Businesses seem to use the names of their products as weapons. A well-chosen name can force you to connect the
product with almost any image or concept. I deem a product name to be deliberatley confusing and generic when it
seeks to appropriate meanings that make it more difficult to think clearly. Businesses use these when they want
to subtly
convince you that their product or service is the original, best
or only
alternative. It is an insidious technique, because it
makes it difficult to talk about the alternatives by
messing
with the language you might use to do this. It's easy
to get snared up in an
Abbott and Costello routine.
Examples
"Word"
You can't talk about word processors without using the word "word". Microsoft's word processor is called
Word.
Word. See
how, by the name alone, Word sounds like the original,
standard word processor. All others now sound like
derivative
products:
Word Perfect,
AbiWord etc.
"DB2"
DB2 is
IBM's major
RDBMS- a database to you and me. It's a competitor
of
Oracle. Databases are often refered to simply as "DBs", unsurprisingly.
"Windows"
Most
GUIs (read; just about everything you've ever
used or seen) present
information in
movable, resizeable, stackable regions of the display.
Such are called windows. The systems that use them,
and other
supporting elements are known as WIMPs- windows, icons,
menus, pointer. Systems that use windows include
MacOS, BeOS,
AmigaOS,
X11, and ummm, Windows. Microsoft do it
again! This time they might have bitten off more than
they can
chew. Chief U.S. District Judge John Coughenour,
presiding over a case where MS is trying to contest a
product called
Lindows remarked that there are
"serious questions regarding whether 'Windows' is a
non-generic name and thus eligible for the protections
of federal trademark law".
".NET"
There's more.
.NET is a new set of technologies,
again from Microsoft, that constitute a jumped-up virtual machine and an associated branding extravaganza. It is being pushed as a solution for
Web Services- the delivery of application components over the web. ".net" is also a
TLD that appears at the
end of
domain names on the Internet. The waters are
muddied again. Now, you can't talk easily about how to
deploy network computing without thinking of the new MS
technologies. Also, you can now start new sentences
with a period/
full stop!
"Palm"
"Palmtop", like "Laptop" and "Desktop" used to be a generic name for a computer form-factor. Now it's associated
with a particular palmtop platform. The other main platform has to use the name Pocket.
"Your Communications"
Your Communications (www.yourcommunications.co.uk) is a British company (part of the
United Utilities Group) that provides voice, data,
Internet and mobile connectivity to businesses, mainly
in the North and Midlands of England. Imagine trying to
tell your boss about what service providers they might
go for.
"You can go for BT, C&W or Your Communications."
"My
communications?"
You are given a false sense of ownership and attachment
to the firm, just by their name. Sneaky.
"My Computer"
In a similar vein to the above, really. This is the icon on a Windows desktop that opens a
window containing all the drives on the PC. As
dev.null points out, this paradoxically points to
your computer. You could see this pronounal confusion as a charming attempt to empower the user and give them a sense of control. But, somebody at MS had to type in the word "my" knowing that it would appear on the vast majority of the world's PCs. That guy
0nz j00.