XNA Newspeak

Recently Microsoft annouced a new initiative called XNA which is supposed to unify development across (thier) game platforms. You might recall that they have made this point before when the Xbox shipped that since it used DirectX it would be easy to program because developers already knew how to use it. And they told the truth.
Now it seems that truth needs to be re-invigorated. So in a time honored fashion in the computer industry we will now get a whole new name for the same concept. I guess this is designed to make us forget all those little details about how the Xbox’s DirextX is not exactly the same as the PC’s Direct X and other inconsistencies. In the new shiny world of XNA all will be wonderful.
Being new is important. But very little is truely new.
Postscipt was a graphics language which allowed documents to be created once and print well anywhere. But there were problems since not all machines had the same fonts etc. So in comes EPS or Encapulated postscript. Safe in its encapuslation all problems would go away. But somehow that didn’t have enough juice to make it. So now we have PDF/Acrobat. Which allows documents to be created once and print well anywhere. Inside that file. Acrobat looks alot like Postscript.
This kind of stuff is necessary I supposed when you are trying to solve a problem that is truly hard (as those above are). Its important to be able to make silly marketing claims (Write once run anywhere) about things in order to generate buzz, even though its impossible for these claims to be true. When you try to make the claim again no one will belive you I guess unless you come up with a new logo.