At least Microsoft's names are more descriptive than average. Microsoft Windows is an OS all about Windows; Microsoft Teams is a collaboration thing. And the whole company is called "microcomputer software". Microsoft Visual Studio is where you paint and sketch...
But yes, we've had flat names and flat icons for ages. It seems there's more supply of entrepreneurship than demand, so you can't call your thing what it does, because five other people already did that and you want your product to stand out. Hacker News is called Hacker News, but now that name's taken, so the next news for hackers will be called something like Newshack if you're lucky, or something like Marigold or Kallipo if you're not. (Actually, Slashdot was named before Hacker News). Recognizable companies may have an advantage, because they can call the product by their company name + what it does.
> Microsoft Visual Studio is where you paint and sketch
It's a code IDE, there's very little visual about it. It's a legacy name relating to Visual Basic, I believe it started as a code editor tightly integrated with a visual native UI editor.
But yes, we've had flat names and flat icons for ages. It seems there's more supply of entrepreneurship than demand, so you can't call your thing what it does, because five other people already did that and you want your product to stand out. Hacker News is called Hacker News, but now that name's taken, so the next news for hackers will be called something like Newshack if you're lucky, or something like Marigold or Kallipo if you're not. (Actually, Slashdot was named before Hacker News). Recognizable companies may have an advantage, because they can call the product by their company name + what it does.