The whimsical rationale behind tech's best branding
CIO has posted a pretty good feature (at least for perusal during the standards usually set by groggy, early-morning coffee slurping) about how ten famous technology products were named. Some of them are pretty interesting, like Red Hat Linux taking its name from a goofy red LaCrosse hat the co-founder liked to wear, or the rationale behind the BlackBerry, which aims to parlay the stress of the words "business email" into "sweet addictiveness":
The consultancy pushed RIM founders away from the word "e-mail," which research shows can raise blood pressure. Instead, they looked for a name that would evoke joy and somehow give feelings of peace. After someone made the connection that the small buttons on the device resembled a bunch of seeds, Lexicon's team (see profile) explored names like strawberry, melon and various vegetables before settling on blackberry—a word both pleasing and which evoked the black color of the device.
On the other hand, some of them are just lame. Wikipedia is a port manteau of wiki and encyclopedia? OS X is really just "Operating System 10?" Oh, do tell! My propellor beanie is positively whizzing, gents.
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I read that Apple first used the word "iPod" for a Mac demonstration booth at a convention, and then recycled it for their portable audio player.
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Better a mundane name that actually means something than some idiotic neologism that sounds like something that your 9-month-old niece babbled when she was loading up her diaper. (See innumerable examples of startups that ended up as craters on the dot-bomb landscape.)
LaCrosse or not, I remember running into Mark Ewing at Unix World in 94 or 95 and him giving me a red CD of an early RHL. Cant remember for sure if he was wearing the hat but I think he was.