No, it doesn't make sense. Cortana was a fantastic name for an assistant, and synergistic with Halo at the time.

The low quality of the voice assistant was unfortunate, but the naming was perfect.

The low quality of the voice assistant meant they doomed the Cortana name. It got associated with garbage voice assistance, so they had to rebrand.

If there had been consumer good will for voice assistant performance before poisoning the name, it might have survived... but when you first product in that realm is garbage and it lingers for a long time, you're dooming the name.

Also, synergy with Halo is meaningless to Microsoft. Most folks do not care or even know about Halo.

Why isn't the Siri name poisoned for being terrible?

It kind of has, although I would argue that Siri is more successful than Cortana.

If I recall correctly, the thing that made Cortana particularly frustrating and worthless is that it did all searches using Bing, and opened any websites using Edge, regardless of your default settings. You got forced to use all the Microsoft version of every tool, even if you didn't want to.

I get the impression that it is, at least to some degree

If the Siri name is poisoned then why doesn't Apple rebrand?

Considering how little knowledge you showed of Microsoft’s history in a previous comment, it would be better if you just sat out branding conversations.

It was foolish of them to think they had any consumer clout left. Shoving 1000 copies of an inaccurate, poorly functioning, and inconsistent product down everyone's throat will someday be a case study in how to immediately destroy a brand.

Crazy how if they had waited about 2-3 years, and kept windows AI-free and released it today using the latest models, it would absolutely be well received (see: muse, new siri)

Instead their incompetent managers were chasing promotions and pushed a technology which was not ready yet

While I would like it to be different M$ is far from destroyed. Quite the opposite from my POV it looks far stronger than 10-20 years ago.

The reality is that most users and consumers don’t care about quality, accuracy or functionality at all.

"at all" is probably a stretch, but agreed that the number one factor for a mile is cost. users will accept a surprising level of trash, if the price is cheap.

engineers tend to think as engineers do, solving all problems with features, quality improvements, etc. but those all drive costs up, and don't always provide the return we think they will.

This is just how Microsoft operates. They have operated like this for decades. “Immediately” is quite the exaggeration.

Microsoft does not care about consumer branding because their enterprise branding game is A1.

.... immediately ? MS has been doing it for decades

GrapheneOS fully lets you use the Play Store. Whatever assertation you're making is just false.

> Everyone online speaks in the same broken loop of the same ten phrases.

This one bugs me a lot. The whole "YouTuber voice" or TikTok influencer schlock prose.

I don't get why "wearable chair" from Silicon Valley (HBO) didn't catch on.

Critical information missing from this article: The List.

Copilot is so shoddily written (all LLMs are, but Copilot's is especially terrible). It's Microsoft's sloppy "we're here too!" attempt that continues to represent the benchmark for the bottom of the barrel.

This is why no one likes AI. It ruins wonderful passion project sites like this.

Junk article, junk idea.

AI is not an organism. Please stop trying to think it is.