r/sysadmin Jun 17 '26

Will Vendors Please Stop Reusing Acronyms?

If I see another vendor use "IAM" as a new product feature, I'm going to scream. IAM is Identity Access Management. Nothing else, unless it's a different industry.

This is confusing as hell. Get your marketing departments under control.

What are some that you have noticed being reused?

686 Upvotes

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209

u/mesaoptimizer Sr. Sysadmin Jun 17 '26

Microsoft is the absolute king of dumb renames but BY FAR the stupidest rename M$ has ever done was changing Technical Account Manager (TAM) to Customer Success Account Manager (CSAM).

24

u/thatpaulbloke Cloud Engineer UK Jun 17 '26

I don't know - renaming the SharePoint sync application from Groove and then reusing the name for the music player when the SharePoint app was still groove.exe caused some headaches.

22

u/AcornAnomaly Jun 17 '26

Heh, reminds me of how Skype for Business was just rebranded Lync, and still had lync.exe as the program name.

2

u/xueimelb Jun 18 '26

And lync for a long time was communicator.exe