I think that the naming of companies and products is less important than people think, especially the marketing people. Think of some well known companies today like Google, Twitter or IBM.
Google is a made up word that derives from Googol, but how many people would have heard of Googol. Twitter has always seemed a dumbass name to me, although this is down to my personal subjective opinion. IBM has no meaning because it is an acronym and most people will not know what the letters stand for.
If the product is good the name will stick no matter what. The writer spent a lot of time working on the name but we will never know if the OS would have been just as successful with a different name. I suspect the name had nothing to do with it.
> The writer spent a lot of time working on the name but we will never know if the OS would have been just as successful with a different name.
It was not about just making the OS popular, it was about forcing the press to refer to the MicroSoft brand every time one of their product was mentioned. Likewise for Word.
I think you're wrong about IBM. Just about everybody knows it stands for "International Business Machines," and if I'm not mistaken it went by that name for a long time before it became popular enough to go by the acronym.
Naming is more important than you think. No doubt a great name won't fix a bad product, and a bad name won't hurt a great product too much, but outside those extremes, I think it helps to have a catchy, unique sounding name, that isn't too ridiculous sounding. If I feel silly or stupid saying a product's name (or an open source project's name), I'm not likely to recommend it unless it's just over the top awesome, which most things aren't.
> Just about everybody knows it stands for "International Business Machines,"
I didn't. I imagine my mom probably didn't, though she would say "that makes sense". My uncle most likely doesn't. I imagine my tech friends don't know, either.
There's definitely a huge shift before and after the existence of internet search engines. A sign of Google's real or imagined power is that they think they are big enough to call themselves something as generic as "Alphabet". I guess they own the de-facto default search engine so maybe they can make it work.
Original source mentioned at top seems to be several comments from https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/ButWhy/Word-is-named-Word--B... . I was originally tracking it down to complain about attribution, but it appears the author of this site is the same person who wrote them. Still, seems like he should have either linked it or maybe not even mentioned it. Maybe I am too easily annoyed or jump to conclusions.
That would have been a great idea in 94. Imagine if Internet Explorer had been called "Web" or "Net" it would have been harder for a competitor like Firefox to challenge them if their name was synonymous with their function.
That would have been a great idea in 94. Imagine if Internet Explorer had been called "Web" or "Net" it would have been harder for a competitor like Firefox to challenge them if their name was synonymous with their function.
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[ 7.6 ms ] story [ 44.9 ms ] threadGoogle is a made up word that derives from Googol, but how many people would have heard of Googol. Twitter has always seemed a dumbass name to me, although this is down to my personal subjective opinion. IBM has no meaning because it is an acronym and most people will not know what the letters stand for.
If the product is good the name will stick no matter what. The writer spent a lot of time working on the name but we will never know if the OS would have been just as successful with a different name. I suspect the name had nothing to do with it.
It was not about just making the OS popular, it was about forcing the press to refer to the MicroSoft brand every time one of their product was mentioned. Likewise for Word.
Naming is more important than you think. No doubt a great name won't fix a bad product, and a bad name won't hurt a great product too much, but outside those extremes, I think it helps to have a catchy, unique sounding name, that isn't too ridiculous sounding. If I feel silly or stupid saying a product's name (or an open source project's name), I'm not likely to recommend it unless it's just over the top awesome, which most things aren't.
I didn't. I imagine my mom probably didn't, though she would say "that makes sense". My uncle most likely doesn't. I imagine my tech friends don't know, either.
You could have started by calling it "Microsoft Web" or "Windows Browser", but ultimately dropped that just like you did with Word or Windows.
You wanna fade into vanilla background deliciousness.