There`s a lot in a name

Some months ago I generally poked fun at odd-sounding company names in the IT industry (and made no friends in the process). This time around, given that it`s silly season, I believe it`s time I made a similar excursion - this time into the realm of the anachronistically named IT company.

Some have tried to steer away from descriptive names here and there, coming up with such beauties as Leaf Wireless, Liquid Thought and Wind River.

Carel Aberts, Technology editor, ITWeb

Iridium Satellite stands out as the funniest one under current scrutiny. Conceived by Motorola, it was named after the element with an atomic weight that corresponds with the number of satellites it expected to have in the sky. In other words, since it expected to need 77 satellites, it went for the cool-sounding Iridium on the periodic table. Today, it apparently has 66 satellites (not counting in-orbit or ground spares). Interestingly, the element with an atomic mass of 66 is Dysprosium, which is sort of neat if you drop the "r".

LAN Design, sold in 2001 to a competitor, Comztek, was really not very well named. At the time of its formation, local area networks (LANs) were probably pretty much the only thing going for the networking arena, but since then there have been MANs, WANs and even PANs. Admittedly, none of these would look any better in front of "Design". Man Design, for example, would seem to belong to a Rocky Horror script.

So Ross Perot, or whoever named EDS (Electronic Data Systems), decided he would immortalise the time in history when we moved from punch cards to other, hipper forms of data. Data was one thing, but ELECTRONIC data - that was wild.

On the subject of LANs, there was once a networking magazine called SA LAN Times. Gamely, it changed its name (and forfeited brand recognition) by changing with the times, to Network Times. I sympathise, because at least it indicates a willingness to admit it was short-sighted.

Computerweek, that place where most IT journalists were made (thanks, guys), was once a weekly. To go with this, they called it Computerweek. (The fact that the name sounds just a little bit like the UK`s Computerweekly was probably very lucky indeed.) Now that it`s a monthly, they added the word "Strategist" to it, which is not a bad word at all, if you look at it, but I can`t help think that it must bug the hell out of them to have to ignore that "week" link.

All right, I know Usko didn`t have much say in this one, because a competitor (Bytes Technology Group) bought the company out. I do, however, think that a spot of re-launch wouldn`t have hurt those bytes-fiends once their darling groups of bits were overtaken by megabytes, gigabytes and petabytes, and made them seem like troglodytes.

On a trip to LA (even I am offered these) I sat next to an analyst who said he was from Forrester. Sly bugger, his name badge said Giga, though (a subsidiary). Before I could think, my mouth let fly, and I said something about the company`s commissioned finding that .Net was cheaper to develop on than Linux. "Oh," he said. "You heard about that. We told our clients they cannot go public with commissioned studies anymore."

But really, my point is that Giga, as in the Bytes example, really has no business with constraining its allusions to grandeur to a specific era in networking, storage or even memory. One thing succeeds another, and all turns to dust in the end.

Other company names that do not reflect what they do anymore include eToys and ETrade. eToys now offers software too, and ETrade also offers banking. When a company decides to do a quick fix by changing its name, often domains are not available anymore. It`s so vital to get the right name right away (it is the better part of branding) that it seems you`re never safe.

Some have tried to steer away from descriptive names here and there, coming up with such beauties as Leaf Wireless, Liquid Thought, Wind River and other nondescripts, but I guess there`s always the worry that serious investors won`t go for your Flying Turtle or Blue Monkey. It seems less risky to leave that for the restaurants in Melville and Observatory.

But this column wouldn`t be fair without taking the mickey out of ourselves. You could argue that ITWeb really should be called ICTWeb these days, given the fast-realising ideal of convergence between computing and communications. But since IP, a computing protocol, will win out as the standard for all computing and comms, I`d say it`s probably safe to assume it will all be IT in the end again.