Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).
I mean it’s a complete and total wild ass guess but the obvious reason to change one’s name is if you’ve identified another entity that is using that name in a way which could prevent you from global exclusive use of the brand.
It’s the kind of thing that could easily have come up in due diligence for the large recent investment.
Doing a quick search of TESS2 for trademarks look they already have the trademark registered for ZEIT (registered in 2017). So it was probably for other reasons. Which is a shame, because Zeit is very concise, easy to remember, and has a strong brand today - at least with their initial audience.
Sounds like they're trying to go for a more corporate customer with their new name.
The name change makes a lot of sense to me, tactically (no matter what you think of the new name).
ZEIT is associated with full-stack hosting including backend servers, which they no longer want to focus on to. To solidify their pivot to frontend hosting in their users mind, they rename to strip all previous connotations from their brand.
Names are like colors and shapes, and their new one doesn't really indicate that they're innovators. Zeit was cool because german names in tech are quite rare, it was showing that they did things differently. Vercel sounds like a lame web 1.0 thing, it's more rigid, rolls way harder off the tongue.
Focusing on backend servers or not is just a implementation detail as a hosting company that want's you to not care about the underlying tech, the name itself is way more important at their size.
- "ZEIT is now Vercel. This new identity aligns with our new focus — to provide the ultimate workflow for developing, previewing, and shipping Jamstack sites."
What did the person writing this smoke? And who reads this and doesn't think of the company as being full of shit? Also, rebranding this is an utterly stupid move. Why on earth would you take the Zeit Brand and rename it into this bullshit concoction of words that you now feel to include in your company's mission statement? You throw away so much brand power. Zeit is a real household name in the JS world, so much that even I know it, and I wouldn't touch JavaScript or JAMSTACK with a barge pole. Vercel is just a faceless hull.
Otherwise, congratulations on securing funding, you guys surely deliver a lot of value to a lot of developers and that's commendable.
congrats team! 21m series A is hefty even before coronavirus. Good to have locked it in.
I've been following this frontend-gets-fullstack-abilities trend for a while. I think Next.js is the best expression of this idea, and is truly the crown jewel of Vercel and also the React ecosystem.
Unlike other React distros like Gatsby or Create-React-App, Next.js is the first "hybrid" framework that lets you choose whether to deploy static or serverless pages on a per page level. This means you can ship features without being locked into app level architectural choices. Even static pages get a "Preview" mode, solving a key pain point for content workflow. (all with the caveat that you must use a hosting setup capable of supporting these features, and naturally Vercel is the best place to do that if you don't want to roll your own). A few months ago Dan Abramov noted[0]:
> The next wave of techniques won’t be about putting everything on the client. Or doing everything on the server. It will let you move code between them without friction, and adjust the tradeoff to the use case. Take advantage of both. The Middle Way.
I see Next.js as the way most of the ecosystem will experience this colocation of client and server concerns.
The other trend I see is that React is continuing to work on integrated client-and-server experiences. (Note: everything I discuss here are experimental projects by the React team, so should not be taken as an official roadmap). React Suspense's introduction [1] was strongly tied to Relay, which introduces a compiler that offers stronger client-server guarantees for working with GraphQL [2]. React Flight will offer streaming server side rendering [3], while React Blocks will offer a generic way to suspend on queries without such strong coupling to GraphQL [4].
I expect that Next.js will also be the first place most React devs experience these improvements (they may be more under the hood by the time it rolls out), and naturally Vercel benefits.
Lastly, it's also fun to speculate on the future of Vercel outside of being "hosted Next.js". Guillermo's blogpost [5] has the appealing tagline "AWS for frontend developers". How many of those great logos that run Next.js is Vercel actually capturing? Is Vercel appealing enough to them that they also host non-Next.js projects with Vercel? Can we view Vercel as a "No Code backend"? Can Vercel deepen its 3rd party integrations to become a true marketplace/aggregator of frontend demand for backend/api services? What, fundamentally, is Vercel selling other than bandwidth, serverless functions, and devops-as-a-service software? Maybe that's plenty.
Odd for them to change branding when zeit is so well known everywhere. And given their products have simple and non googleable names, people have been tagging now and next with zeit so it's googleable.
I've been a customer for 3 years. `now` has felt like such a great evolution of the Heroku experience, which seemed to stop evolving after it got acquired by Salesforce.
Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to supporting apps beyond JAMstack.
^ The re-brand makes much more sense in this light - a young company that can still only focus on 1 product, needs a name that is associated with their current product, and not now v1 and v2.
But that was not the reason given - strange to cause such confusion.
Yeah they had Go support and yanked it. I don't use go but was surprised. Seems like at times they are hoping to be all things to everyone and at times trying to be really focused (although we might disagree with where they are focusing).
Nextjs is most likely going to be the new Ruby on Rails. javascript all the way down, static rendering, PWA, server side rendering...everything baked in.
I prefer to use other languages on backend something like C#, because JavaScript is too error-prone. You can't even just add two numbers (try (0.1 + 0.2) === 0.3) without some workarounds. and there are millions other issues with the language.
I'm curious what you're comparing JavaScript to. Decimal is the native numeric datatype for the stored procedure language of the database I use. Otherwise, even in languages that have a decimal class in their standard library, it's usually pretty clunky to use; no better than, say, https://github.com/MikeMcl/decimal.js/ C# is perhaps the best among mainstream languages, although its implementation is a bit weird.
What is clunky about decimal type? You declare a decimal variable and then use it exactly like any other numeric type. Here is an example: https://dotnetfiddle.net/jjJHA6
0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 returns false in all the interpreters I have installed locally (Ruby, Python, NodeJS and Haskell), and you can't with a straight face pretend that Haskells type system is not strict enough.
Because I was curious, I tested it out with C# on repl.it and behold, 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 returns false in C# as well: https://repl.it/repls/AdoredValidVirtualmachines. Not very surprising of course, since that "error" is a result of the IEEE floating point spec and not of any language.
If you write in C# decimal a = 0.1m; decimal b = 0.2m; var result = a + b; then you will get exactly 0.3, because decimal is a special high-precision numeric type that doesn't have such issues.
That's also the objective of Kretes [1], a programming environment for TypeScript & Node.js (soon Deno) with built-in support for plain SQL and GraphQL
Ruby on Rails is opinionated. JavaScript is the exact opposite.
The data access layer in JS leaves a lot to be desired (especially compared to Rails)
React almost felt like a winner for single page apps, but there was never a great "flux" pattern to use, and now they've completely ruined that ecosystem with Hooks.
Also SPA's have become so big and bloated it's time to go back to something that you can build progressive web apps with like jQuery.
Agreed. I've shipped projects in ASP.Net MVC, Rails, Django, Grails, and Express, and to paraphrase Alan Kay[1], NextJS is the first javascript server-side framework worth criticizing.
I absolutely love the company and am a happy customer, but for the love of time, why give up such a good pun for a name?
(For people not familiar with the german language, zeit means time. And 'time now' is simply an amazing name for a product that enables you to ship, well, now)
Might the name change come from one of lead investors named 'Accel', who wanted to align the name of zeit more with their own brand? Vercel/Accel?
I honestly don't understand why you would do that though, as you just threw one of the most well known brand names in JS ecosystem out of the window.
It's not. It was previously considered signature because it was a prism with a gleam on one corner. Post-simplification, I would still consider it signature, but definitely not unique.
It's a German word and the name of one of Germany's biggest newspapers, and probably part of the name of dozens of businesses in all kinds of industries in Germany.
Using a made-up brand name is the standard way to avoid potential trademark conflicts, and at the same time be more easily findable via Google.
Yeah, not having your name instantly googleable in Germany (a big economy with a lot of developers) is probably a hindrance. Not to mention how stupid it would be to use in a sentence, imagine calling your product "Time", and a developer says e.g. "we're having issues with time.."
The less nonsensical the word in context, the more confusing it is though. Do you dispute that "we're having issues with time" is much more vague and overloaded, than "we're having issues with zoom"?
A camera developer might find "having issues with zoom" as confusing as a dev dealing with timezones finds "having issues with time". Everyone has a different context that may make your name confusing to them.
Who cares. He was a philosopher and a interesting one. That’s like not reading Ezra Pound’s poetry even though it’s some of the best of all time.
American post-war propaganda did a number on you if you’re that whipped. Nietzsche (another German, oh no!) calls that the slave morality.
A shame they changed the name, I liked "Zeit". The re-branding reminds me of the browser IDE "Hyperdev" which changed to "Gomix" and finally to "Glitch"... Everytime the name changes, people care less... but I'm no businessman
> [1] ...Therefore, all new plans include unlimited Bandwidth, Builds, and Serverless Function Execution
Also, the new pricing is a bit more approachable, when I last looked it seemed a bit expensive for Serverless functions.
Vercel/ZEIT is typically a bit cheaper in the long run for popular sites with the fixed costs. If your traffic is really light, then Netlify probably is.
If deploying a Next.js site, it makes sense to deploy on top of the platform made for it (ZEIT/Vercel)
Awesome. I normally work on just web apps but had to build a website recently that had some complex bits in some pages but mainly a marketing site. The experience with nextjs and deploying with zeit was brilliant. Docs are good, everything works well, just an all round good experience. Please don't break it!
As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it.
Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to provide any feedback on the name until they had given it a day or two to sink in. Almost invariably the feedback was, “I hated it when I first heard it, but it has really grown on me.”
Examples of names that would be very easy to criticize on first hearing that have become incredibly successful brands abound. Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name. Now it’s a verb. I won’t waste your time with more examples.
What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that out that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but you imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point?
Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why? I doubt they have a viable product yet. A name change isn't going to help).
There are various types of rebranding that may or may not involve renaming. However, with respect to renaming specifically, it often also comes about because your company name now bears no relationship to what you actually do.
To take a random example from a past life, NL Industries used to be the Nation Lead Company but, while they still have some involvement in pigments, they don't actually do anything related to lead any more AFAIK. (This is a major reason companies switch from a descriptive name to just some letters.)
After the renaming you mentioned of NL, was there any lasting measurable business effect such as change in turnover, profit, new customers, anything at all?
I will say that it's easy to say that none of this stuff matters at all. And it's very hard to quantify among a zillion other variables. Is it crucial in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. But things like brand awareness and brand perception can matter--at least at the margins.
> What value is there in renaming anything? You've said that out that "Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name." but you imply it doesn't matter - so what's the point?
To be clear, my sentence was slightly syntactically incorrect: what I meant was, "Google is a stupid- and juvenile-sounding name." It's not a stupid name, but it is stupid-sounding, at least until you get used to it. But it's far from a stupid name. For instance: it's spelled the way it sounds, it's memorable, and it sounds like a verb. Those are all pluses, and yes, they matter.
I once worked for a company called Internet Enterprises. Terrible name. It sounds like a shell company with dusty offices on a service road off a highway.
I once owned a design agency called factor[e] design initiative (I didn't found it or name it). Poor brand story: the "e" was chosen because at the time (late 90s) "e" was like "i" from a few years ago. No other good reason. It was spelled all lower-case, like e. e. cummings (annoying for a company). It had weird punctuation marks in it. And how do you pronounce it? I would commonly hear "factory" or "factor-E" (correct). I used to joke it was "fac-TOR-ay" (say that with an Italian accent).
A few years in, we rebranded to Parallel. Much better: regular spelling and capitalization, dictionary word and a good brand story (alignment / working "in parallel" with clients, etc.) At times, in conversations with clients, they would inadvertently use the brand: "We'd like to work in parallel with you..."
This stuff matters—a lot! It's easier to attract customers and employees with a great brand. And the brand provides a consistent touch point - a "north star" if you will - for what the company stands for.
Pure speculation but: "Zeit" is a super common German word. So if you want to protect your brand internationally but there's a major newspaper in one of the biggest economies that is also called exactly "Zeit" - that's kind of bad. Vercel is much more unique. You can't get https://twitter.com/zeit because it's the newspaper. You can't get zeit.de because it's the newspaper. You could get zeit.com but you'd compete with the newspaper for it. Picking a brand that doesn't have as much baggage could be convenient down the line.
>Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why?
This is what I figure. That or they want people to forget about lousy things they've done. Dunno if it was ever true, but hearing the rumour that Kentucky fried chicken switched to KFC to avoid being associated with fried chicken and the health issues surrounding trans fats that were a big deal at the time sort of stuck with me.
Personally, I'd trust the company that's kept the same boring name for a decade over one that's renamed themselves several times in the same period.
The software was named Backrub, before they started the company. I wouldn't call it a rebrand, since they never used that as a company name. Almost every product has a pre-release name that was never used as a brand.
My personal opinion is that every great company can have one re-brand in their lifetime, and many have. To name a few: BackRub, Cadabra, Doorbot, Justin.tv
Yeah, a rebranding will always sound weird at first. The question is whether the upside is better in the long-term - time will tell. Vercel does sound good (though does sound close to parcel for me and also reads like vermicelli a bit).
For "Zeit" I am biased, since I speak German and it translates to "time" (and there's a large circulation newspaper called "Zeit"... well, actually "Die Zeit" which reads funny in English - but actually fits for this rebranding :-) ).
When "Open BC" (Germany's LinkedIn, BC stands for Business Club) renamed itself to "Xing" 14 years ago, it felt really weird to me. Though I think by now most people on the Xing platform won't even remember the old name. And in 5 years time, people who weren't even born when it was rebranded will start joining the platform.
Neither, really. Just for me it has a meaning already. Like if a service is called "Time" or "Hour". It's not bad or good, I just already associated with something else.
Related: ConvertKit rebranded to seva and then fairly promptly rolled the decision back based on customer feedback. https://convertkit.com/staying-convertkit gives details. I was pleased at the reversion, though for completely different reasons: I think the rebrand was foolish purely because it went from a memorable name with meaning (even if that meaning didn’t exactly match the purpose for all of their customers) to a four-letter word that’s meaningless to most people and says nothing at all about the company or product.
wow, i wasnt even aware of that rebrand. seva sounds so awful, whereas im already super invested in the ConvertKit story. good reversal of decision there.
202 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] thread> Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.
It’s the kind of thing that could easily have come up in due diligence for the large recent investment.
Sounds like they're trying to go for a more corporate customer with their new name.
\shrug\
ZEIT is associated with full-stack hosting including backend servers, which they no longer want to focus on to. To solidify their pivot to frontend hosting in their users mind, they rename to strip all previous connotations from their brand.
Focusing on backend servers or not is just a implementation detail as a hosting company that want's you to not care about the underlying tech, the name itself is way more important at their size.
What did the person writing this smoke? And who reads this and doesn't think of the company as being full of shit? Also, rebranding this is an utterly stupid move. Why on earth would you take the Zeit Brand and rename it into this bullshit concoction of words that you now feel to include in your company's mission statement? You throw away so much brand power. Zeit is a real household name in the JS world, so much that even I know it, and I wouldn't touch JavaScript or JAMSTACK with a barge pole. Vercel is just a faceless hull.
Otherwise, congratulations on securing funding, you guys surely deliver a lot of value to a lot of developers and that's commendable.
I've been following this frontend-gets-fullstack-abilities trend for a while. I think Next.js is the best expression of this idea, and is truly the crown jewel of Vercel and also the React ecosystem.
Unlike other React distros like Gatsby or Create-React-App, Next.js is the first "hybrid" framework that lets you choose whether to deploy static or serverless pages on a per page level. This means you can ship features without being locked into app level architectural choices. Even static pages get a "Preview" mode, solving a key pain point for content workflow. (all with the caveat that you must use a hosting setup capable of supporting these features, and naturally Vercel is the best place to do that if you don't want to roll your own). A few months ago Dan Abramov noted[0]:
> The next wave of techniques won’t be about putting everything on the client. Or doing everything on the server. It will let you move code between them without friction, and adjust the tradeoff to the use case. Take advantage of both. The Middle Way.
I see Next.js as the way most of the ecosystem will experience this colocation of client and server concerns.
The other trend I see is that React is continuing to work on integrated client-and-server experiences. (Note: everything I discuss here are experimental projects by the React team, so should not be taken as an official roadmap). React Suspense's introduction [1] was strongly tied to Relay, which introduces a compiler that offers stronger client-server guarantees for working with GraphQL [2]. React Flight will offer streaming server side rendering [3], while React Blocks will offer a generic way to suspend on queries without such strong coupling to GraphQL [4].
I expect that Next.js will also be the first place most React devs experience these improvements (they may be more under the hood by the time it rolls out), and naturally Vercel benefits.
Lastly, it's also fun to speculate on the future of Vercel outside of being "hosted Next.js". Guillermo's blogpost [5] has the appealing tagline "AWS for frontend developers". How many of those great logos that run Next.js is Vercel actually capturing? Is Vercel appealing enough to them that they also host non-Next.js projects with Vercel? Can we view Vercel as a "No Code backend"? Can Vercel deepen its 3rd party integrations to become a true marketplace/aggregator of frontend demand for backend/api services? What, fundamentally, is Vercel selling other than bandwidth, serverless functions, and devops-as-a-service software? Maybe that's plenty.
---
references
0: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1193001108102373376
1: https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/11/06/building-great-user-expe...
2: https://dev.to/zth/relay-the-graphql-client-that-wants-to-do...
3: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/dtsi1q/react_fligh...
4: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1239013168682274816
5: https://rauchg.com/2020/vercel
Good to see free personal plan tho.
Zeit focused on all types of applications when it started, not just static frontend and FaaS. I wish it would return to supporting apps beyond JAMstack.
But that was not the reason given - strange to cause such confusion.
The lack of detailed documentation around Python does make me nervous that they may drop support for it some day though.
My notes on running a Python app on Now v2: https://github.com/simonw/til/blob/master/zeit-now/python-as...
And it's listed in their support docs here... https://vercel.com/docs/runtimes#official-runtimes
They wrote about it on their blog: https://fly.io/blog/making-datasets-fly-with-datasette-and-f...
This is a big backing for Next.
However rebranding to Vercel is bad.
[1] https://blitzjs.com/ - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitz
I thought about making "higher level" frameworks by combining "lower level" frameworks myself.
How did you do it? I mean, it's not just wrapping the libraries, but also the CLIs.
One suggestion - I highly recommend you mention that you're leveraging nextjs. There is a certain buy-in that nextjs has that would be hard elsewhere.
In fact I would say that I would totally pay an annual subscription for this (even on "starter marketplaces" like themeforest).
Because I was curious, I tested it out with C# on repl.it and behold, 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 returns false in C# as well: https://repl.it/repls/AdoredValidVirtualmachines. Not very surprising of course, since that "error" is a result of the IEEE floating point spec and not of any language.
[1]: https://kretes.dev/
The data access layer in JS leaves a lot to be desired (especially compared to Rails)
React almost felt like a winner for single page apps, but there was never a great "flux" pattern to use, and now they've completely ruined that ecosystem with Hooks.
Also SPA's have become so big and bloated it's time to go back to something that you can build progressive web apps with like jQuery.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
(For people not familiar with the german language, zeit means time. And 'time now' is simply an amazing name for a product that enables you to ship, well, now)
I wonder whether the rebrand is because of that. If they want to operate in Germany the new name is definitely better.
It's a big market for most internationally operating companies, seems a smart move to take that into account early.
> Apple is also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit in English
And it caused them pretty big problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
I'm sure they've thoroughly vetted "Vercel" against potential trademark conflicts.
Is this satire? Can’t tell.
> Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.
It also "strongly connects" to the words "vermin" and "decelerate".
For everyone who's been on this journey with us so far, thank you, and we look forward to a lot more!
Using a made-up brand name is the standard way to avoid potential trademark conflicts, and at the same time be more easily findable via Google.
We're having issues with zoom...
We're having issues with chrome...
We're having issues with word...
> [1] ...Therefore, all new plans include unlimited Bandwidth, Builds, and Serverless Function Execution
Also, the new pricing is a bit more approachable, when I last looked it seemed a bit expensive for Serverless functions.
[1] https://vercel.com/blog/simpler-pricing
If deploying a Next.js site, it makes sense to deploy on top of the platform made for it (ZEIT/Vercel)
Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to provide any feedback on the name until they had given it a day or two to sink in. Almost invariably the feedback was, “I hated it when I first heard it, but it has really grown on me.”
Examples of names that would be very easy to criticize on first hearing that have become incredibly successful brands abound. Google is a stupid and juvenile-sounding name. Now it’s a verb. I won’t waste your time with more examples.
Isn't rebranding what companies do when they run out of ideas (one of my old employers changed its name at least 3 times because... why? I doubt they have a viable product yet. A name change isn't going to help).
To expand in to a market that already has a well known company by that name
Hard to rank for it for search purposes
Brand is about a specific niche that you want to expand out of
To take a random example from a past life, NL Industries used to be the Nation Lead Company but, while they still have some involvement in pigments, they don't actually do anything related to lead any more AFAIK. (This is a major reason companies switch from a descriptive name to just some letters.)
I will say that it's easy to say that none of this stuff matters at all. And it's very hard to quantify among a zillion other variables. Is it crucial in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. But things like brand awareness and brand perception can matter--at least at the margins.
To be clear, my sentence was slightly syntactically incorrect: what I meant was, "Google is a stupid- and juvenile-sounding name." It's not a stupid name, but it is stupid-sounding, at least until you get used to it. But it's far from a stupid name. For instance: it's spelled the way it sounds, it's memorable, and it sounds like a verb. Those are all pluses, and yes, they matter.
I once worked for a company called Internet Enterprises. Terrible name. It sounds like a shell company with dusty offices on a service road off a highway.
I once owned a design agency called factor[e] design initiative (I didn't found it or name it). Poor brand story: the "e" was chosen because at the time (late 90s) "e" was like "i" from a few years ago. No other good reason. It was spelled all lower-case, like e. e. cummings (annoying for a company). It had weird punctuation marks in it. And how do you pronounce it? I would commonly hear "factory" or "factor-E" (correct). I used to joke it was "fac-TOR-ay" (say that with an Italian accent).
A few years in, we rebranded to Parallel. Much better: regular spelling and capitalization, dictionary word and a good brand story (alignment / working "in parallel" with clients, etc.) At times, in conversations with clients, they would inadvertently use the brand: "We'd like to work in parallel with you..."
This stuff matters—a lot! It's easier to attract customers and employees with a great brand. And the brand provides a consistent touch point - a "north star" if you will - for what the company stands for.
This is what I figure. That or they want people to forget about lousy things they've done. Dunno if it was ever true, but hearing the rumour that Kentucky fried chicken switched to KFC to avoid being associated with fried chicken and the health issues surrounding trans fats that were a big deal at the time sort of stuck with me.
Personally, I'd trust the company that's kept the same boring name for a decade over one that's renamed themselves several times in the same period.
For "Zeit" I am biased, since I speak German and it translates to "time" (and there's a large circulation newspaper called "Zeit"... well, actually "Die Zeit" which reads funny in English - but actually fits for this rebranding :-) ).
When "Open BC" (Germany's LinkedIn, BC stands for Business Club) renamed itself to "Xing" 14 years ago, it felt really weird to me. Though I think by now most people on the Xing platform won't even remember the old name. And in 5 years time, people who weren't even born when it was rebranded will start joining the platform.
"As a condition of the settlement, Apple Computer agreed not to enter the music business, and Apple Corps agreed not to enter the computer business."
Biased which way, did you think it was good or bad?