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

The answer's in the question.

[MythMoth]

Pick a noun. Is it a trade mark ? You bet.

Pick a verb. Is it a trade mark ? You bet.

Pick a proper name. Does it sound dumb as a product name ? Yep.

Repeat as required.

So yes, all the good ones are chosen. The formula allows you to pick something more or less intelligible without handing your soul and wallet to the rebranding dickheads (Centrica anyone ?).

It's just getting a little stale that's all... we need a new formula.

Although now I think about it, maybe Susan isn't such a bad name for a product. Hmm...

Not only that...

[Sklivvz]

It has the (supposed) advantage that it increases the brand value: i- meaning intelligent or interactive, e- meaning electronic, m- meaning mobile, x- meaning experience or extended... Of course, since it's so common it's not valuable anymore. It's supposed to sound intelligent but it's just plain dumb!
Even the free software community lacks imagination in its own way. Think about the recursive naming convention - e.g. GNU==GNU's Not Unix and children - or the Yet Another... paradigm.
The difference is that OSS names are actually smart and funny, since nobody's doing commercial marketing.

It's the current fashion

[91degrees]

Tedhnology simply has to appear to move with the times. Having out of date looking names makes the software appear out of date. This is not what marketing people want, so they follow the conventions. The naming schemes change, but the policy is consistent.

We started off with strings off abbreviations. MS-DOS, VAX, VIC-20. This was probably due to the dominance of IBM, PS/2. Computers were powerful technical devices at the time. They needed a technical sounding name.

When VisiCalc became popular. We had a whole new era of naming conventions (There was an overlap. It takes a couple of years for the convention to become popular). Hence we have products with names that are simply 2 words strung together. Like WordPerfect. In the mid 80's, and early 90's we had computers that were meant to be friendly, so fairly simple relevent names were in vogue, gradually becoming more whimsical., e.g, you know Word is a word processor, can guess lightwave is a ray tracing package, but it would be hard to guess that Opera is a web browser if you didn't already know. Now computers are "cool" accesories, so products have to have suitably cool names. A quick and easy way to do this is to string an initial and a semi-related noun together. Everyone does this. For marketing people, it must be the thing to do.

Disyllabic Reduction

[Motherfucking Shit]

These days it's apparently all about condensing everything into two syllables. I've been meaning to write about this for awhile now, as it's something which has been eating away at me. People are developing a disgusting (to me, at least) obsession with shortening names, and not just in technology.

The first I noticed this trend, at least as it swept the masses and thus caught my attention, was Jennifer Lopez. Sheeple were apparently too lazy to make it all the way through five syllables, so they started calling her "J-Lo." It takes one second to say "J-Lo," two at most to say "Jennifer Lopez," I don't understand why an abbreviation is needed. But society must understand, because it's commonplace.

The trend snowballed from there, and has really taken off in sports, more so than it has in tech or consumer products. Jason Williams is "J-Will," Alex Rodriguez is "A-Rod," etc. It seems like every athlete who's anyone now has his or her own "First Initial - First Syllable of Last Name" abbreviation (the sole exception being Anna Kournikova... I'm the only one who's allowed to call her A-Korn).

Why don't we call George Bush "G-Bu" or Dick Cheney "D-Chay?" Why isn't Black and Decker "B-Deck?" On the flip side, Why did WorldCom do all those commercials about "Generation D" - oops, pardon me, it was all hip lowercase, "generation d" - instead of just saying "The Digital Generaton?" Why does AT&T have to market their service as "mLife" - there's that hip lowercase letter again - instead of just calling it "Mobile Life?"

I don't know who decides which names can be cut down, or why. I don't know which parts of society are responsible for dumbing down proper human names - much less product names - or why anyone would continue to encourage such. But I really am getting tired of the disyllabic reduction.

Yours,

"Mo-Shit"

Have you ever been in a band?

[Bluesman]

The thing that takes the most time is picking a name that doesn't suck.

It's much more efficient to just go with the flow. Creativity is better spent on the design of the app.

This is, of course, why there are so many projects in the "vision" stage on sourceforge and freshmeat. Most people focus on things like a cool name and web site before actually producing something.

Maybe there's something to choosing a dull name...

Re:Oh come on,

[meta-monkey]

It may be original, but it's a horrible product name. Here, I'll make up a name for a product, in the Ogg Vorbis spirit. I'll call it, Arg Nurin. Tell me, would you like to buy Arg Nurin? We've got Arg Nurin on sale, right here!!

...

You have no idea what Arg Nurin is, do you? Same reason most people have no idea what Ogg Vorbis is...the name is entirely devoid of descriptive language. On the other hand, ponder iTunes. What does iTunes do? Hmmm...I bet it's got something to do with music, since it's "Tunes" and all, and since the whole [ie]Word format usually implies either "electronic" or "internet," it's probably got something do with internet music. Bingo, we have a winner. iTunes is a good, descriptive, if unimagininative name.

My point is, from a branding/product identification perspective, a descriptive name is better than an imaginative name. A descriptive, imaginative name is not necessarily superior, either, as you want a name the general public can decode, so 'imaginative' may work against you.

I'll have to disaggree

[Moraelin]

For starters, if Ogg Vorbis's fault is being "non-descriptive", let's think of the format that's more used than Ogg, WMA and iTunes's format put together: MP3.

Exactly in which way is "MP3" descriptive? Well, it isn't. It's just an abbreviation. Didn't stop it from being a success.

Think of "Zip". Right. It's about as non-descriptive as it gets. It's not called "iCompress" or "eSqueeze" or some other descriptive crap. Neverheless, people now routinely speak of "(un)zipping the files". (You could even argue that the "Zip drive" was named like that to ride piggy-back on the success of the compression format.)

Think of "Google". It's not called something stupid like "iSearch" or "eFind". Yet it's so used, that it even became a verb. Enough people actually say things like "You googled it up, right?"

Think "Amazon". It's not called "iBooks" nor "eBookstore."

Think "Dell" or "Apple". One is the owner's last name, the other is just a fruit. Yet everyone's at least heard about them. Or speaking of their products, "Macintosh" itself wasn't descriptive in any way, but it doesn't stop it from being a big thing.

Heck, even "eBay", in spite of having the mandatory "e", is actually non-descriptive. It doesn't really mention buying or auctions.

Etc, etc, etc.

Think of non-computer products. "Walkman" does mention walking, but doesn't feel a need to describe that it's a tape cassette player.

So it seems to me like to succeed you need more like a good product and good timing. Then people will learn whatever short imaginative name you've put on your product.

Just putting a copycat "iSomething" or "eThingie" on a "me too" effort, won't magically turn it into gold. Au contraire, to people like me it will just make it _scream_ "unimaginative copycat!"