A few days ago, Brad Abrams posted this awesome "map" of the Microsoft Silverlight development platform. Silverlight, for those who have been hiding under a rock these last few weeks, is Microsoft's new product for publishing rich content on web sites. Their answer to Adobe's Flash, if you will.

Thinking about Silverlight makes me think of the way Microsoft names its products for developers. When you look at the pieces that make up .NET 3.0, we went from "cool" names like Avalon and Indigo to corporate-sounding names like Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. In Silverlight's case, though, it went from having a boring corporate name (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) to the cool name it has now.

Why can't Microsoft have cool names for all their development products? Well, I guess one reason is around intellectual property. If you had to come up with a cool name for every product you develop that was unique enough that it didn't invite a lawsuit from someone with a similarly-named product, you'd very soon be scraping the bottom of the barrel. A few years from now the names won't be quite so "cool" any more.

And let's face it - who wants to pitch a new development project to their boss by letting them know that they'll be creating it with Microsoft Skidmark using the HemorrhagicFever windowing library and the ToeJam networking subsystem?