Microsoft - I don&#x27;t know whether to hate on them or pity them. They were an early adopter of Unicode, back when there was only one encoding that probably didn&#x27;t even have a name yet (UCS-2). It&#x27;s easy to see how they would unleash that confusing nomenclature on the world, but they should have made an attempt to clear it up when other encodings became available, and they didn&#x27;t.