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Why Leopard should be Windows

Hah, that title got your attention, right? Don’t worry, though, I’m not going on a technology-bashing rampage here, I’m just referring to the marketing name: “Windows” would fit Apple’s current software naming scheme so much better than “Mac OS 10.5″ or “Leopard” does.

For quite a while now, Apple has given its consumer software names that refer to the principal concept in a metaphorical way. For example, their word processor is called “Pages”, since the concept of a page is the most fundamental one in a text processing application (Writing makes us think of books, newspapers, print in general, and that’s why the concept of a page is a fundamental one). Similarly, we have “Numbers” now, “Spaces” is coming in Leopard, and iLife applications like “iPhoto” or “iMovie” basically follow a similar line of thought.

Now, “OS 10.5″, however, is a technical term. OS stands for “operating system”, clearly a term not targeted at consumers, but developers. Conceptually, it’s like “Pages” being called “Word Processor” instead, or “iPhoto” the “Digital Image Asset Organizer”.

“Windows”, on the other hand, would fit into this naming scheme perfectly: Isn’t a “window” the fundamental metaphor of a graphical user interface? They are not called “WIMP” for nothing! After all, each of the programs we’re working with is represented by at least one window. To me, it’s intuitively clear that the name “Windows” follows exactly the same line of thought that “Pages” and “Numbers” do.

Of course, given the tradition of the “Mac OS” naming convention, I don’t see it being renamed anytime soon (and I’m happy about that). Still, it’s somewhat funny to see how much Microsoft’s flagship product would fit into Apple’s current naming convention. Kinda.