It’s due to a recent “corporate divorce” from NBC, and MSNOW will stand for “My Source News Opinion World.” Name and logo changes should be occurring soon.
Weak.
…so they keep the “Microsoft” part of the name and lose the NBC part, even though it hasn’t been Microsoft for years.
Sorta.
NBC is a very recognizable trademark. MS is slang for lots of things. It’s not now, and never was, an official term or trademark for Microsoft.
And lame, doubtless brainstormed by an ‘executive creative team’, generated by a backronym tool, and filtered through numerous focus groups of people with nothing better to do than get scooped up off the street for the promise of a cheap lunch.
Yeah, it’s most commonly an abbreviation for multiple sclerosis. So, MSNOW sounds like a foundation to raise money for medical research. Which is definitely where I want to go for news and opinion.
Stranger
…its literally where the MS part came from.
I remember MS-DOS
I’m sorta astonished that anyone older than 40 didn’t know this. It was always “Microsoft NBC”.
ETA: Perhaps more accurately, it was MSN+NBC (Microsoft Network + NBC). Their logo for a long time was some variant of this:
New Coke! It will solve everything!
MSNOW sounds like a National Organization for Women honoree
It stands for “My Source News Opinion World.”
A pretty tortured backronym, IMHO
It’s barely even coherent. Is it “News Opinion World”, like here is the place where you can get all of your news opinions? That would be an explicit acknowledgement that they’ve abandoned any pretense of presenting facts, or even a pretense that there is such a thing as news that isn’t an opinion.
But the text below shows “News | Opinion | World”, like they’re separate things. Ok, so they have News, and they have Opinion, and they have… World? What does that mean? One can have news about the world, but isn’t that just news?
Clearly the MS in MSNBC originally stood for Microsoft. That’s also not the/my point.
Since Microsoft bailed out of MSNBC decades ago, the MS has not stood for Microsoft. The MS in MSNOW equally won’t.
No more than the “NOW” part will stand for the National Organization of Women.
Is MSNOW a rather tortured example of historical corporate evolution and focus group-think? You bet it is.
Maybe not officially, but it’s no different than Kentucky Fried Chicken rebranding to KFC. Of course it still stands for that, even if they deny it.
…but it did. Which was why I said “it hasn’t been Microsoft for years.” I was just pointing out they are keeping the two letters that didn’t mean anything any more and losing the “National Broadcasting Company” part, which has a legacy spanning decades.
M Snow sounds like a blackmailer mentioned by Auguste Dupin.
I can already see the RW sneers about “M Snowjob”.
The jokes, they write themselves.
The logo looks a bit like PMS NOW.
I agree that the full name sounds rather cumbersome. We’ll see how long it lasts.
…It’s very much in the same vein as Musks Twitter/X rebrand. The amateurish logo, the new editorial direction, there is a LOT going on behind the scenes. I wouldn’t expect MSNOW to be regarded as the “liberal” news site any more, although it will keep up the pretence. Most people won’t even notice the difference.