Ah, so I wasn't imagining it. I know little about font history, but I know that Arial is a Monotype thing, and Arial is a metrically-compatible Helvetica look-alike, so it seemed strange that Helvetica would be under the same brand.
I remember talking to a Monotype executive in the wake of the Microsoft deal that gave us Arial, Book Antiqua, etc. He was embarrassed about having done it, but he said that the deal saved the company from failure. Out of the whole set, Century Gothic is the most interesting face. They reproportioned the Twentieth Century typeface (itself a clone of Futura) to match the metrics of Avant Garde and ended up with something that is neither of its predecessors.
I suspect that the Microsoft Typography group also was created around as a result of shame around the MS-Monotype deal, although I don't know for certain and I've lost touch with the people that I used to know from Microsoft Typography.
