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Comment by VCFundedGenYer

1 day ago

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.

    • It has. Literally nobody outside of tech bloggers like Siri AI or want Siri AI. I'm pretty positive on AI in general and having used Siri AI now since iOS 27 I can say it's fucking useless and I'm about to delete it from my devices to free up the storage.

Unfortunately, they have also trashed the reputation of the Halo franchise since stripping it from Bungie.

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.