The Attack of the Unfortunate Acronym: Microsoft PWNs Us

by Alex Woodie

Ever since my fiancée started working at a company called PWN, I'd been waiting for the proverbial axe to fall. Despite the valiant efforts of the good people working there, it eventually did, as PWN collapsed under the collective weight of managerial incompetence, cash flow problems, and of course that unfortunate name.

If you've been around the Internet for any substantial amount of time, you understand what I'm talking about. Citizens of the Web have developed their own culture and their own language, and within this electronic society, the letters that make up the word "pwn" mean something vastly different than what the owners of the PWN company could ever have imagined.

Of course, I'm talking about getting pwned. Legend has it, a video game programmer was trying to write a line of code that would flash the words "you've been owned" on the screen when the player lost the game. Instead he ended up writing "you've been pwned." That little slip of one anonymous programmer's right pinky finger set a long-lasting precedent for the way people conduct flame wars and insult each other in online forums. It also, I believe, set in motion a series of events that would culminate in my fiancée's company eventually succumbing to the inevitable existential pressures surrounding such a tragic choice of a name. But I digress.

Fate can be cruel, and the owners of PWN really had no way of knowing that they were inadvertently advertising their eventual demise by associating themselves with a term that has come to represent complete and total domination over the grossly inept. The level of computerization and lack of technological sophistication at this company only reinforces my belief that PWN's ownership really had no clue.

Microsoft, as the most technologically advanced company in the universe, really should know better.

Of course, I'm talking about SNARF, Microsoft's Social Network and Relationship Finder. SNARF is a new piece of beta code out of Microsoft Research that's designed to help Outlook users with the problem of e-mail triage. Anybody with too much e-mail and too little time to read through each one has wished for a more intelligent way to sort and organize messages, and this is what Microsoft has attempted to do with SNARF.

The key difference between SNARF and other e-mail clients is that SNARF provides a way to sort e-mail by social standing, rather than the traditional messages or folders. Instead of seeing a list of e-mails sorted by the time they were received, the SNARF user is presented with a list of people that she knows, and of mailing lists that she's on. Each person or mailing list heading tells the user how many e-mails she has in that category, and in this way she is able to sort through her e-mails based on social relationships, as opposed to the order she received them. It also lets her ignore messages from people she doesn't know, or, increasingly, who don't really exist except for the purposes of sending spam. Check out www.research.microsoft.com/community/snarf for screenshots or even to download and install the SNARF beta.

Don't get me wrong: I applaud Microsoft for developing programs like SNARF. I even find myself admiring the way Microsoft has released this particular piece of code, straight from the lab as a free beta download. This has been a time-honored way of getting new tooling into the hands of developers, and it's now becoming a more accepted and mainstream way of distributing consumer technology, too. The success that Google has had with beta products like Google News and Google Earth are perhaps the most pertinent examples, but there are many others. Microsoft, with its new Live offerings, is showing that it's hip to the new laws governing Internet 2.0, and the delivery of SNARF suggests it can move fast enough and confidently enough to survive the emerging paradigm and compete with the likes of Google.

The thing that I have a problem with is the unfortunate name that Microsoft chose for this particular piece of software. If you have never heard of the word "snarf" before Microsoft introduced its recent software, rest assured: it has not appeared in Webster's, but it had a definite meaning. This is a family publication, and we maintain a certain level of decency here, but if you are so inclined, you can momentarily leave the Jungle and look it up at www.urbandictionary.com.

As you can see, there are many rude and indecent meanings and actions associated with this word, any of which should have given Microsoft pause before naming its product. that, but the definition that I have always associated with the term is number 5. Judging from what Microsoft's SNARF does (connects you with your friends), I strongly suspect this was the definition of snarf that Microsoft Research had in mind when they named their product.

Perhaps this is making too much fuss about nothing. Maybe I should just chuckle at what amounts to an inside joke, and applaud the geeks at Microsoft Research for having a sense of humor, albeit a lewd one. It just kind of bothers me that SNARF might find its way onto my grandmother's PC, and she won't have any clue that she's been made the butt of somebody's little prank. You might expect this sort of thing from somebody who writes video games or Unix utilities for a living, but not a highly respected software company with a sense of social consciousness. I guess the joke's on us.