A rose by any other name...? Not in the high-tech world

The Internet has afforded software developers many opportunities the last few years -- including the freedom to name your firm "Yahoo," if that's what you want.

But for many high-tech developers these days, naming a new company or product is an exercise in patience as much as marketing and creativity. When 848 names using "net" were filed with the U.S. Trademark Office last year, and 459 names using "power," most likely the one you want is already taken, or sounds too much like your competitor's.

"Naming is very competitive," said Susan White, manager of brand marketing for the Compaq Computer Corp., which resorted to invention for its own name. "You've got a lot of people vying for the same names." Like baby names, high-tech names follow the fashion of the times. Meet someone named Judy and you can almost bet she was born in the 1950s, along with Judy Jetson and thousands of other Judys. Log on to the Internet today, and you'll meet InterNIC, Interspace and InterOp; Netscape, Netopia and Netlogic; Connect Inc. and Interconnect, and WorldLink, MagicLink and MindLink. When the AT&T spinoff, Lucent Technologies, began its search for a name, the company considered names using "net" and "com," as well as names that could form an acronym. Landor Associates of San Francisco, one of the nation's leading coiners of corporate names, came up with more than 700 suggestions. "At least 80 percent to 90 percent of the names we generated were unavailable," or already spoken for, said Russell Meyer, director of naming for Landor (which is named after the firm's founder, Walter Landor). Lucent, the eventual winner, came from the same root as lucid, Meyer said, and was chosen by the company for what was seen as its "positive connotation." Starting with a list of 700 possible names is not uncommon in the corporate identity business. Typically, with the help of a consultant (who might charge in the neighborhood of $100,000), a company quickly slashes the list, much of it computer-generated, to a dozen or so candidates. Compaq, for example, took a full year, working with the consulting firm of Master-McNeil Inc., to come up with a name for its new notebook computer. Working from a short list that included Explorer, Jazz, Roadster and Quest, all of them names that denote motion -- and all taken -- Compaq finally chose Armada. "Armada came clean," White said. Corporate naming follows certain patterns, naming specialists like Meyer say. A whimsical or irreverent name can suggest a radical break from old ways (Yahoo, Excite, Hot Java or the Web magazine Suck). Another common approach is to invent a new word from an existing, familiar word. In the 1970s and early 1980s, companies combined words to form names that sounded technical or scientific, like Intel, an abbreviation of Integrated Electronics, and Microsoft, a merger of microcomputer and software. Perhaps the most common practice is, of course, to use a simple name that describes the company's business, like "Software Development Corp.," or one that includes a key descriptive word like "net" or "link." But according to naming specialists, those names get used up the minute a new market segment is identified. And the approach has its own liability: the names all start to sound alike. "It would be like everybody calling a toothpaste something with `paste' in it," said Joe Kraus, a founder of Excite Inc., an Internet search engine and Web review service that last year changed its name from "Architext." "Over time, consumers have trouble discriminating." The other issue that corporations have to consider today is whether the name is available as an Internet domain. Excite had hoped to use the name "Bull's Eye," only to discover someone had already registered the domain bullseye.com. "We couldn't get the guy with the URL to sell it to us at any price," Kraus said. The company finally settled on Excite from a short list that included Ferret, Scout and the descriptive NetPoke. Long ago Apple Computer and its founding team of self-described "pirates" turned naming convention on its head. In the heyday of the IBM PC and the TRS-80, Apple named its first Macintosh model the Lisa -- after Steven Jobs' daughter. Apple itself was named to represent something "healthy, fresh and natural," and because Jobs was fond of health foods. Irreverence now has found a ready home in the Internet business. But even names that seem arbitrary and whimsical are quickly getting used up. "I thought of tons of names, but most of them were taken," said Kim Polese, the founder of Marimba, a company developing software using the Java programming language. Eventually, Marimba took its name from the dance. "I was looking for something dynamic and fun." Polese also led the team that came up with the name Java while leading that project at Sun Microsystems (Sun was an acronym for Stanford University Network). "Sure, we're marketing to nerds," Polese said, "but I think nerds like to be marketed to like everybody else."

Copyright 1996
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