Discussion on:

20 worst-named tech products, ever

I was in the CEO's office a good few years ago to discuss my future now they were closing the company that I had helped build over more than a decade and had been flushed down the tube by new management....

...and somewhere in the conversation I asked about one of the products of another company in the group - a DECT phone. I guess the guy who pitched the idea was either speaking in an American accent or had a bad sense of humour, anyway I said "Who on earth decided to call one of our products the Uranus?"

From the ensuing silence I kind of figured out whose idea it was.....

Perhaps if you're saying the Pentax * was a goofy name, you shouldn't have a picture of a Samsung phone?

Not really a game-changer, and hardly as stupid as "Google". You're just used to it.

edit: Some of those names are pretty bad, but the rest are about average. OTOH, you can throw in about any name which starts with a lowercase "i" or has "Live" in it.

the "iLive"

Or the favorite of Big Brother fans (tch!), the sanitary utility with a built in webcam: the "iDump Live"

Google does have the advantage of being extremely easy to pronounce and also to spell correctly after hearing it. To be fair, I think I was using "search" dot com at the time. Just looking at "Cuil", I would have to guess at it and depending on how it's pronounced the spelling might not be so intuitive.
Toatally agree on the lower case "i" nonsense, it's long past cute but I'm used to it. Just thinking, I don't own or use anything with a small "i" prefix.

I'm with you there. I always say that I'm anti-i

I was an iPro with my iPaq from Compaq (and later from HP) until the iMac or whatever i* came out...

I forget the word but it was originally to represent an uncountable number of pieces of information... and then someone switched a few letters to make it Google. Maybe due to the ridiculous Pam Anderson T-shirt pattern! :-P

Names of items don't have to really be liked, do they? I would never name a child Frank, or Giusseppe, or Alonzo, or Harold... but it's really irrelevant... as irrelevant and disappointing as this article...

A number represented by a one with one hundred zeroes to its right, or ten raised to the one hundredth power. Not to be confused with a 'googolplex', or ten raised to the one googolth power.

And googleplex is a misspelling of googolplex.

And probably why Google has the "did you mean..." search result, assuming you had misspelt something.

I wouldn't care much for it spelt the other way, either. It has never said "search engine" to me.

So Google was named for the number googol, and not Barney Google? Hey, it could have had something to do with Barney Google's googley eyes.

How do you spell Google, anyway?? Every time I search for something, there is a different amount of "O's" in it!!!!

Or, perhaps, loooooool.

Yeah, not the best name, maybe, but hardly atrocious. The search engine is a decent alternative, though, and the naming is following the pattern set by Google - not directly implying search at all in the product name. Like Mahalo, Clusty/Yippy - whatever they call it now, Ixquick, ODP, or even specialized engines like Wolfram.

Because people, it is assumed I guess, like product names and not descriptions.

In other news, I just figured out last month the Skydrive is named as it is because we are to associate "sky" with "the cloud". Which seems to me now to be one of the least stupid names MS has come up with. Then again, they can't seem to pick one name for a service and stick with it.

Which reminds me: Bing. WTH is that about?

BING = Becasue Its Not Google!

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All any of these companies had to do was walk around their offices and get 10 people to read the proposed name aloud. If one person says it funny, dump the name.

There's a quite good software audio synthesizer called Z3TA. I suppose they thought people would look at it and think "ZETA," but I bet I'm not the only one who reads it, "ZeeThreeTa."

Rule one: Never use a name that contains characters other than letters of the alphabet.

What you and I may consider "alphabet" someone else may not. It's one
way that I filter for spam in email...I don't read Japanese, no Cryllic...
emails in those "alphabets" go to the spam basket.

refers to the visual ugliness overload of the device: it is such a burden on the sensory system that any sane person reaches for the Mute ki... can't handle any sound when eyes are bleeding.

My best friend worked for a guy who named his business Whagaa. (This was just outside Silicon Valley in California from a white guy who only speaks English, so there can be no "foreign language" excuse.) It was supposed to be involved in small video devices, but you couldn't even get to a device when your eyes are bleeding from the company name.

The first time I got a press release from a company named TaTa Technologies, I thought it was a joke. Even now that I know who they are (global company in Engineering and PLM), I still snicker and cry 'Save the Ta-Ta's!' every time I get an email from them.

In Montreal, near a downtown highway, they have a large building displaying their name. The problem is that in French Quebecer it means stupid or perhaps moron... So that's a few million of us mystified or laughing on highway 10.

The Italian kitchen appliance manufacturer SMEG. "Smeg" means icky in a sort of body-fluid kind of a way, as popularised by TV cult space sitcom Red Dwarf.