Why Such Unimaginative Nomenclature?

apoplectic asks: "Pick a word. A noun would be nice, but not required. Now, imagine a potentially meaningful adjective or other nebbish modifier, select the first letter, and append this to either the beginning or the end of the noun you originally chose. Some examples, include: JBoss, WebL, GStreamer, eMachine, iPod, and of course the XBox. I realize that the exceptions greatly outweigh this rule, but this does seem to be a disproportionately invoked naming standard that lacks a little 'je ne sais quoi'. Why is this so common? Do you really like this 'standard', or is this like something touched on by an episode of Futurama? Have, we have run out of names that have yet to be copyrighted, and all we are left with is Poppler -- or some hideous cryptic name from the aforementioned 'UName' naming standard. Why does it seem as if quite a few applications, along with many a geeky item, follow such unimaginative naming conventions?"

Comments

Oh come on,

[MoOsEb0y]

Isn't Ogg Vorbis original enough?

Re:Oh come on,

[Anonymous Coward]

>Isn't Ogg Vorbis original enough?

Yeah. Unfortunately it's also stupid sounding. An informal poll of 3 non-geeks near me agree.

Ease of understanding

[ObviousGuy]

Name the application with an easily recognizable and appropriate name that briefly describes what the product does. That's good naming.

Coming up with obscure references to geeky things is not good naming practice.

Re:Ease of understanding

[Anonymous Coward]

That only works if you slap a fairly non-descriptive company name in front of the description. Otherwise a group of people could all be discussing "e-mail client" all day, never agreeing on a thing, because they are using different e-mail clients. Personally I think there are lots of good unused words and made-up words to go around.

Just don't be like the idiots at Mozilla and decide to change from a perfectly useful brand name like "Mozilla" to not one, but two, already used names in rapid succession. The best part? On Linux, Mozilla-Firebird actually makes a .phoenix directory. If I'd missed the Phoenix stage I'd never know that was the Firebird stuff. Agh!!! Why they didn't just go for "Mozilla Browser", "Mozilla Mail", "Mozilla Chat", etc, and leave all the various Mozilla config stuff in .mozilla is beyond me.

Words are arbitrary.

[torpor]

Make some new ones up. It doesn't matter.

I made up 'ampfea', and among our little group it has come to mean 'any meeting place for electronic artists'... we've had 8 meets since we started getting together for jam sessions, and 'ampfea' has started to take hold as a word in common use among our little crowd.

This whole iThing is just Madison Avenue counting on the memetic nature of human interaction ... but humans interact in entirely arbitrary ways so ... just make up new words, people. Its easy!