follow that tradition are es and rc. Perhaps msh.net, but that does sound like a URL, though with openoffice.org being both a software package name and a URL, I can hardly complain.

Well, Microsoft could do the same - msh.net being both the shell and the website’s URL. They’d have to change all their internal function names again, but with MSH (sorry, PowerShell :^) all they’d need to do is something like:
MSH > get-childitem | get-member-name ‘PS1′ | “string”.Replace(PS1, MSH)
or words to that effect.

I thought Monad had substance and it isn’t in use by anyone else for software.

The whole gonad argument is extremely weak. They didn’t rename Windows when people started coming out with Winblows and Windoze.

Lame, Lame, Lame.

Monad and MSH (very pithy and appropriate)… Jeffrey Snover listened to everyone, why didn’t the marketing people?

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