
Original Microsoftie on how Windows got its name - mikeyanderson
http://thehmccompany.com/2015/06/19/windows-is-named-windows-but-why/
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PhilWright
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.

~~~
jlarocco
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.

~~~
mytochar
> 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.

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EdSharkey
Edge should have been called "Internet" or "Web" or "Browser".

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.

~~~
mikeyanderson
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.

~~~
sdrothrock
At the time it was made, "Internet Explorer" was pretty synonymous with its
function.

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crystalmeph
Reading this on an iPad, and the bottom of the article is completely obscured
by the dark background.

~~~
nness
Same experience on desktop. It's not great.

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scintill76
Original source mentioned at top seems to be several comments from
[https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/ButWhy/Word-is-named-Word--
B...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/ButWhy/Word-is-named-Word--But-Why) . 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.

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galago
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.

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dang
"Bandwidth Limit Exceeded". Is there another URL for this?

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pokoleo
Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:syBZyVf...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:syBZyVfD-Z4J:thehmccompany.com/2015/06/19/windows-
is-named-windows-but-why/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

~~~
dang
Thanks!

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Bud
If you're going to rewrite the headline, could you do it without the "it's"
typo?

~~~
mikeyanderson
I suck at grammar. I use grammar.ly but I don't think it flagged it. I would
love to get rid of grammar :)

