The Rise of StudlyCaps
May. 17th, 2005 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurSigns of the times. It just occurred to me how many of the companies I've been interacting with professionally have TwoWord names, in that form: two capitalized words smashed together. Not surprising, given the way the Internet namespace has been running out, but it's amusing to watch the commercial world turn into a giant Wiki...
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 02:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 03:25 pm (UTC)I'm tired of , which came after TLA and before BizOTronic... or, since this is
There was also the short-lived blip of "misspelling or truncating a name" to be memorable. (Cingular, Genuity). The current rage is "a name which means nothing at all", cf Altria.
Some day I will create a software company, and I will use the name I co-opted from a friend so many years ago. Splendidus. Splendidus Software or Splendidus Consulting. My favorite company name is Ab Initio, similar reasons....
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 03:30 pm (UTC)I think your editing erased a word? The one before the comma in "I'm tired of , which came after TLA"
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 03:32 pm (UTC)"I'm tired of <color><noun>, which came before"
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Date: 2005-05-17 03:34 pm (UTC)I always liked the new logo -- a hand punctured by holes. Very good for healthcare, I thought.
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Date: 2005-05-17 03:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 07:19 pm (UTC)Now, of course, I'm left trying to remember the original TLA for OptiMed. I keep thinking ESS, but that's wrong. (It's a product I worked on at Intermetrics.)
Lordy, thinking about that project does bring me back. The original incarnation of that remains the greatest software debacle I've ever been involved with...
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Date: 2005-05-17 03:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 03:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 03:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 07:20 pm (UTC)Altria
Date: 2005-05-18 12:19 am (UTC)Well, Altria's a special case, since they were trying to escape brand recognition...
Actually, meaningless names have long been important for transnational companies. Bite The Wax Tadpole!
Next up
Date: 2005-05-17 03:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 04:19 pm (UTC)You may think Sup3r Co. looks silly as a name now, but it's hot with the kids...
More trends I'm glad to see go: Foo.com (my previous employ wasted ~$300k on a rebranding from X to X.com); eWhatever; iWhatever; lowerCaseInitial, in general; and anyone else who insists on having their *logo* be their *name*.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 07:28 pm (UTC)My favorite example of this is "Amazing.net". It's the porn store next to my comic book shop. And yes, that's what the sign on the front reads, in big letters...
iWhatever
This one is still with us and will be for a while, as a carryover from the iPod.
Of course, we had a near-miss on this. The original name for our product ASAP was "iTap", for no particular reason except that the product designer thought it sounded good. Fortunately, we were saved by a sudden influx of better sense, and that became simply the codename for the first release. It's still the top-level namespace of the product, though.
(You can learn much about a product's history by looking at its namespaces. The base namespace for all of the games I worked on at Looking Glass was "cam", and that had nothing to do with us working in Cambridge. Rather, the original name for Thief was "Dark Camelot", back when they thought that the zombie swordfighting was going to be the core of the gameplay, and the namespace was the last vestige of that, years later.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 11:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-18 02:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-18 12:17 am (UTC)Yep. When Endeca was founded, the working name for the company was Optigrab (from the glasses handle Steve Martin invents in The Jerk); we have a lot of "opti-" names in our codebase.
It's worse when the name gets exposed to the outside world. Qualcomm's BREW API (platform for writing apps to run on cellphones) has names prefixed with "AE_" (I think). Turns out it's a lightly productized version of the API they were using in-house, called Application Environment, and marketing didn't give them time to make changes before they released it. So the namespace leaks the product's major weakness: that it's an in-house library that was never meant for use by third parties. (Marketing, of course, fixed it later by retronaming BREW to BREW Application Execution Environment.)
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Date: 2005-05-18 12:46 am (UTC)Endeca
Date: 2005-05-18 01:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-18 02:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 07:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 07:46 pm (UTC)Like, if you want to talk about Ebay, you can't just talk about it, you have to at least spell it eBay and possibly ebaY. It was obnoxious with LATEX, and it's still obnoxious now...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-17 08:13 pm (UTC)Capitalization
Date: 2005-05-19 12:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-18 12:35 am (UTC)Not for long, though--predictive text has already made SMSspeak obsolete. It'll hang on as a fashion for a while, but that'll end if companies start using it to much--nobody wants to be associated with corporate poseurs.
My previous employer was named Incentive Systems--they started when nobody else was in the product space, and they needed a descriptive name. Then they started getting competition, and competitors started describing themselves as selling "incentive systems", at which point Incentive Systems decided it needed a new name.
So they hired a consultant to suggest a name that would be distinctive, but without being completely new, so that customers would realize it was the same company. $100K of consulting fees later, they settled on "Centiv". The VP of Marketing told us that there was a company called "Centiv", but that was OK, because they weren't in the same sort of business (they sold "signs for liquor stores", she told us--turned out they were broader than that), so here was no trademark risk. The other company already had "centiv.com", but we'd just take "centivinc.com" (even though we weren't formally changing the company name to Centiv, Inc.; we would be Incentive Systems, Inc., doing business as Centiv).
Well. Not surprisingly, our customers, when told we were now Centiv, tried to send mail to user@centiv.com; when that bounced, some of them would send mail to postmaster@centiv.com. So the people at the real Centiv, Inc., started seeing these strange messages, and quickly figured out what was going on. They threatened a trademark suit; rather than go to court over a name that was an obvious failure, Incentive switched to Centive, registered centive.com, and threw out all the Centiv-branded stuff they'd had printed up.
Shortly thereafter, the VP of Marketing "left to pursue other interests".
(no subject)
Date: 2005-05-18 03:27 am (UTC)Maybe it was the same VP of Marketing. Ours was also drummed out of the company, in a ceremony that involved the lead programmer (a 40ish, slightly rotund gentleman) skipping around the office singing, "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead!"
It was that kind of company, in the end.