Dear Microsoft, what is wrong with AX naming?!

Fedir Kryvyi
Jul 28, 2017 · 4 min read

Okay, this is definitely an unusual story for this blog. It is not about UI or some crazy idea about AX from my head, but it is all about my personal confusion and rage about current Dynamics AX name. Yeap, you got it right, my point is that it is amazing system, with an awful name.

To give you a full picture, we need to travel back in time back to 2008. This was a year of Dynamics AX 2009 release, first major re-naming of AX after it was bought by Microsoft. For those of you who wonder how AX was called before, there were a couple of versions from AX 1.0 up to AX 4.0, so technically AX 2009 is AX 5.0. And I get the idea — probably there was some kind of a meeting, where someone realized, that Microsoft already had SQL Server 2008, MS Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008, and a bunch of other products with year-based naming, so they decided to rename AX. A couple of years past that point, Microsoft released AX 2012 and people got used to the fact that this naming convention would stick. And then, Microsoft moved to the cloud.

It became obvious, that cloud-based software, and subscription-based payment models are the future of enterprise software development, so Microsoft shifted their own focus and brought both Azure services and Microsoft Office 365 as their headliners of cloud future. Clearly, Dynamics products, including AX, were moving to cloud too, so their old year-based naming didn’t make any sense. So, Microsoft decided to shift to “AX + Number” naming at least for some time. As a result, AX 7 came to life. It was a bit confusing, because at that moment AX 2012 was 6 years old, and AX 2009 was almost 9 years old, and everyone forgot about AX 4.0 already, so number 7 didn’t make any sense for people.

To fix that missunderstanding, and to bring namings of different products all together, Microsoft decided to change release name of Dynamics AX 7(technically a beta version) to Dynamics AX 365. It looks good, it looks familiar, it aligns well with Office 365. But there is a bit of a hickup in this idea — AX is not the only product in Dynamics family. Microsoft needed some way to distinguish AX, NAV and CRM, so they came up with a solution —advertise Dynamics products as a forged together system with three distinct parts that have functional naming. That is how we ended up with “Dynamics 365 for Operations”(AX), “Dynamics 365 for Finances”(NAV) and “Dyanmics 365 for Sales”(CRM).

Well, but that approach was not ideal either. Although Microsoft presented three different products as a part of a single system, initial plan was to have a bigger portfolio of smaller products that could be sold separately if needed. So, one more re-naming was on the way! That is how we ended up with “Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition”, “Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Business edition”, “Dynamics AX for Sales”, “Dynamics AX for Talent”, “Dynamics AX for Customer Service”, “Dynamics AX for Retail”, “Dynamics AX for Project Service Automation”, “Dynamics AX for Customer Insights”, “Dynamics AX for Marketing”.

Okay, to be honest, I am not even sure what parts of AX, CRM, NAV and other systems were distributed under new names(probably some parts of GP and SL even), but I believe that “Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition” is AX. This new approach is beneficial for end consumers, who were given an ability to buy a specific product instead of paying extra for the whole package that they won’t be using at all, but the problem is that this whole mumbo-jumbo was done in like eight months or so. Thus, everyone still calls it Dynamics AX.

It is such a nasty situation, that even Microsoft are not sure how they are going to call AX in two month or so. Here is a screenshot from MSDN, essentially Microsoft development portal:

Dynamics AX (latest)? Are you serious?!

2017 is the year of bad naming. Windows 10 “Creators update” will be replaced with “Fall creators update”, as if we will never get anything else except of “Winter Creators update” and “Spring Creators update”. It doesn’t get better at Apple side of thing — MacOS X “Sierra” will be replaced with “High Sierra”. Google are not sure yet what “O” in Android “O” means, and how it is aligned with Chrome OS naming, or is it at all.

Dear Microsoft, you were brave enough to state, that Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, and there will be only updates with different set of names. Please, do the same with AX. Just call it Dynamics AX, and add any other fancy name afterwards that you want to. You can call it “Dynamics AX, Enterprise edition” or “Dynamics AX, Business edition” or even “Dynamics AX, Fall Business edition”, whatever. Clean up this mess!

My personal blog about technology, UI/UX and personal projects

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