Microsoft is a corporation with billions of dollars, a huge number of talented staff, and a marketing department which is best described as ‘not great.’ That last bit is based on the knowledge that they are naming their next console the Xbox Series X.
A bit of history to put this into context. The first Xbox was called the Xbox, which was simple and made fun of at the time, because it sounded like a code name that accidentally became the real name.
There was then a follow up, which became the Xbox 360, which worked provided you didn’t think about it too hard.
Then things got silly.
The follow up to that was the Xbox One, which is a weird name for the third Xbox. They then added new models, including the Xbox One S, which was slimmer, and the Xbox One X, which had more power, and more X.
The new one is called the Xbox Series X, which is not to be confused with the Xbox One X. They are definitely going to be confused with each other.
Meanwhile, Sony, their largest competitor, just uses an increasing number to indicate where in the grand scheme of thing the latest PlayStation fits. They are going to be up to five next year, and it’s easy to understand, because 5 is more than 4, which is more than 3, and so on, so we understand the hierarchy.
Microsoft’s bizarre naming structure means that unless you’re in the know, you have no idea which is the one you want. There’s no comprehensible structure to their naming system, and I’m sure in the 2020 Christmas season there’s going to be people who get the wrong Xbox because of the confusion surrounding whether the One X or the Series X is the one you want, because their names are too similar for the average person to keep track of. It’s a naming disaster, for no clear reason. There are few names worse for generating customer confusion than naming something basically the same as the old product, changing the word people are least likely to remember.
The clear solution would be to call it anything else. The original code name was “Project Scarlet” and you could run with that and paint them all red, which would be distinctive at a minimum, though potentially controversial since they wouldn’t visually fit in many living room setups.
That said, I would like to have one, because they promise full backwards compatibility with all previous Xboxes and the house Xbox 360 sounds like a chainsaw falling into a bucket of rocks. That’s possibly a bad sign. Sony’s inconsistent record on backwards compatibility means that I still have PlayStations 2-4 hooked up to my television, and while none of them sound quite so bad that’s a lot of inputs to tie up.
