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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?"
iDunno
Isn't Ogg Vorbis original enough?
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...
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
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.
I have been pwned because my
Make some new ones up. It doesn't matter.
... but humans interact in entirely arbitrary ways so ... just make up new words, people. Its easy!
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
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
My Stack Overflow user
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.
Owen Densmore covered this in his O'Reilly blog last year - he checked /usr/dict/words against DNS, to see how many words werent taken. There were only 43 4-letter words left from the .com namespace, junk like "frib", and "odso".
There were a few thousand 5- and 6- letter words left, but again, all pretty uncommon words: "upwaft.com" or "bepity.com" anyone? Most 'real' words are claimed by someone, somewhere, and the only option for making a name that uses words people know is to make one up by sticking words together, or letters and words together.
-Baz
Wonder what J. Lo thinks?
As the availability of simple, catchy, unique names that are real words is drying up I wonder if in the future we will start to see more of the "entire sentence as product name" category - such as I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.
How about "It's An Even Better Word Processor" or "What A Great Graphics Card" as product names?
(Of course, some people are already doing this in the form of recursive names - someone already pointed out GNU for instance!)
A little planning goes a long way...
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"
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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...
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I propose we rename GNU/Linux to "I can't believe it's not Microsoft."
_______
2B1ASK1
eDiot.
All the computer guys that have been around long enough to produce commercial release stuff grew up in a world of eight character filenames.
Which is a better product name:
XBox
Incred~1
The second one is 'Incredible Game Box' but old school computer guys automagically trunc that to Incred~1.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
The next person to write an app with a gratuitous G, K, or X at the beginning (gPornViewer, kFlamewriter, XBitTwiddler) wins scorn, derision, and a swift kick in the ass, absolutely free of charge. Moreso if you use a name that's already taken.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
There are english geeks who understand how to create new pleasing word in the english language, but they don't reside among us computer geeks in great numbers. Part of the reason has to do with laziness, and another part is famiarity. This is why companies have both an engineering dept and marketting dept, rather than one group that does it all.
When engineers are given a spec, they don't have a name for it. Eventually, in order to ease communication, shortcuts are created which bear some resemblance to what the project is or does, or is just a pet name. Mozilla was one such name in the development cycle of netscape early on. If the engineers were in charge of naming, because it was so familiar to them, they would choose the pet name regardless of market perception. By default is not generally the best way to name a product.
Furthermore, it's hard to come up with a name which is both easy (and obvious) to pronounce, and produces a pleasing effect.
"Tlorg" is a bad name because you do not start an english word with the TL combination. Battle is a word where TL is used, so it's not a bad combination, it's simply not acceptable at the beginning.
"Blarg" is easy and fairly obvious to pronounce. But the effect of the word is not something you'd associate with a succesful, useful, and powerful product.
-Adam
Maay of you are probably not familiar with Xaraya, but here's the story of where the name came from.
"Project X", as we were calling ourselves in the early days, decided to conduct a name contest among the development team. Entries were submitted, and the voting commenced. Not happy with any of the entries, I decided to come up with something new based of 3 criteria:
I also felt the name should be a little exotic according to US/European tastes. So, I trolled through a database of Australian place names, entering various short combinations of letters. After a while I had a list of seven possibilities... then I started swapping letters (mostly vowels).
I presented these in IRC, and a couple of them (including Xaraya) caught on. So well, in fact, that the name voting had to be reset to include the new entries. One of our devs who lives in Spain said Xaraya reminded him of the Spanish word for Manta Ray ("raya", literally "blanket"), so I went looking for manta images to create a logo which supported this concept. "Xaraya" won the name contest, and evenually a Manta logo was also adopted.
Of course, this name has nothing to to with what Xaraya does. Making that connection is the realm of the marketing and branding people.
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!"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.