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The Corporate Lame Name Game
daniel-san writes "I've always wondered where names like Lucent, Aptiva, Infiniti, Agilent, Aquent, Naviant get invented. Not just pertaining to e-commerce companies, the article at Salon describes some of the silliness and the willingness to pay for these names. With companies like NameLab, NameBase, Name/It, NameTrade, Namestormers and TrueNames behind the scenes, I now understand the source of my comedic relief (and sometimes utter horror.)
" What are your choices for lamest names for companies or products?
eToys
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Seriously, there are many lame names for companies, but they are the ones that are now out of date, they sounded 'hip' in the 80's or early '90s.
Microsoft: small and soft - what every girl wants on her Birthday.
Yeah, like "slash...dot" now thats a funny name hahahahaha! ugh
This post has been encrypted in several of the most advanced ROT-26 algorithms
Jesus Christ, man!
I really got it!
Now don't flame me... I'm not bad!
How about Windows POWERED?!?
HEY MICROSOFT! CHANGING THE NAME OF A PRODUCT DOSEN"T MAKE IT SUCK LESS!
I think another interesting name coming out soon is the new Amway web-company. It's called Quixtar.com I guess that way they at least get a domain name that no one else has. Maybe that's a reason for some funky names too, because you know how many "normal" names are taken up already. -Chris Ten Harmsel
-- Breaking Windows: Not just for kids anymore KDE
This is slightly offtopic, but should be discussed at some point. /. is supposed to be a place to get and discuss news that I just have to know and might've missed otherwise. Almost every day you guys post a reference to Salon.com. I like that site, and actually read it every day, along with /. Why do you want this redundancy? Everybody knows that Salon.com is great - why not just go there and go to 'technology' section instead of re-posting their stories all the time?
Enough said. But seriously, how can anyone think this is a good name for a product. Its not even a name, but a description, and besides how can something be powered by itself?
/. being renamed /. powered. Granted, its a little recursive, but its mostly dumb.
This would be like
We are agents of the free
Inprise sounds manufactured, apparently trying to associate with ideas like "Internet", "Intranet," "Enterprise," etc. I program in Borland (Inprise) Delphi 4 and love it so don't get the idea I hate the company, just their new name.
Itanium... followed very closely by Inprise.
At my previous job, we were bought out by a bigger company who thought they could do the ISP business. In the process of "finding" their name, they hired some outfit from California (IIRC), which spent weeks and weeks discovering *the* name that would revolutionize the ISP business. The contractor met with the companies representatives and suggested... Syndic (and the slogan was "The biggest thing on the Internet"). Yes, the only ISP name that could double as a pr0n site. :-D
Needless to say, they said *thank you* and went somewhere else.
Without you I'm one step closer to happiness without violence.
I always believe that companies that are named after people, usually their founders, have the lamest names. However, not all the names are like that. A name like Dell for example sure is a good and successful one.
... is what English majors do after they finish college.
I read this story a couple of days ago, much to my amusement.
Well, I worked for MacTemps (now Aquent, *shudder*) back in the spring, and when I got the new corporate brochure with the new name and logo, my first reaction was "What the #&$@* does "Aquent" mean!!??"
The USAir -> USAirways change strikes me as lame to the extreme. How much money did that take? Oy.
Note that not all the ideas these guys come up with are lame: PowerBook is brilliant, and I really like the name Lucent. It's just after the inital blast of smarts comes the followers: Livent, Aquent, etc.
As for my choices of lame-ass product names, any new car of the past decade pretty much qualifies! Tercel, etc.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I second the vote for Itanium.. Where the heck did that come from anyway? Take the leading 't' off 'titanium'? IMHO, 'Titanium' is way better than 'Itanium' any day..
Of course, then people will think the processor is made out of titanium rather than silicon and whatever else..
--
Somebody actually got a cash bonus for selecting WidePoint where, *ahem*, a friend of mine works.
But then again, it beats out ZMax (predecessor name). It's actually not that bad working for a company whose lamest aspect is their name.
In case you are reading fellas, just remember that any publicity is good publicity. B-)
DB
Aptiva
Aeron (Cool Chair though)
Solara
Acura
Proliant (Nice Servers though for the most part)
InDesign
NetWare (I really don't like the name of Novell NetWare)
IntraNetware
Groupwise
RAV4
Integra
IROC-Z (I know it's named after a race...still...bad name)
Those are just some of the names I hate...I'm hungry...can't think of more.
You either have to make up a word, pull something out of another language or Norse Mythology, buy it from someone else for the price of a small country, or choose to go for a meaningless acronym.
Ask the people at BZET, they'll tell you
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GCS/M/Sd?s-:a---->?c++UL+++P++++L++++ E+++W+++N+K-w---M-PSY+t+5?XtvbDI++
Gotta be Itanium.
do you find yourself sick at the sight
of your own reflection?
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I remember when I first heard the name Pentium, I though fuck, why not just call it 586. To me, Pentium seemed really silly at the, but I don't think anyone can seriously claim that Intel went wrong with that choice.. I had similar feeling with the name Athlon, but it too has grown on me. Itanium? I still don't like it very much, but I expect that it will start to sound better as more people use it, and everyone will totally forget the name Merced in a year.
In Louisville we had a company named Capital Holding that owned insurance companies. They changed their name to Providian because (they said) it more clearly reflected their actual business. Interestingly, this occured shortly before the unpleasantness in Waco, Texas, and thier new building quickly gained the nickname "Branch Providian Compound".
Well, if they had it to do over again, UNIX isn't such a great name. I mean it looks like an acronym, and not too many people apprecite the pun on the name of a 30 year old operating system.
I still think Xeon sucks too as a name, but what do I know?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Let's see...
Intel Itanium (instead of Merced)
AMD Athalon (instead of K7)
NVIDIA GeForce 256 (instead of NV10)
There are others, but I just can't think of 'em off the top of my head.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
How about pronunciation?
I am sick and tired of people pronouncing Linux as Linnux...
It isn't Linnus Torvalds, is it?
Hehehehehe...
-Vel (thats pronounced Veel)
You could have something like:
Microsoft (just because)
anything with "tech" in it (like my ISP Pinnatech == dumb)
Jon Katz
"Prime Time "
KFC (or any other alphabet soup)
etc.
We are agents of the free
How about stupid logos? Let's not forget Lucent's coffee-mug-stain-on-a-napkin logo :)
I think that was the butt of a Dilbert joke once too.
Finkployd
hmmm, micro and soft... needs Viagra.
Yes, now I remember the name I hold with the most disgust:
Clarica.
Take a big guess what they are.
They used to be The Mutual Group.
Take a guess what THEY do.
This is the worst example of "rebranding" since Silicon Graphics changed to SGI. At least SGI kept consistent.
"Clarica" means jack-shit.
At least with a name like "The Mutual Group" you could expect them to be related to finance.
Now they sound the name of a crappy subcompact.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Personally, I believe Infogrames is one of the lamest names ever. They make nice games and all, but that name just irritates me.
I thought it was hilarious when The Mushroom ran their "Infogrames Finally Drops 'R' From Name" article.
Cooperation
Coopitition
Copitortion
Cooptimizortion
Coopitron
Compicoop
Compitition
So this was a joke, then? Perhaps you should simply say I'm sorry.
-m@
last time I was in Seattle someone told me how Starbucks got their name...much cash and hand-wringing, then someone read Moby Dick. Starbuck was the ships mate who loved coffee.
ay wah-lar
that's why they have the mermaid.
not relevent really, but at least they had brought in some literature.
On another point...any company that is an iBar or an eFoo, gets immediately filed under c for clueless IMHO
amazon.com
eToys.com
FBI
:)
Eric
Nazalcrom
I think naming a company after a word because it sounds cool tends to define the company. A compnay named Yabba sounds cool, but they are probably just a buzz company. A name should describe what the company does.
Good examples:
IBM (International Business Machines)
Sun Microsystems
Silicon Graphics Inc.
BeOS (makers of BeOS)
Microsoft (makers of software)
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
Am I the only one who gets the impression that company names of the late 90's are going to be remembered in the same light as bell bottoms and platform shoes?
Of course, this coming from a guy who calls himself Effugas and runs a website named DoxPara Research...Look mah! Mid-Name Capitalization, the Almighty X, and *Gasp* RESEARCH!
;-)
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http:///www.doxpara.com
DaimlerChrysler
That is one word now, and a silly one at that. It means nothing to someone who knows not who or what 'Daimler' is (or was), and the same goes for Chrysler. At one point I believe they were the names of company founders, but now it's a tongue-twister.
There's plenty of these things around. List some more.
I mean, why would someone type in 'Amazon' into their web browser? To search for 'sexy amazon babes', of course.
Amazon.com obviously grew into the commercial giant they are today solely because they engineered their name to grab the most 'net pr0n boys possible without offending the others. ;)
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
Off the top of my head.
Quadra
Centris
Performa
DOS
Bravada
Festiva
Nova
McAnything
Pentium II/III
K62/3
Vaio
Presario
Celebrity
Quake/2/3/...../*
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I know a gentleman who founded a small electronics engineering company. He sold it and made himself rather well-to-do. The company's name was something like "Applied Electronics, Inc." or some such. Something bland, but descriptive of what they did. When the company was sold, they hired a naming consultant to rename the company. It is now known as "Zetaco." This acquantance of mine didn't like that much. He's a rather literally minded gentleman (as electrical engineers often are) and he still occasionally asks the rhetorical question, "Just what the hell is a 'Zetaco?'"
Of course, the reason for all the goofy names is to try to come up with something than can be trademarked and hasn't been used before. Its impossible to search every state for every trademark, so you don't bother with real words -- any useful real word has probably been used. Hence things as goofy as "Athlon" and, let's face it, "Pentium."
Pentium III? Fiveium three?
Yes, I would name my own baby; No, I would not pay $1M for that name. Any company who would is being wasteful.
LoudCloud
:)
I'll bet that cost Marc a fortune
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Of course, all these names sound silly, but what do you suggest? I have a painful experience of coming up with a name for my start-up; fortunately , we were able to buy a decent URL for a reasonable amount of money. A friend of mine still hasn't come up with a good name for his company; pretty much every single URL that comes up to mind is taken by someone who doesn't use it. Just try it - think of a concept and try to find a name for company based on that concept. Or, can you suggest just some abstract good word-like names?
There's a band around Toronto called Five Knuckle Chuckle, or :)
FKC
They even approriate the type style and change the logo to the colonel with crossed eyes for their posters. It's funny!
As for KFC, my friends and I all call it PFK, cuz that's what it is in french (Poulet Frite de Kentucky, or something similar)
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
With Celeron and then later, Itanium...
What the hell is itanium? almost itanium??? It just does not convey any meaning in the world to me...
When "Pentium" was announced as the replacement name for 586, I thought it sounded like some kinf of contraceptive, rather than a CPU. x86 CPU names have just been getting worse. What's wrong with MicroSPARC, Alpha, MIPS R5000?
I can only imagine the Dr Strangelove meetingroom at Intel a few months ago, which lead to "Itanium".
"Gentlemen, AMD have rnamed their K7 chip to 'Athalon'. We cannot afford a Stupid-CPU-Name gap"
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
colonica, e-trusive, vomotica
Where are the keys to my whore?
First of all does VAIO mean anything??? Is it Japanese? I mean how do you even pronounce it? Even worse is that the logo for it doesn't even look like the letters. And Sony can make cool logos, I mean look at PlayStation's (which is a pretty stupid name if you think about it. Kinda like a strip bar).
well, about $1 m.
God have mercy on the poor children of these indecisive, yet motivated, individuals. These poor children will move into their twenties know as 'Kid' until the parents finally decide that Bob would be nice.
IBM
Microprose
Symantec
S.u.s.e
BSD
OS/2
Windows 95/98/2000
KDE
AOL
There are a lot of lame TLAs, as we can see.
Sadly we were a bunch of comp-sci-geeks in NZ who didn't realise that we had no way to market our compiler (no platforms, no contact with the then expanding San Jose micro community .... etc) we were pretty naive.
Now I wish we'd incorporated - we could have sold that name for big-bux :-) oh well that's life.
GeForce 256 is the lamest product name. I pronounce it like Guh Force (like gefilte) because "Gee Force" is lame. GeForce is a lame way to spell it, and the 256 is not even relevant to the product in any meaningful way. Very nice product though.
- There was a wide plot of woodlands off of Post Oak Tritt Road.
- Some bulldozers came and cleared the land.
- They covered the land with roads and houses.
- They named the neighborhood ``Lost Forest.''
The unselfconscious irony here is unspeakable.How much did /. spend to get the name /. ? probably nothing. it could worth more then million.
I believe he's refering to eToys.com and eToy.com, but I could be wrong.
... is to blame for a lot of these names. If you plan on doing business worldwide, your name needs to be pronounceable by people with many different native languages, and needs to lack bad connotations in those languages.
For example, Federal Express officially changed its name to FedEx in part because people in many countries had trouble pronouncing Federal.
So we get the worst of decision by committee -- only names that have no chance of offending or confusing any one among the world's 6 billion people will survive.
Let's put it this way," says Redhill. "Over the years, we have created and sustained many of the world's most durable brands. We make a lot more hits than companies who think up their own symbols and names. I'm not suggesting that a company couldn't get it right with a stroke of insight or genius or luck. But if it's your own brand, how can you possibly be objective? I mean, would you name your own baby?" Redhill thinks for a minute, then backpedals. "I mean, of course you would name your own baby. But wouldn't you ask your friends and family for suggestions and recommendations? Perhaps they would open your eyes to a name you'd never considered."
I mean, are these guys for real? They are con artists at the best. At the worst, elite patronizing assholes.
I mean, my god, can you believe that someone doesn't want to name their company Gravoent? I mean, it scores very highly on the Standardized Normalized Associative Kinesthetic Educational Optical Integrated Linguistics (S.N.A.K.E.O.I.L) test. I've flown on the Concorde, for Chrissakes. I'd like to see their making-up-funny-names credentials. Oh what, you don't have any making-up-funny-names credentials. Well, I'll have you know I majored in making up funny names, did my masters thesis on making up funny names, and have several years field experience making up funny names.
(Sarcasm mode off)
I mean, C'MON!!!
Anyone who has done any circuit design should like Lucents initials.
LTI. Or your good friend Linear Time-Invariant.
-RossB
Oh yeah, couldn't sell a car with this name in South America, Central America, Mexico or Spain (no va = doesn't go). What a hoot.
Microsoft. They aren't a small company anymore so what's up with the "Micro"? And they don't do just software, if any (most of it's bloatware!). They make hardware too... Hey, why don't we come up with some new names for Bill's little cash cow?
Microsoft - I'm sorry, but, who the hell thought that up! Sounds well... bad.
Icom - Sounds like a miss spelling. Now a non-issue since Allen Bradly bought them out, then Rockwell Automation bought Allen Bradly, etc.
Wonderware. Produces MMI/SCADA and Industrial Automation stuff. What the hell were they smoking in California that night?!
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
The AT&T Family Credit Union just changed it's name to (drumroll, please) Truliant!
What the heck is that about? Like I should put more "Che-oney" in my accout so my Mo-ecks don't bounce.
Also, remember that cereal "mueslix" (sp?).
There's a brilliant marketing decision! Let's name a food the most disgusting thing we can think of. I think the runner up was "feclus".
Let's see... Once upon a time, an ex-coach founded a small LD company. Called it LDDS. (Long Distance Dialing Service) Acquired a bunch of compainies, renamed it Worldcom. Merged with MCI to make MCI worldcom. Now, with the Sprint thing coming on, it'll go back to Worldcom.
Sigh.
I remember when I first heard the name Pentium, I though fuck, why not just call it 586.
It got called "Pentium" because Intel wanted to trademark the name of their chip, and you can't trademark a number -- 3rd party competitiors could have made chips called "Ultra 586" or something (which is just what happened anyway with Cyrix). By picking an actual name for the chip, Intel was able to have brand-name protection.
(ob-hypothetical company name suggestions:)
PS: What is the plural of Unix?
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_______________
Mello like the Yello, but without the fizz.
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
There are alot of bad names out there, but ultimately a name should have something to say about the product/company or have someting to do with the company. While everyone lists some bad ones, I'll chime in with my favorite name for a product yet : X-Cargo - the Sears shell-like box that you could fill with luggage to go on top of your car. Sublime.
I'm trying to visualize this '4 month process' mentioned in the article to come up with a name. The best way I found to come up with names is to take two objects that have absolutely no connection to each other and somehow form it into one word. Say, perhaps, a telephone and a comb. Maybe something like Telecomb or CombHone or something. Then you have to go through some intense process of surveying people to make sure they like your name and would be able to buy your product just based on your name's appeal. If, say, I was manufacturing rice, Telecomb probably wouldn't be the best name. Let's see.. Maybe a combination of Uncle Ben and rice cakes... Bencake maybe? Or CakeWilds? I fail to see how it takes 4 months to come up with a catchy sounding name.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Want to use these names for your company or product? I'll give you a discount
You know, the one with the ant commercials and red blocks that make you think it's a Dodge commercial, but the name that sounds like a Ford minivan.
Of course, they have that loopy logo that looks like a Meta key on an Apple, and of course the obvious similarities to the name of a Microsoft product or fifteen...
What is Winstar, anyway?
--
E2 IN2 IE?
In my time as a market researcher, I've had to wade through company name after name, a whole lotta "com"s and "tech"s and 'solution"s. They don't stand out to me; they sound like everyone else. Since most normal english words are gone, you don't want a huge company name that describes what you do if customers have to type it in ("www.mikesconsultingcompany.com" ain't gonna get you hits"). The solution, in my eyes, is to come up with something people will remember. Although that's the point with the "com"s and "tech"s, everyone's doing it, so it really doesn't stand out. To me, yahoo! and amazon made me think. What the hell do they mean? What do they have to do with onlne directories and books, respectivly? Nothing. That's the point. They were chosen because they'd be remembered. Yes, they're silly. Yes, they're not descriptive. And yes, you remember them.
The Good Reverend
The worst names have been spawned by ISPs in my hometown... Oncomdis, Pipcom (Peterborough Internet Pipeline, which remeinds me of oil or sewage) , Quickline (it was an internet cafe).
Also we have Microage (computer store).
Fortunately there are some much more interesting (and memorable) names out here - Nerds On Wheels (mobile computer repair), Quantum Gate (gaming store), and Eyeball Soup (gaming store).
Anything with micro, net, com, or line, in the title slips in one ear and out the other (in my case, anyhow). The name is one of the most important things about a company, as far as advertising and media relations go. I certainly agree that 'Aquent' sounds much more like mouthwash than office temps. But hey, why would we want business names to be intuuitive, interesting, or noteworthy?
M2 Technical Industries. Sure I own the damn thing. Yeah its a really lame name. But... I didn't pay a damn dime to some think tank to come up with it and it serves the purpose.
M2 comes from my last name, which starts with a M and my partners last name which starts with.... you guessed it, an M. Technical Industries is a clear an obvious play of L0pht Heavy Industries. Yeah I'm lame....
GIHM -The light at the end of the tunnel is only the oncoming train.
You could just picture the writer trying to keep a straight face when he interviewed all these ultraserious name-gurus. My favorite quote:
"But if it's your own brand, how can you possibly be objective? I mean, would you name your own baby?" Redhill thinks for a minute, then backpedals. "I mean, of course you would name your own baby."
That cracks me up.
Someone should write some perl scripts to scan the dictionary and randomly chop words together. Call it GNUName or something; hell, that's probably already trademarked.
Communication is only possible between equals
i* and e*. Every damn company remotely related to the internet is slapping an i or an e on the front of their names. It was fine for email, but come on, it's been beaten to DEATH. Let's have some actual innovation in names going on.
Beside Unixes you could use Unices, which is closer to the English rules of pluralization.
was the monkeying about that SGI did when they made a big deal about their search for a new name, and changed to ... SGI
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
I hate names that have punctuation (like exclamation points, e.g., SomeExcitingCompany!) or are spelled incorrectly on purpose (Kool Aid).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
... that the name companies have some of the stupidest names around? Name/It? Namestormers?!?
/.ers, I think the names they sell are actually pretty clever...
It's funny, because unlike many
MSK
One name immediately comes to mind. Itanium. I guess they wanted to recapture the glory of the Pentium name. They failed. It just doesn't have the same...oh, I don't know, it just sucks.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
But mostly laughed. This article reads like a chapter out of a Douglas Adams novel. Therein lies the sorrow, as this isn't fiction where things are larger than life itself and words are frequently discovered that didn't exist before. No, this is the state of corporate America, further alienating itself from the common man by paying focus groups and consultants to create a fiction that will be their nameplate - thier face to the world. Sad indeed. kristau
So the new tact these guys should take is, when consulted, tell people "look, you don't want caring, on top, etc., that's what everybody else does. What you want is a name that's going to make everybody see you as evil, uncaring, backstabbing, bloated bastards...becuase you know, that's gotta get you coming out the other end with names that will be totally different than everybody else', rather than the cool kind which are currently associated mainly with evil, uncaring, backstabbing, bloated corporations..."
Listen to me Peter, I want this bench. You go sit on that bench over there, and if you're good I'll tell you the rest of
- Access
- Excel
- Outlook
And the best one...Microsoft Works! (?)
1.3L, 3 moving parts, 280 HP, no Turbos, wanna Race? RotaryNe
Back in my youth I got paid to peddle this rag called "Grit". Not a very informative magazine, very stupid name, but all my relatives had a subscription...
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
Playstation?? Dreamcast??
I gotta admit, I laughed myself silly at Dreamcast. From Sega Master System (cool) to Saturn (excellent, semi-geeky) to....Dreamcast??
Blah. Why not paint it pink and call it the LoveMachine?
We need cool names for systems like Jaguar, not froo froo names like Dolphin for our future generation of gamers.
=I am Jack's general protection fault=
Yes, but you are making the assumption that history is being taught in the schools, and that anyone is paying attention.
Considering that I had a conversation with a Mormon girl who said that the souls of babies come from "spirit children" who are produced by "Papa God" and "Momma God", and that human females need to have many human children to prevent overcrowding of "spirit children" in heaven, I think the risk is very low.
I was talking to a Lucent employee who called his company Loo-Scent. Then it occured tome - why the hell don't people think of these things before they name their companies?
Related, the Vic-20 was a stupid name, but for different reasons.. They released it under a different name in Germany, becouse apperently Vic is a cuss in German.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Someone was paid several million dollars to come up with the name "Exxon". I forget the exact figure, but it was more than $1 million per letter. Specifically, the request was for a name that was "Bold, Powerful, and Not a Dirty Word in Swahili". For why this is a desireable trait, you may want to look up the translation of "Coca Cola" into Chinese...
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
My favorite example is Lexicon, a top-flight naming companythat in the same 4 month period came up with the ultra-imaginative words:
Triples (for a cereal)
Quadra (the new mac)
Pentium (duh)
They liked numbers used in new and innovative ways. I believe Apple spent over two million for the groundbreaking names "Quadra" and "Centris"
Kevin "I used to work for Dantz, and they named themselves!" Fox
www.fury.com
Kevin Fox
I made a Random Name Generator in Visual Basic for that sort of problem. You can roll it a few times and try to get a name. It doesn't just throw out random letters or you might get a name like "xrtlkjg". There are rules about how many consonants can be together, and rules like "q" with "u". I was implementing different language syntaxes in it, but I stopped at that. Thinking up a good name is not a simple matter. People seem to like latin-sounding names. I guess it makes them sound important.
theres a company in kitchener/waterloo ontario that is called Cummings Cockburn. I'm not sure exactly what they do. but i thought that they were worth mentioning :)
My former employer, Very Small Company[1] decided to get prepared for an IPO (ya, right). It's a network solutions provider (designs, installs networks). They decided to get on the .net bandwagon, and name themselves VSC.net. They even have a little globe holding the place of the ".".
Eeew. That was about the time I quit.
[1] Not its real name
--- Phyre
At least their marketers had a sense of humor -- when they started using the name, they used the slogan "The Biggest Name in the Business". :-)
My favorite lame product name is Potted Meat Food Product, which I think is a Hormel product. I hate to be too hard on it though, because it is at least an honest name, assuming that potting accurately describes the process they perform on the meat. This product shows what happens when you name a product with no marketing considerations whatsoever.
Microsoft is a pretty pathetic word. It's just that nowadays it's SO common, that it sounds just as normal and just as "english" as the workd "the". I guess that's what millions of dollars worth of branding does for you.
:) and "soft" from software? So really, their name is a silly shortening of "Microcomputer Software" or at least that's my take. Even if it wasn't shortened, it would still sound weird by current conventions. The last time I saw the term "microcomputer" was in a Lisp programming manual from the mid/late 80s.
Think about it. "Micro", I guess from "microcomputers" (which they aren't called anymore
But again - it doesn't sound strange really since it's so common in the language. But I guess you'll find out that if you say a word over and over, and don't focus on its meaning but rather just the *sound* of it, anything starts sounding very strange. Try "salad" which has absolutely no composite parts that I can see.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
If you haven't seen Office Space, I'd highly recommend it! It is hilarious.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Why not rename Slashdot?
We could have:
Slashtiva
Slash Dotient
Pickle P45
Hack Point
Art Garfunkiva
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
So here you have all these naming firms. Apparently all the good (English) words have been taken already. Their task, as they see it, is to simply merge existing words (note how everyone seems to think of Greek and Latin as the penultimate source of style -- I guess English or Italian or Russian or Chinese or Swahili isn't established well enough to be allowed in corporate naming circles). It doesn't matter whether or not the client likes the new word or if the word fits the client, the word simply has to adhere to a certain set of rules and taste. Thus the end results are as ugly monstrosities, quite similar to the dominant architecture "style" in the book.
I guess I have no point to all this, it just seemed interesting. It'd be interesting to know where all these supposed rules for naming things come from. Also, if the goal is brand name recognition, a good brand name isn't going to create recognition. Only a good and seemingly omnipresent product will (though a bad brand name could damage that, I suppose). The best these names can do is offer some vague ideas of what the business's attributes may be. People fear blunders like trying to sell a car named "Nova" in a Spanish speaking country, when a name is only going to cause problems when it's very blatantly bad. I guess if it only brings to mind vague ideas then it's safe. Vagueness also suits these companies very well. God forbid they actually state what they do in their name! People might actually remember their company, and then they'd get business, which means more work for them. We certainly don't want that happening!
logan
Why would anyone want a car from Killed In Action?
--
He's seeing monsters. He's losing his mind and he feels it going.
I use to work at Verio (home.verio.com) when the company first started and they didn't even have a name yet. When they showed us the name and logo (verIO), we all asked, "Version ten? What the hell does that mean?" The response was, "It's just 'verio'. It doesn't mean anything. It's suppose to be meaningless. We wanted something that didn't mean anything." I'm not making this up. Okay, why does the logo have to look like "version 10"? They insisted it didn't look like that at all.
The vast gulf between marketing and the real world always amazes me. Or are we to the point where marketing IS reality?
Jon Sullivan
www.jonsullivan.com
hmm . . . maybe "slashdot"
;-)
But I'm pleased to say that when we unveiled the name last month at an all-company meeting, a thousand employees stood up and gave the name a standing ovation.
Well, I was watching it on closed circuit TV at the Agilent plant in San Jose, and the reality was a little different....
Back when the split was coming, but we didn't have a name, the Powers That Be were overly coy about the name. A few people from another division did some digging and found a couple of names the Landor person had reserved the same day that they announced they had a (highly classified) name. These were Tessent and Kengent. This speculation came out in the SJ Mercury, and Tessent seemed to be the leader.
Some comments from a Walter Hewlett led us to think that we would get Tessent (Test and Measurment , get it?) that therw was widespread dread on the day it was to be announced. So, when Agilent was the name, the first thing I heard was a huge sigh of relief.
(I'm glad that Kengent never was taken seriously. Who knows what the Barbidahl division would do?)
Pete Brooks
Some great examples:
Nova - someone beat me to it. Car name (Chevy); in Spanish is ~ 'no go'.
Osram - lighting bulbs, German I think. Apparently the word means something close to 'shit' in Polish.
Malaga - Car (SEAT) and also a place in Spain. Unfortunately in Greek means 'wanker'/'jerk'.
SEAT - it's actually a car company, not a chair ;-)...
;-)...
Somewhat related: Charlton Heston. In Greek the film distrubutors call him ~'Easton' as the correct pronunciation in Greek means, literally, 'shit on him'
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
I thought you said you weren't going to be pouring any hot grits down your pants for a while... You said you had run out or something???
Oh well, glad to hear you were able to get more!
Snorp, the anti-snoring drug is one of the worst names I've heard. I don't know what it is about nasal products, but Nasalcrom is another terrible name for a anti-snoring (or something like that) agent.
BS - (They sell bathing suits.. either that or BullShit, I'm not sure)
Awful Aurthurs - (The sell food. Oh yeah, I just love my food awful. I hate that good tasting stuff)
Birthday Suits - (Not quite sure but I think you pay them to steal all your clothes.)
And the king of all time stupid business names:
Dirty Dick's Crabs - (It's a restaurant. Let me tell you seeing a biplane carrying a banner that reads "Dirty Dick has Crabs!" is very very dangerous when you are in the ocean holding a body board. A wave caught my board, it popped up and... well lets just say it hurt. Although the people that some my near lifeless body corkscrewing toward the shore thought that I was just a really good bodyboarder. hehe)
Or NYNEX. NY & NE stand for something. What's the "X" for?
Telrad? Sounds like they sell remote geiger counters.
A local service company: "Twisted Pair". I think I dislike the name because I dislike the company, though.
Non-phone companies:
Exxon. Stupid, but an improvement over "Esso". Supposedly they paid a consultant $250k for those 2 x's.
In the UK, there's a chain of gas stations called "Q8". It's a part of the Kuwait Oil Company.
Walmart isn't great, but "Sam's Club"? Sounds ilke a bar & grill in a small town.
That's the worst!
I someday hope that I'll have something happen to me that is clearly my fault, that will get national media attention, that has everyone telling me to sue for "huge tracts of land", so that I can tell everyone: I'm an idiot and I'm the one who caused this to happen. My mother, father, sister, brother, nephew, uncle, government, teacher, priest, wife, mistress, daughter, son, friend, airline, restraunt, car, neighbor, etc, had nothing to do with it. I am the one to blame. I cannot sue for the land because I'm to blame.
I spilled the damn coffee on myself. I knew it was hot, but I did it anyway.
I rear ended your car, let me pay for you doctor's fees, but screw your emotional distress cause gump happens. I've got a burn on my face from the airbag, but I'm just thankful I didn't get impaled on the fschking steering column.
I'm an overweight weenie who closed the toilet lit down on my schlong (and ladies, it is a schlong!) and then sat on it, then twisted around a bit for good measure. I mean, c'mon fellows, how many of us don't know where our one eyed Jack is at all times?
My baby swallowed a penny and choked. I think I'll sue the goverment for not putting a child warning label on it. 20 years later that child is going to shoot up a post office over a 1 cent stamp increase, I just know it.
Pretty soon, people will be sueing Microsoft for charging too much for their products, even though no one forced them to buy the damn thing! So what if Dell didn't let you get a computer with something else on it, punish Dell, tell them you are buying a computer somewhere else. I don't get too upset with Honda for not having ALL the options on my Prelude that I wanted, I still bought the car. But, but, Chrylser offered that on their car, why don't you on yours?
Hey man, you can have any color car you want. As long as it is black--Henry Ford.
Damn, monopolies. I'll show him, I'll pick a white horse over his black car.
Build a toilet seat that even an idiot can use, and only an idiot will sit on it.
You think things are bad now, wait until the namers start using gratuitous self-reference... I'm just waiting for someone to try to name a company "InterCaps"...
Well, almost too late.
I once heard that GM had a hell of a time figuring out why their Chevy Nova wasn't selling well in South American countries.
No Va apparently means no go in spanish.
If that story's true it gets my vote.
Companies whose names are somehow witty, but only if you have prior knowledge (like "Twisted Pair", which is really only entertaining if you know anything about the telecom system; otherwise it sounds like bad pr0n...).
And now for something different; did that article actually say that "Nortel" was the product of one of the naming companies? Before "Nortel", it was "Northern Telecom" - how much mind-power would it have taken to figure that one out?
Since the merger with Bay Networks, it's now "Nortel Networks"; d'ya figure they hired someone to do that, too? Yeesh...
--
--
It's not the rambling I object to, so much as the mumbled incoherancies...
Ooh, sign me up for this service! That's just what I want, someone who not only doesn't give a hoot about my wishes, but is willing to tell the press so much.
Sadly, I participated in one of these "naming" focus groups once; it was when I was doing about weekly "focus groups" for a market research company that paid me about $75 for 2 hours work a week. You get into these groups, they've just handed you (or are about to hand you) a good lump of cash, and then ask you how you feel about this-or-that. Frankly, I would have dis'd all the names I heard - that was my first thought - but I wanted to get invited back so I could keep making the bucks. So, I chose the least stupid name, sounded really excited about it, told them it conjured up all these images of [insert adjective or verb here], got my $75 bucks cash, and forgot about it. Yeah, and I can't even remember what names I picked! That's how effective those focus groups are.
Eventually, this self-aggrandizing attitude will catch up with them, I hope. There's just no room in this economy for more self-aggrandizing holier-than-thou business models. Once the fame and money wears thin, this crowd will be back doing real work somewhere.
My $0.02.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
When my mom went to work for WorldCom, I told her she might as well be working for "UniGlobe" or "EinVolk" or something.
Actually, I found this article vaguely disquieting. Can our "captains of industry" really be so dumb as to be taken in by gibberish like the "semiotics of the letter 'i'"? Give me a break. It all has shades of "The Emperor's New Name". I can just see a conference room full of people thinking, "This sounds like a bunch of iCrap, but everyone else seems to like it, and these guys are professionals."
Still, my favorite part of the article was towards the end, where it mentions the guy in one office who decided to start calling himself Mescaline, or some similar-sounding nonsense. Maybe it isn't such a mystery where they get these names after all: "Omigod, Jamcrackers! Get 'em off of me! Get 'em off of meeeeeee!"
-r
Red Flag Sanitary Napkins
White Elephant Batteris
A shop in Nigeria:
E. R. Sewarege Fresh Water Service
The name I like to see someone have the testicular fortitude to use:
Terminal Demonics Corporation, maker of the Belchfire 300 Oxy-PlasmArc Cutting Unit
Straight from their mouth...
What is VAIO?
These names aren't just chosen randomly. Their parts and their meanings and the feelings associated with them are taken into careful account. Copious market research is done. So I guess the point is all these comments about how much we hate this name or that name aren't really an indicator of anything besides individual taste: they don't really matter very much. The names are not designed for us. They're designed for PHBs and airhead shoppers. And they work.
Anything starting with i, e, or X.
Congrats. It really should be slashdot.com, as it's now a for profit organization.
Another thing that the highly-paid naming gurus often miss is the reader's subconcious ability to correct a typo. I can't be the only one who always reads Imation as Imitation.
george
These are the ones that piss me off the most--names that tag together words and prefixes or suffixes from greek or latin, hoping to make it sound good. Micro-soft, Uni-Sys, and the most gawdawful of them all, trans-meta. WTF were they thinking?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
"Itanium"
"Inprise"
"TurboLinux"
"Netlojix"
"Equinix"
"SmartForce"
"Metacreations"
"Metalink"
Itanium -- what the hell is that? Can I make a boat hull out of it?
Inprise -- sounds like a combo on "internet" and "surprise", which I suppose is pretty meaningful
TurboLinux -- come on. Like they'd name it "supercharger linux" or "carburator linux" or "really slow linux" or "nitrous oxide linux"
Netlojix -- corporations have ruined my scrabble game. Now all the words I know either aren't real or or spelled wrong
Equinix -- maybe some kind of equal-opportunity gelding service for horses?
SmartForce -- you know, like "military intelligence"
Metacreations -- what the hell does that mean? I suppose paint and canvas are both metacreations, in the way this company uses that "word," but they are called "paint" and "canvas," not "metaart"
Metalink -- sheesh.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
let's just say that when a company comes out called "mammalix" that'll get my vote.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am
How about Kia? They make the Sportage, Retona, Clarus, and Pregio?!?
Here's some cars that should have been introduced during the nineties:
Geo Scrotum
Geo Speculum (would compete with Ford Probe for "Car most likely to make women squeamish"
Infiniti Q45 Explosive Space Demodulator
Cadillac Coupe de Soixante-neuf
Solaris Java, a solar-powered "smart car"
Ford Excessive, an SUV bigger than the Excursion
and, of course, the Isuzu Hemos
Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
Doesn't sound that bad. Of course it is probably recycled.
Most of the others are sad.
I don't get why nobody rips on any computer lines. Compaq and Dell stand out for that.
Lets get the Optiplex, the Optical Plexiglass!
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - F. Voltaire.
It really matters what's behind the name. I doubt
Microsoft paid enormous $$$ for their company name.
Ditto, mentioned Yahoo, and not mentioned UNIX,
Linux and a large number of names that have a success
story to tell. Everyone knows Yahoo. I heared about
Naviant, Whatever-gent, -ment or even -bent from
this article. Swap v and i in Naviant and you'll get Naivant.... Someone, I bet, had already made that typo....
Also, everyone is talking globalisation but name makers
don't seem to consider not-native speakers at all.
If I have to pick my Bloomsbury each time I hear the company name.... Or transcribed in my native tongue it sounds like sh*t.... Oh, well....
KuroiNeko
What happens when companies keep merging and just add their names together? You get the longest name on the NYSE: PriceWaterhouseCoopers -- sorta old-fashioned in that they're retaining the surnames of their founders, but newfangled in not using spaces or puncuation.
-
<SIG>
"I am not trying to prove that I am right... I am only trying to find out whether." -Bertolt Brecht
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Why is that lame? Cause too many people think DVD stands for Digital Video Disc, rather than Digital Versatile Disc.
I'm probably on crack, but for some reason it really bothers me when people call it a video disc as if there are no other uses for the technology.
Anyway,
-dr
Hmmmm...Maybe I'll propose we change our company name to honor the Swedish chef...Bork! Bork! Consulting. :) Our corporate byline can be "Flim go voop, voop voop!"
"Stupid Patty and stupid Selma!"
Daewoo... people who have no right trying to manufacture cars... they should stick to the fourth-rate TVs that they give away free with any car purchase.
Blech!
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I can't remember who, but one guy commented in the news that it sounded like a birth defect. "I'm sorry, ma'am, but your son was born with a unisys." "*GASP!*"
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I'm all for people making a buck in their chosen fields, but do they REALLY think that choosing a new name for a massive mega-corporation is going to make the slightest bit of difference? They could have called Lucent AssCo and it would still be a successful comnpany. They were a successful company before the name and they'll be a successful one after it. Same with HP and Agilent. Short of being offensive there's not much you cant do to name a company that's already been successful for decades.
And the guy ripping Yahoo? What is he high? Yahoo is the only internet company whos brand name is strong enough that they make money on it alone. Yahoo continues to turn a profit like most of the other iThis and eThat companies. I think maybe those Yahoo guys were onto something.
Who do these guys think they're kidding? The most successful companies of this century are almost all abbreviations, GM, IBM, GE, AT&T, all the television networks, etc. Of the ones that are left, they're usually people, Chrysler, Disney, Warner Bros. Over the last 20 years or so we have even more foolish names... Intel? Microsoft? HBO? Who in their right mind would name an entertainment company almost the same as a homeless transient? Or a submissive term like small-soft. Or name a chip company like a phone company? About the only guys who get it right were Apple, and they named it themselves on a whim.
I just dont get it.
-Rich
Really. C'mon. How much did they pay to change their name to what people already called them?
Consigned to flames of woe.
My choice for worst name chosed by an image firm.
When Bank of Boston and BayBank merged, the initial word from the companies was that the merged name would be Bay Bank of Boston, which you would think to be perfect and appeal to customers of both previous banks.
Then they shelled out the cash to hire one of these wacky image firms to choose a new name, and that company took the Boston part, and the Bank part, ignored the part from the bank with wider coverage, and dropped the "of". Then they smacked them together unnaturally like one might sauter an floppy drive to an iMac.
They came up with this awkward consonant combination that doesn't roll off the tongue too well, and if you know New Englanders, you know we tend to drop letter in annoying places (yeah yeah r's too), so the result is a name that no one in the target market says properly.
I guess this is a moot point, since after only about 6 years of life, BankBoston is being merged again, and its name wont live on.
R.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Well, there is the impotent name...
"Microsoft"
Traf-O-Data is the original name for microsoft! that's almost as bad as winCE
I used to work for a pharmaceutical company and name companies do a very important service. For one with a drug you need to find a name that is not too similar to other drug names -- otherwise pharmacists, doctors and patients get drugs mixed up which is a bad thing. Find new names for things is not easy given the huge number of registered products.
Besides, Aptiva is a much better name than Slashdot.
I just think, along with at least a few others in this world, I'm sure, that celeron is a dumb name b/c it's too reminiscent of a certain vegetable (?) by the name of Celery.
It's always nice to know you've got a garden in there; some real processing power.
Insert mind here.
We have sent all the second rate phone sanitizers into space. Your phones will still be clean.
I was just telling this story to someone yesterday. He was't amused. I guess you have to read it. Or maybe my delivery sucked.
There is no better site out there.
It makes you want to swagger on over and LART the little marketroid that came up with that one. I can just see the focus group now! "Well, like, there are enterprises, and they, like are just entering. We're already in the business, right?"
--
I noticed
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
(This is the only answer I can think of.)
Okay, so its a lame example, but that's the first example I can think of...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
You're forgetting the worst product name of all time...
...without changing the name...
...wait for it...
Yes, that fateful day when Chevy decided to sell the Chevy Nova in Mexico...
If you plug "no va" into babelfish, you get:
it does not go
Oh, let us bow before Chevrolet's inability to hire a Spanish speaking person before marketing millions of cars...
sigh.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
VideoServer changed their name to Ezenia.
VideoServer... Pretty sure it has something to do with video on the net. (Videoconferencing, actually)
What the fuck is Ezenia?
BitPoet
In the electronic music world, it's not uncommon to chose weird nonsense words to name compositions. I say this is for the same reason that nonsense words are getting chosen for technology corporations and their high-tech product lines.
First some examples of electronic music names:
Names like:
Heliosphan (aphex twin)
zeiss contarex (autechre)
entresol (sun electric)
Versivo (bola)
The reason these kinds of weird names are chosen is that in both the case of electronic music and technology firms, the product is extremely abstract. Most normal language deals with relatively specific concrete terms and concepts.
These companies don't have one concrete or specific mission. Technology's moving fast, and people realize this.No company wants to name itself after a specific technology or product which could be obsolete in 5 or 10 or 20 years. So you pick names that have meanings unrelated to what you currently do or produce. AT&T doesn't see a whole bunch of business in telegraphy any more.
This leaves several options.
* Pick a word that conveys something good unrelated to your technology. Zenith. Sun. Saturn. Problems: How many appropriate words are there? Don't want to violate any trademarks..
* Use a family name. Who's family? I think a lot of technology companies NEVER were a family business, due to the ammount of capital required to get started.
* Make up some word that linguistically hints at other meanings, but has no explicit meaning of its own. Novell (novelty?) Lucent (Light?) Itanium (Titanium?) Problems: Some people say they're dumb.
* Use some acronym, ignore the original meaning.. AT&T does this now.
The electronic music names tend to evoke notions of Science, space, chemistry, & technology in general. The technology industry tries to evoke speed, dependability, luminence, and innovation. And vowels. They want you to think of vowels.
But it's the same game - Picking a word for an abstract concept which has none.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
The Spanish Inquisition.
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
... hence the whole "Pentium", "Itanium", etc. thing. The only reason we have these is because Intel pissed and moaned about AMD and other chip manufacturers using "386", "486", etc., and they lost the fight.
In 1983ish when they first started in business, I thought "Compaq" was one of the stupidest company names I had ever heard.
Slight shortening and mutilation of "Compact."
[HUGE YAWN]
So, why wasn't I surprised to learn that the same consulting firm came up with "Acura" (shortening and mutilation of "accurate"), and the model name "Integra" (shortening and mutilation of "integrity").
Can you say, "stuck in a rut?"
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Compaq computers, per-se, and an Acura Integra is by far the best car I ever owned. But, I find the names, well, lame!
Barf!
I should note that several of the responses I got were from people who owned or worked with goofy-named companies, and some told of how hard it was to get a name registered since so many hundreds of thousands of companies are already out there, taking up the sensible ones... and remember, this was over 6 years ago now, long before even most computer people had heard of the Web...
Come on, who else would even dream of using Seven Soup Cans Software, LTD as a company name, except me. http://www.sevensoupcans.com -^Barret^ barret@sevensoupcans.com anyways
But I'm pleased to say that when we unveiled the name last month at an all-company
meeting, a thousand employees stood up and gave the name a standing ovation
I've been thru these. Could it be they were simply relieved at getting it over with?
--
Infuriate left and right
I think it's funny that my Multimeter has the name Fluke on it. I'm never really sure if it's correct or just guessing.
Last year my company spent 25 million on a new logo. A couple days before the big announcement of what the logo was they told all emploiees that we won't get a bonus because we were missed the target by 10 million. Conincidence? We think not. (Managment will disagree, but stock prices few several bucks just after the anouncement)
Ask anyone around here though, the surest sign of a big lay off is a company moving to a new building, changing their name, or changing their logo. The old timers hold that as true.
Remember from those old GTE Yellow Pages commercials? ("Not Al's Rugs, Al's RUG. Now if I advertised in that book of yours, people would be in here trying to walk on my rug, touch my rug, maybe even buy my rug. Then it wouldn't be Al's Rug.)
e ir-commerical asses. (And while I'm at it, I'll take out the Washington Mutual, Gap, and Amazon.com people.) And why "dsports" anyway? It's not "esports", it's "dsports"...it's one letter better! It looks too much like "despots.com".
Anyway, on a more pertinent note, I'd like to vote for any new drug that gets made. Xovirax, Tagamet, Claritin....the list goes on...and then of course, they've got commercials on network TV, that have NOTHING to do with what the drug is used for. And then they tell you to ask your doctor about it..."Hey Doc, what the F**k is Claritin?" Then underneatht he name, they have the chemical name for the drug, which is totally unrelated to the "layman's" name for the drug. What the hell people?!
But if it's an actual company, the number one most retarded company out there right now...
dsports.com.
I'm about to go down there with a chainsaw and cry havoc and let slip the dogs of public opinion on their sorry, not-knowing-how-to-have-not-have-people-revile-th
Runner-up awards go to "fogdog.com" and "flooz". How the hell are you supposed to associate "fogdog" with sports? When I hear "fogdog", I think of this dog walking out into the street in like London, or San Francisco, right before it gets hit by a big old bus. Fogdog. Might as well call themselves "Chapter11.com".
And If anyone gives me "Flooz" I'll papercut them to death with the Flooz receipt. If I wanted e-cash, I'd just jack your credit card!
---------------------------------------------
"Fire!"
"But Sir, we'll hit our own men."
"Yes, but we'll hit some of theirs, too."
---------------------------------------------
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
There was a company known as RDI in Virginia. They were/are a software consulting house. They payed half-a-million bucks for an image overhaul. They firm they hired came up with "Gineer", short for engineer. One of my former bosses told me this story (he used to work there), saying that the management thought that market leaders didn't have TLA's anymore. Ummm... hello??? IBM, AT&T, MCI, Sun?
--
--
"In Cyberspace, no one can hear you be sarcastic"
My solution? Make it illegal for artistically incliend people to work. That way, we force them into poverty and all they can do is sit around painting and writing and living on handouts. No more artsy companay names and we get better real art!
You could call yourself "DonkPunch", have a last name that no two people pronounce the same, combine your name with the word "Media" to name your company (even though media became uncool in 1995), name your domain after your full company name (making it 18 characters long), post pointless comments on slashdot, and include a link back to your Java-using website even though Navigator for Linux is notoriously unstable with Java.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
The Lucent proxies block salon.com because it is SEX. Your action was logged. Your behaviour is not in compliance with the Lucent corporate spirit.
NT (which, officially doesn't stand for anything) has always struck me as kind of silly.
--
--
"In Cyberspace, no one can hear you be sarcastic"
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC at the hight of the fried food is bad for you craze. A lot of people called it KFC anyway. Then again, what do I know I've never even been to one.
It's
Really
Only a
Camero
--
Ok, so they didn't mean it to mean that..
Their names were lame sounding, meaningless and furthermore the companies never, EVER, brought a product to fruition.
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
[I apologize for rhyming my title. It was inadvertent.]
I work for a company that contracts to the Federal Government, and it is constantly merging and renaming itself to keep the people who work for it employed. This has the advantage of giving us several options for spiffy new business cards, and not much else. But this latest round of renaming produced more bowing of heads in shame and suicidal tendencies than if we had merged with AOL - It went something like this:
Our company started out as IDI (Infotec Development Inc. Pronounced eye-dee-eye, not Idi as in Idi Amin Dada). The first merger produced Pacer Infotec, and we are now -- drum roll --
AVERSTAR.
I kid you not - everyone I worked with was like, "WTF - Average Star?? AAUGGGH! That sucks! Who the F thought of that! Oh my God - that's so f**king lame!..." and all the rest of the Kubler-Ross stages.
Don't get me wrong - this company's great to work for, but even now, that name is generally considered a big honking failure.
It's not all success stories, or even sweetness and light, boys and girls. Some times it hurts like stigmata, and the scars are just as permanent.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
http://www.ssc.com/lj/linuxsay.html
"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
The original article is much better than anything we can say in this discussion. Go and read all five pages of it. Absolutely hilarious, sarcastic and all around well done.
It does, however, beat "Campus Jihad for Alah." I say that from a non-Muslim perspective so maybe they have the same connotation for Crusade as I do for Jihad.
You are.... CORRECT!
First, the Muslims (at least the Middle Eastern ones) really dislike crusades (historical, that is). Saladdin who defeated some of them is a huge hero.
Second, the word "jihad" in Arabic means nothing but "earnest and hard work towards some goal". The correct translation would probably be "campaign". Historically this word is was used to denote the holy wars to spread Islam and so is associated (in the European/Western mind) with sable-wielding barbarians coming from behind the dunes on their camels, and lately, with Muslim terrorists.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
--the Mazda Millenia. If I owned such a car (or an Infiniti) I would keep asking myself, "If they couldn't spell the name right, what else would they get wrong?"
Eilroch Graphic Design. Yep. That's it. Can you figure out where it came from? I was (oddly enough) a conselor at a vacation bible school and got bored one day with one of the other guys. We started trying different permutations of our own names, and ended up with Eilroch being the most interesting. The process: Charles -> Charlie -> eilrahC -> Eilrohc -> Eilroch. What do you think? Visit my URL to see the site. MCH.
Michael C. Hollinger
Aquent called me up the other day and have an interview for me.
And my Dad works for USAir(ways whatever).
---CONFLICT!!---
Camry, drive limp-wristedly!
You woulden't find a discussion as lame as this at Salon
How can these people pretend they are professional?
The root for sequential is 'quent'
the verb 'to follow' in latin is sequor, sequiris, sequitur, sequimur, sequimini, sequntur. I'd say the root is 'seq'. sequent means 'following'. but loquent means 'speakking'.
to speak is 'loquor'. so 'quent' might as well be the root for loquent. and aquent might as well mean 'not speaking'..
---
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
Frankly, I don't think you can beat The Xiphophorus Company.
Not only that, but what they do absolutely rocks. A patent-free GPL'd next generation audio codec? Mmmmmmmm.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
I spent some time trying to think of a domain name that I liked, wasn't taken, and was short. The best I could do was two out of three. Finally I decided to go with the automatically assigned hostname (g27) that was given to our server before we had a domain. It worked out great because everyone using the server already refered to the server as G27 and was used to typing it in as the hostname. It also ended up being easy to remember and unambigous (almost no one is going to type gtwentyseven.org instead of g27.org.) Best of all I fit five syllables into 3 characters.
numb
the Kia "Sportage" sounds like some kind of 1337 talk.
H3Y D00DZ, tH3 GAM3Z ON! l37Z G0 WA7CH S0M3 Sp0RtAG3.
Of course it's also one letter from "shortage".
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Historical perspective
I remember when Intel announced that the
fabled 586 would be called "Pentium". We (the hacker community) thought it was a dumb name at
the time, and I remember saying that everyone
would probably call it 586 anyway.
So, maybe five years from now, we will be talking
about the glory of the Itanium name.
I wonder how much SGI paid to be told they should change their name from Silicon Graphics to SGI. When I saw that press release I cracked up.
My company recently switched name, from interActiva become e*maze, what /.ers readers think of our new name? The engineers didn't like it, so it was the best option we had (other included karoshi, securio, droolingidiot.com) Bye the Lord Snow White
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this? (Plutonite)
The subjects of this article really seemed like a joke. Some of the recountings reminded me of something out of a bad movie... a REALLY bad movie, like "Teen Witch" where you just cringe while you watch it.
Some of the things these "professional namers" said were frightening. I wonder if they really believe their own words, or were they just making a sales pitch? Jesus.
I don't know how the writer actually managed to interview these people while keeping a straight face (assuming she did keep a straight face).
This may be a symptom of why we're having protests in Seattle... business is just so out of touch with real people.
Oh yeah i agree with the console stuff too =P
www.metrio.com A friend just handed me this URL to look at, and their site had this at the top of the of the home page: metrio \'me-trio\ n: greek origin; 1: assessment 2: the classification of someone or something with respect to its worth. Sorry, but I think metrio is a fairly dumb name, regardless of its meaning. :-P
... "The king has no clothes!"
I think that Sun (which few people know stands for S tanford U niversity N etworks.) is one of the coolest names/acronyms, not to mention logos out there.
--
--
"In Cyberspace, no one can hear you be sarcastic"
The founder of Toyota is name Toyoda. A fortune teller told him that a name with eight brush strokes (Toyota) would be luckier than one with ten (Toyoda). He was also told that cars with names starting with C would sell better. Camry, Celica, Corolla, Cressida...Tercel?
Nissan (Datsun) was going to sell a car with the name Fairlady. The US division didn't like it so the name was changed to the production code name, 240Z.
Mazda had a van that they didn't import to the US. It would have been extremely popular with a certain group of people. The van's name was, Bongo Friendee.
Nissan came up with the name Leopard J. Ferie, but later changed it to J30.
On a slightly different plane: I always thought that Microsoft was not a particularly "macho" name (if you get my drift).
Does that symbolize that company's desire to devour the world?
The name was also a hit among the NewCo rank and file. "It's funny, because 'Agilent' isn't even a real word," muses Redhill.
:-)
Neither is Itanium, Pentium, Athlon, etc. Names != words
Now let's play some word association based on what it sounds like:
Agilent
-- Flatulent
Pentium
-- Pentagram
Pentium Pro
-- Professional evil
Pentium ][
-- Crap v2.0
Celeron
-- Cheap vegetables
Pentium ]I[
-- 1984
Itanium
-- I think not
Athlon
-- Bicathlon
Crusoe
-- Coconuts
Inprise
-- Inbred
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
OTOH there's a bus company in Brazil called "Ass". In Southern Brazil you can find a couple of companies called "Fuck".
Oh, sure, they're changing it to "Windows Powered" now, because it "emphasizes the integrated nature of the palmtop appliance," or some such BS.
But we all know the truth: It took the geniuses of Microsoft marketing this long before it finally dawned on them that the natural contraction of "Windows CE" is a word meaning "an expression of pain".
The Chevy Nova, i.e. "The car that you knew Latin America will never buy."
While in English, it conjures up a good astronomical image, in Spanish it translates to "doesn't go/move." Kudos to the fine folks in Detroit for that gem.
It's all part of the "the only thing that matters is that there's someone else to blame" mentality. It's really sad that punditi like Jesse Berst can get away with actually saying in print that that's a good reason not to use Linux.
(I used to work for Thinking Machines. Whatever one might say about the company, the name was actually distinctive. There was a slogan there that predated me -- for obvious reasons, they couldn't really use it -- "When we say thinking, we mean business!" It helps to know that they tried to call themselves International Thinking Machines at one point. There were plenty of other problems with that outfit, but name recognition wasn't one of them.)
Ok; so we're making fun of big corp names. However what does the name Redhat have to do with linux or anything computer related for that matter? If I were a non-literate computer user when I'm posed with the name RedHat. I'd probably think of a Red hat. Nothing to do with computers at all. How about slashdot? Great name for a webpage on that posts news. Heh; we shouldn't be so quick to judge others with funny names. Granted I've come to like all these names because I know what they truly mean. Bleh anyway
-the block is hot
Ok the drug to help you quit smoking is called Zyban. Now what is that supposed to tell me about it. In fact almost all drug names are stupid, propecia? uh ok...Ritalin? Adderall? hmmmm...just throw together a few consonants, add a few vowels, and you've got a good drug name i suppose. i'll make one right now. Druizecol. Good huh?
Scheeze. Don't you guys get out anymore? This is not news.
Unless Marc and his pals are working on creating thunderstorms, LoudCloud is definitely the stupidest corporate name I've ever heard.
I read that a while ago, someone linked to it in a post. One of the funnyest things I've ever read.
:P
I registerd the name 'jamcracker' at slashdot after I read that
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The nicknames people give products are usually much cooler than their actual names. Celery is a great name for a processor. What's even cooler is when companies actually start using the nicknames themselves. This doesn't happen very often though. Could you imagine Intel refering to their processor as the "Celery" on their web site?
I think the dumbest name on the internet has to be xxx....blockstackers.com there goes my karma Q: What starts with an F and ends with a K? A: Fire truck!
Sounds like Can o' Pus. Ugh.
Gentle Armadillos, LLC (tm) -company develops and deploys ecommerce sites. gentle armadillos, llc
Gentle Armadillos, LLC (tm)
-company develops and deploys ecommerce sites.
gentle armadillos, llc
Too bad they get to besmirch the greatest work of literature in the english language. Of course, Starbuck was this pretty boy 19th century yuppie 2nd mate. You couldn't really trust him. His competance made it hard to hate him as much as you wanted. Maybe it's an appropriate name after all.
"Linux" is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. If he wanted to change it, I'm sure he could (though, I don't know why he would...)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
"Channel 2"
The next time somebody started another channel, they had a public naming competition. Guess who won the big prize. Yeah, you guessed it: the guy who suggested
"Channel 3"
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Was toyota named after a person?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
What the hell is that?
Sounds like I'm getting mugged by some Londoner:
"Oy! 'And over yer dosh, else I box yer ears"
Intel really missed an oportunity here they could have gotten everyone looking for p0rn to go to their site, and they just had to follow the standard they set with the pentium.
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
This kind of reminded me of the fatbrain name story -- which I had to admit is a name that really catches my fancy. It's a pretty good piece about how they went about putting a more effective marketing spin on "Computer Literacy", and makes "those people who make up names for other people" sound a whole lot less petty than the salon article does.
:)
And it makes me want to buy stuff from fatbrain.
Hey! That's actually pretty cool. Good name for a company that works with adult literacy.
Copyright! I Call!
Why shouldn't linux sound as much as possible like unix? You don't say oo-niks, do you? LUNIX!!!LUNIX!!!!!!That's the OS that bugs bunny uses.
I hope you're right, but are you sure? What about the company zerox freaking out about people xeroxing or making xeroxes, when they should be saying "make xerox copies"?
(i hope you're right because trademark law is designed for things, and these days action is what's valuable..)
Entegrity -- supposedly for Enterprise + Entegrity
.
Like (nearly) any one of you, I could come up with way more creative and distinctive names for identity-free corporations and their pathetically codenamed creations than these titles-by-machine-AND-committee id/DeSIGN companies. I can actually picture the management-appointed nameGurus squatting in the corner of their Pythonesque (a la Brazil) cubicles chewing their toenails and with faces more contorted than the silly words they come up with.
Why aren't more of these naming jobs open to the public anyway? I could find use to a few hundred kilobucks.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Linux is a pretty bad name in my book.
Time to duck and cover.
As for my choices of lame-ass product names, any new car of the past decade pretty much qualifies! Tercel, etc.
The Tercels came out in the 90s? Shit, my moms been driving around a 1984 Tercel for years!!!!
I don't mind the name so much, infact I have one (a 97, quite nice and speedy). Toyota revamped there product line for 2k, and they got rid of it. Now we've got the crapy looking 'echo'
oh well... I'm getting pretty far offtopic...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Maxigamer. It's just plain lame.
It just bugs me every time I notice it.
Another dumb one is right downstairs: eForce. Any company can add e or i to their name and all of the sudden their name is Hi-tech and modernized. I think any failing company should just add an e or an i to their name.
This is actually a real problem in business. I forget what it's called though. Genericization, or something like that It's something you want to try to avoid, although it's an indicator of success.
More examples:
Kool-Aid
Band-Aid
Styrofoam
Kleenex
Coke (if you're from the Southern US)
Levis
Most of e-business based names sound very funny in Russian :). Especially e-business, e-book or www.ebstrategy.com. Basically "eb" in Russian is a commont root of words equivalent to the English F word (but stronger - cannot be spoken in public in any case). So, e-business is a business where you are getting f***d, while www.ebstrategy.com is a site about strategy of f***g or strategy that is so bad (f***d up). :)
My memory for URLs is good enough that I usually don't bother adding them to my links page until I'm sure they're something I'll use at least once every week or two for the forseeable future. So when I first discovered Slashdot two years ago, I had a terrible time trying to remember the right name. I kept typing "dotslash.org" because I thought, "you use ./ to run something in the current directory, but /. is just another name for / by itself."
I notice that Slashdot now has "dotslash.org" registered as an alias for slashdot.org. After almost two years as a reader, I still don't see the point of the name.
You agree with the post you're repling to :)
Anyway, I prefer calling the OS line-ucks, even though I always refer to Linus as Linn-us. And speaking of Linn-us, hes stated that he dosn't care how people pronouce it, so why should anyone else?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think its Corolla. Corona is a beer (and a wonderful beer at that). I don't think either of those are "real words" anyways. And its Camery. Not Camre.
Personally I like when companies just give their products model numbers.
- Technics SL-1200
- Ford F-350
- Motorola 68040
- etc
Can't go wrong with a model number.Along with the other posters, I'd have to say that was funniest post I've read on /. in months. Please moderate it onward to glory!!
I fear I can offer no new names on my own, being too stricken with afterhumor to think.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Years ago Standard Oil of New Jersey decided to change their name to something that sounded like their line of business and spent a not-so-small fortune rebranding all of their company worldwide to "ENCO" -- short for "ENergy COmpany". Their name was changed again shortly after one of their Japanese affiliates informed them that "ENCO" sounds very much like an extremely vulgar Japanese word describing female genitalia. . . Their new name, Exxon is meaningless in every major language on the face of the planet. . .
... the Ford Pinto, which means "Ford Penis" in Brazilian Portuguese.
What a stupid choice of person to name suitcases after. Amelia may have a certain cachet as America's premier '30's aviatrix, but hey...will your luggage ever arrive at its destination?
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I want to develop an open source version of this thing. All we'd really need are a database of the appropriate word fragments and the "feelings" and "characteristics" that are associated with them. I've got a BA in English with minors in Creative Writing and Business, and am only an mature programmer (You should see the applications I slap together in VB for my employer...) so I'd need help.
Anyone interested in helping to compile the word lists, design the database, write the code etc please e-mail me!
To e-mail me remove the threat from my e-mail address....
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
That's probably another reason for the popularity of these names is that they don't mean anything in any language. I remember Esso went through great pains to make sure Exxon didn't mean anything in any language.
:^)
My personal favorite is Coca Cola, though. When they moved into China, as I heard, the Chinese symbols that produced the sounds Coca Cola translated into "Bite the Wax Tadpole". So they changed the symbols on the can to translate into "Makes Your Mouth Come Alive."
Of course, in Vietnamese, Co Ca Co La loosely translates into "She Sings, She Screams." Maybe that's why they sell so much Pepsi...
I believe Daimler continued doing small auto stuff (maybe custom cars?), then joined with Chrysler later...
I'm not sure about that. DaimlerChrysler was formed in 1998.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Clearly a product that aspires to be something, will never be a good product. Perhaps they meant their car to be like a car, but something else :-o
The ISP had started out as Phoenix Datanet with the domain phoenix.net. Classy. Very rarely misspelled.
The company was purchased by Charter Communications to add an ISP to its portfolio of technology. The new domain name was c-com.net. Here begins the trouble. When on the phone, one would say the domain name as "cee dash com dot net" and quite often get confusion from the customer. "What? Cee dot com... uhh... what was that again?" Thankfully, legal troubles ended that domain name.
Then the company merges with Pointe Communications. The Charter name is abandoned (there is much rejoicing). The new domain name? pointecom.net. Yes, the 'e' is silent. Once again, on the phone with the customer... you can't just say "point com dot net". That would get you "pointcom.net".
My solution? Pronounce the 'e'. "point Eee com dot net - no spaces". Its a tribute to the pointy-haired bosses who come up with these naming ideas.
"Vic" in German would sound like "fick", which is the informal imperative form of "ficken", which means "to fuck".
I can't wait to e-commerce myself with my new Itanium credit card. Years ago (shortly after Standard Oil--NJ became Exxon) National Lampoon did a comic showing Tricky Dick changing the country's name to Nixxon.
Are they using Smartfilter from Secure Computing? I noticed I had to add an exemption for salon.com on our proxy because it was tagging it as a sex site.
Pokemon means "pocket monster" in Japanese.
No further comment.
I've been waiting to see an article like this. I used to work at Landor and their names have always made me sick. And if you think those are bad, you should see one of their lame PowerPoint presentations where they present dozens and dozens of these idiotic names ending in -ent or -a. I'm still waiting to see: Computa (how about idient).
Not mentioned in the article is another ludicrous Landor project, when they charged Silicon Graphics, International untold thousands to change their name to SGI. There ought to be a law. The prices mentioned in the article are much less than what a company typically pays because they usually get bilked into buying a whole "branding strategy".
Now I work for one of the other newly-named -ent companies mentioned in the article. No one can pronounce the name, no one knows what it means, or can tell what the company does. Brilliant.
It's the Emperor's New Clothes. Let's hope there are still some CEOs out there who have the courage to go with a solid, real name. Fuck Lucent. Give me Bell Labs any day!
When chevrolet marketed the old Nova in Mexico, they neglected to note that the spanish translation of "No va" means literally "It doesn't go". A hell of a name for a car.
I thought - what the *$@$! Who names their company with a name like "Tedious"? What a marketting blunder. Then I later eventually found out that the name of the company was "TDS Metrocom". I misheard the TLA as if it were a word. It still gives me a chuckle whenever I hear it. Accidentally naming yourself "tedious" is the last thing you want to do in a market where the public is technology-phobic.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
My vote goes to Allegis.
Remember when United Airlines (led by Dick Ferris)
spent more than $100 million for this change.
After a couple of bad quarters, the board sacked
Ferris, and rescinded the name change, opting
for the current monniker, UAL.
Nothing I have seen on this thread yet tops this.
actually, dotslash would be better? why?
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-dot-slash-dot-org
with the latter you dont get 3 slashes in a row and 2 dots in a row, but they get mixed up!
So, whats the answer?
When the Agilent name was announced, some fellow HP-ites noted that it rhymed with Flatulent. And then when we saw what the logo looked like...
OK, explain GNU, pine, wine, etc...?
Back in the bad old days of Netscape tech support, it was (and still is to my knowledge) done by an outsourcing company. In those days it was called "Corporate Software". Then they overextended and got bought out by R.R.Donnely and renamed "Stream".
Now what does the word "Stream" conjure up for you? Well, judging by the way they treat their employees, it has little to do with "mountain air" and "sunshine". More like "a glittering shaft of gold splashing down out of the heavens" or what happens after you drink too much thundertrain 20/20 on a Saturday night.
Their unofficial company slogan is "What end of the Stream are you on?".
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
http://etext.lib.virginia. edu/modeng/modengM.browse.html
Do a search on "coffee" "java", etc. and you won't find any mention of Starbuck liking coffee, unless there's some other synonym for it.
Is weakness. witch is exactly what intel wanted to convey. Celerons are ment to be cheap chips for people who cant afford a real computer. Never mind that you can clock the hell out of 'em, and that in almost any application it ether comes within 5%, or beats a pIII (128k catch, but its full core spead)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The graphics chips handle 256bits of data in a cycle, also the memory bus is 256 bits, I think...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Winstar's mission is to help medium and small-sized companies transition to an Internet centered business style and compete in the fast growing electronic marketplace. Winstar's belief is that business strategy and communications technology are mutually dependent, and reinforce the company's goal to make business frictionless for its customers as they embrace the new Internet economy. Welcome to the new e.conomy. Winstar. Brave New Business.
I think I may be sick...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Mescalanze is easily refrenced to Mescaline. Aparrently the drug of choice for these puppies. Me I prefer Crack
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
One word. Itanium.
Actualy, in China, Coca Cola is called "Cuh-Co-Cuh-La", It means "good tasting-joy" or somthing. I remember reading that they had to 'tweak' the name a bit, but They ended up with somthing good, I guess.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The Toyota name comes from the Toyoda family.
Hide your women! I am arrived!
And I didn't pay a single dime. Eat that.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
Agilent is an anagram for "genital"!
I remember when GM first introduced their electric car for lease only. Anyone remember the car named the GM 'Impact'??
A month or so ago, I ran /usr/dict/words through Network Solution's whois for fun. Out of 45k words, only about 4k got "no match" (some of which are registered with other registrars). Needless to say, the ones that are left are not that great (actually, a lot of the ones that are taken are not that great). For the 38k words for which I grabbed creation dates, I made the following table:
Year / #Words
1985 / 4 (e.g. think.com, dec.com)
1986 / 15 (e.g. adobe.com, sun.com)
1987 / 11
1988 / 22
1989 / 40
1990 / 77
1991 / 130
1992 / 209
1993 / 464
1994 / 1666
1995 / 5180
1996 / 5637
1997 / 6004
1998 / 7000
1999 / 12330 (e.g. abortively.com, tenseness.com, Yoknapatawpha.com)
beacuse DVD Dosn't stand for Digital Versatile Disc. Infact it dosn't mean anything. Beacuse of the argument over Video and versatile, the meaning was striped. DVD dosn't stand for anything.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
- The Probe (for people who like to tailgate?)
- The Dodge Ram (for very violent drivers?)
- The Taurus (for running red lights?)
- The Corrola (for statisticians?)
- The LeBaron (for a very small market, French noblemen)
- The Escort (for horny #@(&$'s)
Duh...Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Integrated Electronics.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
sun isn't a TLA, idiot
I can just see my grandmother going around her garden, tending to her roses, her marigolds, her ezenias...
I think that hardware gets the gayest names. Just look at your examples:
1.) Itanium
2.) Athlon
3.) GeForce 256 (NV10 was way better)
4.) Aquim (or whatever that MacTemps thing was renamed to, it sounds like a Spring Water distributor)
5.) Whatever happened to Sexium following Pentium anyways?
(yes I know you were not totally serious)
Microsoft is a great name: it describes perfectly what they do, and it rolls off the tongue (for me, at least).
Unfortunately, they haven't grown out of the hobbyist mindset (think "micro"), and the whole industry is trashing in pain...
P.
Companies often say that things that are *obviously* initals don't stand for anything. This is done because you can't trademark initals (you trademark the full name.) So they say they have no meaning (even when they do) as a workaround. This may well be a case in point.
I used to work for Bell Labs, in the building that's now Lucent. Just after the Great Renaming, I visited my old boss there. His comment on the Lucent name was
:-)
They must have paid somebody a lot of money to think up that one
and of course, Dogbert The Consultant used a coffee-cup stain as "The Brown Ring Of Quality" logo for Dilbert's company.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Netscape manages to give you a good idea of what it is, AND it sounds pretty cool (way better than "IE")
And Mozilla is just plain good...
Agilent? Howabout going with "Thunderbird" instead... or maybe "Mentos"
Presario, Proliant, Prosignia, Contura, etc....
Consider the Hong Kong soft-serve icecream company known as Mister Softee... I nearly choked on my bottled water (and I'm not going ANYWHERE near the ice cream).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
One day, some idiot is going to come up with the name 'indigent', and then I'll laugh...
whoa, wait a second, they have. Here
Ed
How about Imation? If you read it too fast it looks a lot like "imitation"...
There is a reason Plan 9 from bell Labs is not mentioned here -- it is a perfectly good name for an OS!!
Briliant. It was probably the best name ever created for a computer.
From one of my favorite sites: http://www.dumbentia.com/pdflib/cpqad.pdf
I don't think thats right, beacuse the word for 'bite' in chinese is "Yau" in the 3rd tone, or "ding" in the 4th. ( zhongwen.com ). I do remember hearing that though.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
CORPORATION names ar ecool. i'm going to name mine ""Dildox". We will make mad dildos with supa-leet stumiulation attachmentz and phat vibrational modes you are owned simple. yawn.ez
SUPER IORER TALENTTZ. SIMPLE.
_.......................__
||.....__...._._||_..||-\\..._...._._||_
||......_\\.(/_'..||....||-//.//.\\.(/_'..||
||__((_||_,_/).||_..||....\\_//.,_/).\\_
The final word; anything following is redundant.
I remember the first time I saw the Lucent logo: it was on a USB developers conference and a speaker from the newly-named Lucent stepped up to the podium. Behind him the projector showed his name and the huge Lucent condom logo. He looked so ambarrased... he spent the first few minutes of his speech apologizing about the logo.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
aitch aitch tee tee pee, slash slash slash dot dot org
There's an extra "aitch" in there.
Somebody moderate this up (if I'm not the only one this deep in the thread)! I just about died when I read it, probably the funniest thing thusfar on this story!
I seem to recall hearing somewhere about wonder bread, and all of the special claims that they made back in the 1950's, but new government regualtion has prevented them from saying things like "builds strong bones" because it isn't true.
A few examples that come to mind are: Wonder Bread (I wonder who named it...) Coca Cola (cocaine related), Pepsi and most other soda names like 7up, surge, etc.
Cigarettes are also named funny: GPC Approved(an intended Acronym that doesn't mean anything), Marlboro?
And Food: Nabisco, Frito Lay, Betty Crocker
The whole name thing has been going on since after WW2. It's part of a trend in business, trying to sound flashy and high tech to consumers. I don't buy it, but if it sells betty crocker more cake mixes, then more power to her fictional name.
Oh yeah, Babe Ruth (candy bar) was named after the daughter of the company founder or something, not after the baseball great.
10-4 over and out.
I can't believe that companies spend millions (or billions?) of dollars on these stupid names. ``Celeron''?!? That sounds more like a vegetable than a CPU. Maybe if companies stopped blowing their money on these things, they could produce better products... Well, maybe not. But it's still a waste.
Salon.com sucks. It quickly fell to shock tabloid material after it gained popularity a couple years ago. With the exception of the tech articles written by guests, the articles are generally poorly written and have hardly a coherent thought to offer. Their motto is "did when make you think?" Yeah right. They must show some signs of critical thinking in the writing before they should expect to "make you think". Further, their motto presumes that the reader normally doesn't think and/or that the author is so enlightened that you could hardly fathom her ideas on your own. Yep, they're right of course.
heh I agree, specially when your last name translats to something funny in English.
...Is that it's a slight bastardization of the Japanese word for "horse."
...when Subaru was going to introduce the "Rectum."
Just take the name of any car and preceed it by the word "Anal" for hours of fun.
Ford makes some of the best:
Anal Explorer
Anal Probe
Anal Expedition
This should work for some company names too.
I wondered if anyone else had that problem. Some words more than others, like "luggage"..
I ought to start a list, because about once a week I find one of those words that just sounds weird.
Cruising around in my Encore one day, although it was the first one I'd ever owned, I was nearly sideswiped by a large pickup truck. After a quick maneuver to avoid it, I commented to my shaken-up passenger: "Have you ever had to dodge a Dodge?"
He shot right back with "We were nearly rammed by a Ram!"
The rest of our two-hour car ride was filled with..
"Have you ever followed a Ranger with a Tracker?"
"I wonder which has better headlights, a beamer [(sp?)sic] or a Laser."
"Which will go farther before its power runs out, the Explorer, the Voyager, the Probe, or the Pathfinder?"
At one point we passed several Cougars and a Jaguar in a fairly tight group, and observed that such creatures usually don't travel in packs. Impalas, however, do. Hmm. Too bad we weren't driving a Safari.
Then we got lazy and continued with "Have you ever flipped an Eagle the bird?" "No, but I got the driver of a Falcon all ruffled once."
My favorite to this day, more so because a locksmith confirmed the hilarity of the situation:
"Ever locked your keys inside a Jimmy?"
You've forgotten ANUSOL, the medicine for your ANUS. (or did you already know that?)
well, in that case, the original poster should have mentioned the extra points for new word "lancer"
Sort of like Intel renaming themselves 'Intel Inside'. Sick. Stupid.