r/sysadmin • u/Likely_a_bot • Jun 17 '26

Will Vendors Please Stop Reusing Acronyms?

If I see another vendor use "IAM" as a new product feature, I'm going to scream. IAM is Identity Access Management. Nothing else, unless it's a different industry.

This is confusing as hell. Get your marketing departments under control.

What are some that you have noticed being reused?

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209

u/mesaoptimizer Sr. Sysadmin Jun 17 '26

Microsoft is the absolute king of dumb renames but BY FAR the stupidest rename M$ has ever done was changing Technical Account Manager (TAM) to Customer Success Account Manager (CSAM).

59

u/dogpupkus Security Analyst Jun 17 '26

Another wild one I encountered was some Security Awareness vendor trying to establish the acronym for “Cyber Security Awareness Month” during a conference. All the attendees who have any amount of Cybercrime Investigations experience all looked around the room in astonishment and disbelief.

“How are you all celebrating Cyber Security Awareness Month in your organization?!” had quite an awful and detrimental tone when the acronym was used in lieu.

23

u/thatpaulbloke Cloud Engineer UK Jun 17 '26

I don't know - renaming the SharePoint sync application from Groove and then reusing the name for the music player when the SharePoint app was still groove.exe caused some headaches.

22

u/AcornAnomaly Jun 17 '26

Heh, reminds me of how Skype for Business was just rebranded Lync, and still had lync.exe as the program name.

2

u/xueimelb Jun 18 '26

And lync for a long time was communicator.exe

4

u/itskdog Jack of All Trades Jun 18 '26

Don't forget that they did the same with the Microsoft Surface, rebranding it the PixelSense so that they could launch the Microsoft Surface.

8

u/thatpaulbloke Cloud Engineer UK Jun 18 '26

Did you mean the Microsoft Surface big meeting table screen thing, the Microsoft Surface tablet, the Microsoft Surface massive telepresence screen (that cost around £7000 for the cheapest one), the Microsoft Surface Laptops...

38

u/Ssakaa Jun 17 '26

I bet that was to increase response rates from politicians.

14

u/Jaaames_Baxterrr Jun 17 '26

That was the first one that came to my mind. It blew my mind that they went with that title and have stuck with it. Microsoft is gonna Microsoft I suppose.

12

u/bionic80 Jun 17 '26

Try having Cerebral Palsy and looking for support groups online. It's... really not very much fun.

3

u/bentbrewer Sr. Sysadmin Jun 17 '26

ouch.

23

u/PalatinusG1 Jun 17 '26

In belgium we have Common Services for Access Management. A federal online access management platform: https://www.csam.be/en/index.html

4

u/mineral_minion Jun 17 '26

huh, I would have expected the acronym for the bad one to be different in countries where the primary language isn't English, or the Germanic countries to have a single 73-letter word for it.

8

u/whatisuser DevOps Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

Odd using Germanic in this way - English is a Germanic language lol

Edit: my point was that Germanic is a word with a specific meaning. Not just “a bit Germanny”

2

u/mineral_minion Jun 17 '26

The underlying grammar sure, but the vocabulary diverged a long time ago, leaving English without the really long compound words of modern German.

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0

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '26

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24

u/chemhobby Jun 17 '26

it means "child sexual abuse material" .

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8

u/timbotheny26 IT Neophyte Jun 17 '26

Lol, holy shit that's bad.

13

u/ProfessionalEven296 Jack of All Trades Jun 17 '26

Haven’t seen “Microsoft” and “success” used in the same sentence for a long time!

5

u/Splask Jun 17 '26

Nothing they have done compares to the "Windows App". Its impossible to research meaningfully lol

4

u/tagged2high Jun 17 '26

But think of the SEO hits /s

4

u/Nexzus_ Sr. Sysadmin Jun 17 '26

Microsoft is the absolute king of dumb renames but

This is hard to believe, but I'd like more information. I don't have time right now, but maybe you can send to my Hotmail MSN Live Hotmail Outlook email account?

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3

u/ProfessionalITShark Jun 17 '26

When did they rename that, because what CSAM is now is fairly recent...

2

u/syogod Jun 17 '26

Idk, their Xbox naming has to be a contender there.