Monad is a very nice piece of software. Powerful, extensible, bringing the Unix world to the Windows people. "Monad" as a word alludes to the powerful Leibnizian philosopical approach of monadology, which influenced scores of important philosophers and mathematicians.
But "PowerShell"????
Could you pick a name more 1990s shareware-esque?
It sounds cheap. Bourne-Again Shell (born again), C-Shell (seashell), these are clever names that also indicate their origins.
PowerShell sounds like a 1980s Hanna-Barbera cartoon about command line interfaces.
Horsethief
· 3 years ago
And, of course, it's also used by a bunch of other people...
Yeah, kudos, marketing department! Pick a (lame) name that is already in use by two other packages.
I wonder how long it will take good ol's MSFT to sue the X11 terminal emulator people for use of their trademarked name PowerShell (TM). The capital S in the middle is a special MSFT invention, I guess...
davidacoder
· 3 years ago
I think the new name is horrible. "Power" sounds incredibly cheese, certainly not like a product geard towards tech professionals. Why the added "Windows"?!?
The new abbrevation "PS" is terrible for searches. It is used already by Postscript. "MSH" was great, as it always narrowed down searches very well.
"Monad" and "MSH" was a GREAT combination. Short, everyone liked it, and none of that nonse "Microsoft" or "Windows" attached.
Not happy.
davidacoder
· 3 years ago
Oh, and Robert: Do you like the new name?!? You write kudos to the marketing people that the name is short, which indicates that that is the only thing you like about it ;)
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
David: it's OK. It's better than many of our names, not as good as our best, but it lost the soul that Monad had.
davidacoder
· 3 years ago
Can't stop right now. Didn't you say just a couple of days ago that marketers should explain their product naming? Why not start right away: Please try to track down the person that was in charge of this one and make him/her explain it.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
I'm working on it. Actually the guy in charge of naming just wrote me a very nice email so we're gonna get together soon.
Wild Bill
· 3 years ago
Cool - so finally you can start administering complex windows software architectures from the command line.
*cough*. Like Linux, AIX, Solaris, AS/400, zOs and I'm guessing OS/x (lineage, etc).
I'm really glad that *someone* in MS actually listened to a customer, and actually managed to push it past all the dead whales in MS middle management. Reading your blog and Mini-MSFT's blog, the latter operation sounds *really* difficult.
But one has to ask. *Yet* another different MS interface, in *yet* another release. Another 3-5 years before it beds in, is reliable and is supported by third party vendors. And the usual question - will it be around for good, or is this just another MS-Must-Have-Now-But-Forgotten-About release ?
Wasnt SMS supposed to do this ? Or did I made the mistake of believing *that* product marketing when it first came out 10+ years ago ?
Kudos on actually delivering something that might help. Which might offset the "why wasnt it in Windows 2000" thought that keeps popping up in *my* head.
Yep -- never liked the name of Monad for the whole 'G' reason.
Devil's Advocate
· 3 years ago
Well we'd like to watch the video - but as long as you insist on making them in .wmv, you're going to be only preaching to the choir (and I'm not in it).
Aaron Axvig
· 3 years ago
From the blog link: "When Marketing saw what the technology actually did and the incredibly positive reaction that customers and partners, they decided that we warrented a "Marquee" name (I'm not making this up). Marquee names are given to those features that are going to be emphasized during the Marketing push."
Just an interesting tidbit of insight into why this product gets a short name.
farhan
· 3 years ago
i agree - monad was much better than powershell. so was longhorn.
davidacoder
· 3 years ago
Excellent! Will be interesting to hear why he came up with that... I think it also is important to keep in mind that MSH could have been kept if the thing would have been called Microsoft Command Shell, or something like that. The more I think about, the more I see the non searchability of "PS" as a problem. Tech pros so rely on being able to quickly search for things on their technology...
Josh Einstein
· 3 years ago
I think the name is horrible and I have emailed them letting them know. Monad isn't a great product name either but MSH was fine. It's supposed to be a unix-like shell so why not just stick to the "sh" convention?
Windows PowerShell sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon.
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
Monad is too geeky, sounds like a Lord of the Rings or Star Trekkian race, something dipped from the SciFi channel. But PowerShell, won't work with the core audience, too Energy Drinkish, too pop-cultural sharewarey cheese-whiz on high. Good in the sense of the wider CIO buying audience, that won't use, but will be impressed over the "power" nomage. I guess it depends, looks bad to me, but then anything is an improvement over say something like, Microsoft Windows Command Line Shell Core Edition or Microsoft Windows Data Prompt Shell. I guess it really depends on the buying market...if "Power" works.
But the legal dept. sure didn't do their homework, enough similarity to make a case on a few fronts.
Kevin Marks
· 3 years ago
Leaving out the spaces makes PowerShell one word?
solomonrex
· 3 years ago
I agree with the PowerShell blog - they expected it to be Microsoft shell or Management shell. Those (at least the first) aren't taken and identify the product immediately in the "marketplace". The only better option would be to identify it with .Net, which is the backbone and the key selling feature: exposure to .Net classes and object oriented structure via the command line. Then, again, .Net has had a problem of it's own as a brand.
shell.net? Command.net? Microsoft .Net Shell?
But no, it's not a terrible "Windows Live .Net Command Shell 2006" style name.
Finally, about the product itself: if you really want to go after hobbyists again (as with your Live initiative), this needs to be part of Windows Vista Economy Basic (or whatever it's called). Ship it with everything, and you may get some traction against Linux mindshare and a get a toehold in various Linux shops and small businesses that would like easier, more powerful scripting features in their desktop. VBA helps Office, after all. Having an XML-literate command shell might just win some developers over. And one of LAMP's strongest features is just the Bash shell.
Alex
· 3 years ago
"Powerful, extensible, bringing the Unix world to the Windows people."
I hate comments like this. Monad (or whatever) is waaaaay more powerful than any shell you can get on Unix. 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. Monad is way more than just a shell, and I think it's one of the best things Microsoft has done for its powerusers and IT shops in a long time.
BTW, the name change stinks and represents how Microsoft marketing kills whatever it touches. How about the "PowerShell 2006 SP1 Express Edition for Administrators"? Wouldn't that be a more informative name?
stuart
· 3 years ago
I like the name. I'm not saying it's perfect but it's a lot better than I expected: "Windows Integrated Shell 2007 Enhanced Edition"
BlogReader
· 3 years ago
What can be done in this that can't be done in the Bash shell? From the blog:
First, this shell does not use text as the basis for interaction with the system, but uses an object model based on the .NET platform.
Huh? Everything on there looked like text to me, and if they're trying to be "admin friendly" it has to be text. I'm not sure if they're planning on drag and dropping something into a command line interface (it wouldn't surprise me if they did).
Those that don't understand the bash shell are bound to reimplement it, poorly. Or worse they could come up with PHP.
Second, the list of built-in commands is much larger; this is done to ensure that the interaction with the object model is accomplished with the highest regard to integrity with respect to interacting with the system.
Oh I see that they have reimplemented PHP with its 1500 "core" methods.
Horsethief
· 3 years ago
Alex, while I am happy to admit that Monad brings a lot of news things to the shell game (so to speak), it is being introduced about 10 years after Bash 2.0. How much shell systems administration has anyone done in Windows, not counting Cygwin (a port of Unix utilities). Batch files for COMMAND.COM or CMD.EXE, maybe on of the third-party shareware shells? Pretty lame. But only because MSFT took so long to catch on that a lot of sysadmins don't like pointy clicky things for administrative systems.
I've thought about the lack of a Java analogue to Monad, for the Unix world, and wondered why no one had done it. I reckon a big part of the reason is that it really wasn't particularly necessary. Almost everything in Unix is manipulation of text files of one sort or another, so text-based shells work quite well. When you get into the wacky-object world of Windows, then it seems like an object-passing shell is fairly useful.
When O'Reilly or someone puts out a book like "Monad Cookbook" or something to that effect, it'll have real traction. Until then, it's just something else MSFT is trying, it may last or it may get killed, who knows?
Diego
· 3 years ago
PowerShell??? I agree, it's all very 1980s. I'm surprised they didn't go with Turbo... "TurboShell - now 50% faster!"
What's wrong with Monad? I liked that name. Marketing was worried about it being called Gonad? :) Reminds me of The Simpsons episode where Homer and Marge are trying to pick a name for Bart. While choosing names Homer is coming up with alternatives which kids would use to make fun of him at school. The joke being that he ended up with Bart.
I'm begining to think that the people picking Microsoft's product names are sitting in a room somewhere with a magic 8 ball. "What about PowerShell?" *MS Marketing dude shakes magic 8 ball* "Yes!" OK, the magic 8 ball has spoken, PowerShell it is! :)
Mark
· 3 years ago
Microsoft powers hell?
Okay...
Kelly Jones
· 3 years ago
I've gotta agree with some of the other comments. msh is *far* more searchable, keeps with the tradition of command shell naming, and PowerShell reeks of cheesy shareware. Monad shell, msft shell, management shell.... not PowerShell.
-Kelly
Devil's Advocate
· 3 years ago
"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.
Mike
· 3 years ago
Wasn't Monad a codename anyway?
"Shell" means nothing to a non-developer, and to the new generation of visual developers out there.
BlogReader
· 3 years ago
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.
Matt Spong
· 3 years ago
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 :)
Scott Hanselman
· 3 years ago
The name is horrible. Truly, completely, horrible. Couldn't have been worse if they'd named it "Norton Desktop."
The product kicks ass, though.
Pusher Robot
· 3 years ago
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.
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
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".
Wesley Parish
· 3 years ago
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.
toast
· 3 years ago
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?
All Comments
But "PowerShell"????
Could you pick a name more 1990s shareware-esque?
It sounds cheap. Bourne-Again Shell (born again), C-Shell (seashell), these are clever names that also indicate their origins.
PowerShell sounds like a 1980s Hanna-Barbera cartoon about command line interfaces.
A quick Google turns up:
http://powershell.sourceforge.net/, a (good) terminal emulator for X11
http://www.majorgeeks.com/PowerShell_XP_d4149.html, a shell extension for Windows XP
Yeah, kudos, marketing department! Pick a (lame) name that is already in use by two other packages.
I wonder how long it will take good ol's MSFT to sue the X11 terminal emulator people for use of their trademarked name PowerShell (TM). The capital S in the middle is a special MSFT invention, I guess...
The new abbrevation "PS" is terrible for searches. It is used already by Postscript. "MSH" was great, as it always narrowed down searches very well.
"Monad" and "MSH" was a GREAT combination. Short, everyone liked it, and none of that nonse "Microsoft" or "Windows" attached.
Not happy.
*cough*. Like Linux, AIX, Solaris, AS/400, zOs and I'm guessing OS/x (lineage, etc).
I'm really glad that *someone* in MS actually listened to a customer, and actually managed to push it past all the dead whales in MS middle management. Reading your blog and Mini-MSFT's blog, the latter operation sounds *really* difficult.
But one has to ask. *Yet* another different MS interface, in *yet* another release. Another 3-5 years before it beds in, is reliable and is supported by third party vendors. And the usual question - will it be around for good, or is this just another MS-Must-Have-Now-But-Forgotten-About release ?
Wasnt SMS supposed to do this ? Or did I made the mistake of believing *that* product marketing when it first came out 10+ years ago ?
Kudos on actually delivering something that might help. Which might offset the "why wasnt it in Windows 2000" thought that keeps popping up in *my* head.
---* Bill
http://www.billbuchan.com
Yep -- never liked the name of Monad for the whole 'G' reason.
Just an interesting tidbit of insight into why this product gets a short name.
Windows PowerShell sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon.
But the legal dept. sure didn't do their homework, enough similarity to make a case on a few fronts.
shell.net? Command.net? Microsoft .Net Shell?
But no, it's not a terrible "Windows Live .Net Command Shell 2006" style name.
Finally, about the product itself: if you really want to go after hobbyists again (as with your Live initiative), this needs to be part of Windows Vista Economy Basic (or whatever it's called). Ship it with everything, and you may get some traction against Linux mindshare and a get a toehold in various Linux shops and small businesses that would like easier, more powerful scripting features in their desktop. VBA helps Office, after all. Having an XML-literate command shell might just win some developers over. And one of LAMP's strongest features is just the Bash shell.
I hate comments like this. Monad (or whatever) is waaaaay more powerful than any shell you can get on Unix. 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. Monad is way more than just a shell, and I think it's one of the best things Microsoft has done for its powerusers and IT shops in a long time.
BTW, the name change stinks and represents how Microsoft marketing kills whatever it touches. How about the "PowerShell 2006 SP1 Express Edition for Administrators"? Wouldn't that be a more informative name?
First, this shell does not use text as the basis for interaction with the system, but uses an object model based on the .NET platform.
Huh? Everything on there looked like text to me, and if they're trying to be "admin friendly" it has to be text. I'm not sure if they're planning on drag and dropping something into a command line interface (it wouldn't surprise me if they did).
Those that don't understand the bash shell are bound to reimplement it, poorly. Or worse they could come up with PHP.
Second, the list of built-in commands is much larger; this is done to ensure that the interaction with the object model is accomplished with the highest regard to integrity with respect to interacting with the system.
Oh I see that they have reimplemented PHP with its 1500 "core" methods.
I've thought about the lack of a Java analogue to Monad, for the Unix world, and wondered why no one had done it. I reckon a big part of the reason is that it really wasn't particularly necessary. Almost everything in Unix is manipulation of text files of one sort or another, so text-based shells work quite well. When you get into the wacky-object world of Windows, then it seems like an object-passing shell is fairly useful.
When O'Reilly or someone puts out a book like "Monad Cookbook" or something to that effect, it'll have real traction. Until then, it's just something else MSFT is trying, it may last or it may get killed, who knows?
What's wrong with Monad? I liked that name. Marketing was worried about it being called Gonad? :) Reminds me of The Simpsons episode where Homer and Marge are trying to pick a name for Bart. While choosing names Homer is coming up with alternatives which kids would use to make fun of him at school. The joke being that he ended up with Bart.
I'm begining to think that the people picking Microsoft's product names are sitting in a room somewhere with a magic 8 ball. "What about PowerShell?" *MS Marketing dude shakes magic 8 ball* "Yes!" OK, the magic 8 ball has spoken, PowerShell it is! :)
Okay...
-Kelly
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.
"Shell" means nothing to a non-developer, and to the new generation of visual developers out there.
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 product kicks ass, though.
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.
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".
"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.
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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