Who is responsible for naming your products?

As I started to play with Sharepoint I wanted to find more information about it on the Internet. I used Google and entered the acronym MOSS to find more and was surprised with results I got. Then I realized (haha all you English speaking guys) that it could mean something else as well.

After that I recall one of our product we called Conman and after a few years one customer asked us – Why you named it like this? We didn’t get it at first and then he told us that it means something like thief in English. Well, for us it meant Contact Manager which make completely sense and we didn’t try to find what else could it mean.

So, do you have some special team responsible for naming your product or do you name them just based on their purpose or developers themselves responsible for it? Do you use a code names and are they funny or not really? Do you check them for secret meaning or similarities? And should you care about it or is it just more fun?

1 komentář

  1. This is a good point. One of the things that IBM traditinally has gotten yelled at about was it’s dead dull naming for it’s products. My understanding for that was exactly your point – coming up with names that are clear, translatable, and non-offensive. Being IBM, of course, they have battalions of lawyers to assist them in making the ‚best‘ naming choices.
    Of course, as we can see, being descriptive and completely non-offensive almost assuredly means, boring, dull, and long.
    OTH, since we have Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services, I always thought we should also have the Lotus Integrated Collaboration Experience….
    😎

Leave a Reply