Slashdot Mirror
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
Well naming a product a girlsname gives us the oppertunity to chat with each with not sounding like total geeks...
like
geek1: "Have you used Susan too?"
geek2: "Yeah, i am so sattisfied with the result.."
geek3: "Susan sucked!"
good option!
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 Having out of date looking names makes the software appear out of date.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.
>Isn't Ogg Vorbis original enough?
Yeah. Unfortunately it's also stupid sounding. An informal poll of 3 non-geeks near me agree.