New Corporate Logo for Microsoft Takes the Stage

As this snippet from Peter Bright’s Ars Technica story from yesterday illustrates, Microsoft’s replacing the corporate logo it’s used for the past 25 years.

Peter Bright shares the news, shows off new MS logo

I’m not the only one who’s noticed its resemblance to the Windows 7 logo, albeit in “non-wavy,” unshaded rectilinear form. Many other pundits and observers have noted the similarity of colors in the four logo blocks above to the Win7 flag’s layout and position.

Same colors, same order in the Win7 logo, but with shading.

It’s very interesting that as the Windows 8 logo adopts a monochrome blue color scheme and a rectilinear layout, the Microsoft logo picks up the rectilinear motif, but drops its “perspective view,” at the same time preserving the four-color theme from Windows 7.

Squares are seen in perspective in the Windows 8 logo.

What’s it all mean? I wish I could say for sure, but it does seem to suggest continuity with the Windows brand, while shaking up the established order for something new and different.