Maxim V. Karpov does a great job of clearing the fog for me regarding the use and mis-use of the term “Sharepoint” regarding the set of technologies that fall under the Sharepoint umbrella [via Scoble]. I constantly see and hear “Sharepoint“ being used when “SPS“ and/or “WSS“ would be more appropriate. For those of us that don't know every feature, function, and difference between the two, “Sharepoint” isn't precise enough a term. I have come to assume that “Sharepoint” means “SPS” because it saves me the trouble of having to listen and decypher what someone is saying and then find out that they are talking about SPS and I don't need to listen further. This sort of confusion could be easily avoided by MS but they have a track record of strange marketing choices.
For example, why did MS discontinue the entire "Backoffice" line? They didn't, of course, they just rebranded it a few times. But isn't the whole point of branding to make something stick forever in someone's mind? To make it instantly recognizable? Doesn't changing the brand name every year or two work against the process?
Here is another example of a bizarre marketing choice by Microsoft. A couple years ago, MS decided to brand pretty much everything they produced with a new brand name. Just as they used the word "Windows" last century, they took another well-known, universally used word and decided to use it as their brand. Unlike "Windows", though, this word was one that was actually used constantly in the exact field that MS's products live in. There are probably only 2 other words that would have been poorer choices: ".com" and "www". The former didn't sum up the “web” aspect of MS's new technologies and the latter has way too many syllables, so MS went with the 3rd most used phrase in the internet:
I think a lot of people would say that it is obvious from those images what the MS brand is: “.net”. If someone thought that, they would be wrong. The brand is not “.net”, it is “.NET”. Every single time the word is written or typed in official documents, the word is “.NET” in all caps. Why, then, is the logo lowercase? You can't say that it doesn't matter because if it didn't matter, it would not be “.NET” 100% of the time when written. “.net” is almost always easier to type than “.NET” so there is some work involved in ensuring that the “.NET” brand is spelled correctly. So how did the logo manage to be spelled incorrectly? This has to be the most extreme case of a branding/marketing mistake I've seen. The only thing I can think of to explain this is that the written materials come from the C# team and the graphic came from the VB.NET team (VB isn't case sensitive, C# is).