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How 10 Iconic Tech Products Got Their Names
lgmac writes "Think Windows Azure is a stupid name? Ever wonder how iPod, BlackBerry and Twitter got their names? Author Tom Wailgum goes inside the process of creating tech product names that are cool but not exclusionary, marketable, and most of all, free of copyright and trademark gotchas. Here's the scoop on ten iconic tech products and how they got their monikers, plus a chat with
the man responsible for naming Azure, BlackBerry, and more. (What's the one he wishes he'd named but didn't? Google.)"
Name it what you want, but the RESULT is what gives products their reputations, not the names of said products. The only saving grace of XP is how terrible Vista was received by the public, so in comparison, XP looked much better. And how interesting this is to me because I remember how terrible XP was in the beginning. Vista is like Windows ME -- everyone will be happier when it goes away, and we'll all love Windows 7, as long as it's different than Vista. Unbind our hands, and open up the possibilities and you'll win us over. Stop fixing things that we like just because some restrictive group wants you to (RIAA, MPAA, FBI, CIA, DOJ...etc), and start fixing things we hate -- like how restrictive everything is in Vista.
Security has little to do with forcing us to click OK every ten seconds, because eventually that repetitive task will just happen without any consideration -- much like how EULA's are click-passed, and how nobody EVAR reads em. If you want to keep us secure, take a page from Linux and open up your OS to public scrutiny so that people can perfect it. What are you afraid of? Seriously. Who cares if we find out that you people at Microsoft haven't done any real work since 1990... we ALREADY KNOW THAT. You just keep repainting the same product and sending it out with a bunch of problems so we will all feel your pain and we will all buy into your anti-virus and special editions... your drive for future product updates. We know that you only borked Vista so that people would love XP... and it worked. We loved you again, but we loved the past MS. People aren't stupid... well at least not THAT stupid.
Although it looks like you think we are, especially because of those insane advertisements you have with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. Are you nuts???
We also don't want to lose our life savings from lawsuits. Oh and while you're at it... take a close look at the stock market and remember that WE EMPLOY YOU, so you'd better do what we say MSFT or we'll employ someone else... it's only a matter of time, now that the incentive for free OS use is higher than ever!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
He says before Google, all the search engines were engineering names like WebCrawler, Webfinder, Websearcher, etc.
Apparently he never heard of search engines like AltaVista, Yahoo!, Lycos, etc. Seriously? Names are his business and he doesn't remember any of those?
The second iteration was actually probably the better, branding-wise.
They were all set -- Firebird for web, Thunderbird for email, Sunbird for calendar -- even things like Songbird for music. I think there were even logos.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
WTF? No way I'm clicking through that. Not even a fig leaf "print this article"-link there. And for what? A huge picture and three lines of text? Abominable.
Naming is actually a really big business and is usually a pretty painful process. I know someone that was a professional namer that worked for a big branding house for a while. The time they spent coming up with names was pretty incredible.
F/OSS, in general, fails miserably here. "Linpus Lite" on the EEE PCs? WTF?
The name should not matter, but in reality, it does. Unfortunately, OSS projects seem to only accept a rebranding under threats of legal action.
In general giving Open Source Apps horrible names, and odd Icons to go with it hurts the adoption of open source more then most anything else. First there is no real point except to feed RMS's ego to put G for GNU in its name. If you care what license it is then you read the license (at least the title), otherwise you will download and use it anyways. Next the name and/or the icon should help the person know what the app does. Next the name shouldn't sound like a 3rd party ripoff of a well known brand. No Sorney, Magnetbox, Peniphonics, OpenOffice. All it really does is advertise for your competitor and make you look like you are playing catchup with them, while you may actually be going in a different direction. Finally if you are going to use a name that is kinda unique and can be trademark like firefox you need to be smart like the Firefox team really spread the name out so everyone knows about it and what it does. No it is not easy, big companies make the same mistakes too like Vista. However you should put care in making your project name for your Open Source Project.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And I'd add that some places actively test the names, as well. E.g., asking what people think in focus groups of different names. Or, more subtly, showing a new product to different people with different names on it, and getting stats about their reactions.
Depending too much on what executives personally think of names is dangerous, because executives are very rarely representative of the target market. That lesson applies to lots of other things, too, like features and pricing.
Depends on how set on a name their wife is, it could be over in a matter of seconds.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
even considering the subject matter. It covers that wikipedia is wiki + encyclopedia, but offers nothing on how wikis got their name (a hawaiian bus system), it just says that android was made by a company named Android, and says that OSX is the 10th mac os, without even bothering to look into the cat names at all. The only one with an actual interesting answer was Red Hat.
And since they're apple, the fact that another company (some networking equipment firm no one's ever heard of) had already thought up and marketed an iPhone is no problem whatsoever.
Don't forget the GIMP. Or the Apache ("a patchy") HTTP server.
Sure, they have clever origins, and that's fine for projects just getting off the ground, but it becomes a PR issue when it starts being used or heard by the mainstream.