This is making me really angry. Dropping the Metro name is just so... spineless. There are lots of great, simple, evocative brand names that happen to overlap with other totally different kinds of things. There's no more chance of people mistaking the windows 8 UI style with a German retailer than they are with a bus (the Seattle area mass transit service is called "Metro King County").
I don't want to live in a world where cowardly lawyers force every brand name to have an i- prefix, z used as a plural, or missing vowels in the middle.
The headline and the linked article really seem to be setting the wrong tone for this. Metro (the store) and Microsoft are friends. Metro sells microsoft stuff, the two parties make each other a ton of money. Metro says "hey guys, can you call your stuff something else" and microsoft says "sure, no problem buddy". This is how the world should work.
If they're friends, why couldn't Metro-the-store have said "cool name, we obviously like it, maybe it will help us with our store branding"?
Instead they puffed up their chests and Microsoft rolled.
(tin foil hat on) - I wonder if there was internal support at Microsoft for dropping the name Metro, and this trademark question simply provided the cover for it. MS has repeatedly made the decision that they want the "Windows" name to be primary for EVERYTHING--even when it makes no sense like "Windows Phone". Maybe this is just evidence of the Windows brand people winning yet another internecine war within Microsoft. Maybe a decision this bad could only be made by powerful people who think they're making a good decision.
I don't want to live in a world where cowardly lawyers force every brand name to have an i- prefix, z used as a plural, or missing vowels in the middle.
This is why we can't have nice things.