Signal to Noise

“Windows Marketplace for Mobile”.

OK, does this name strike anybody else as particularly dumb?  On the syllable count alone, the marketing folks at Microsoft should’ve shot this one down before it had a chance to get into the wild.  Now, it seems, it’s going to have to stick.

Compared to Apple’s “Appstore” (2 syllables) or Nokia’s “Ovi” (barely 2 syllables) or even Blackberry’s “App World” (seeing a pattern?), Microsoft’s elephant-sized name for it’s application store clocks in at a whopping 8 syllables. Imagine the water cooler discussions that will never happen as a result:

“Hey man, where’d you get that sweet pinball game?”

“Well, I got it from Windows Marketplace for Mobile!”

Riiiight.  Who seriously is going to call it that?  Microsoft’s history of self-defeating brand names hasn’t been on display this starkly since “Microsoft Windows Server Base Operating Systems Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005“.  Srsly, who uses this wordy terminology?

With Apple having already coined the de facto term “Appstore”, why doesn’t Redmond take advantage of the growing strength of the Zune brand and call their wordy app store something like “Zune Store” or “Zune Place” or even just “Mobile World”?  Even HandMarket, a third-party app store for Windows Mobile, beats Microsoft to the punch in succinctness.