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Somewhere between the geekiness of the late 1980s and the greediness of the late 1990s, technology turned "cool." In the national consciousness, George Jetson was replaced by Max Headroom; Mad Max superceded by the Matrix (though a leather-clad Mel Gibson, no matter how sweaty, will always remain cool to some of us. Mel, if you're reading this, feel free to e-mail me).
The network industry was suddenly where the rich, hip and happening folks hung out. The type of marketing genius that had previously gravitated to, say, the small appliance industry or car manufacturers moved in on technology. True, I never understood all of their ploys, such as mass consumer advertising. (Why run a Super Bowl ad for a $100,000 server or a $25,000 router? Do the masses really shop for such products like they shop for beer? Do the masses shop for high-end network gear at all?)
Also see: Uncool names and Famous product code names
But those hip marketing minds do deserve applause for overhauling how technology products are named. Seems to me that engineers, with their love of numbers, apparently ran the product-naming show for many a year. So you had your IBM 650, your Wang VS-16000 850 and let's not forget your Cisco 2500. The whoopee naming innovation in those days was random capitalization and/or punctuation combined with the wild abandonment of spaces between words (like the IBM AS/400 or Digital Equipment's OpenVMS ).
But when technology became cool, so did a slew of product names.
Security products, it seems, sport the most creative names - particularly intrusion-detection systems (IDS), according to an informal survey of a few dozen Network World readers.
Respondents named IDS product Beadwindow (from the same-named vendor) as the favorite clever product name. You've got to do a little intellectual digging to "get" the wittiness here. Beadwindow is a military code word for when a radio operator has reliable information from a friendly source that the enemy has breached the radio network. Clever, but complicated. More to the point is IDS product Manhunt, created by Nexland and acquired by Symantec, with one respondent suggesting, "I bet they would sell more to IT geeks if they called it Womanhunt."
Other names that respondents said were among the industry's best are, in no particular order: StrokeIt, an open source advanced mouse-gesture recognition program; Skype, an open source Internet telephony product; Kill A Watt, a power-monitoring device from Convenient Gadgets; and Ethereal, an open source real-time network protocol analyzer.
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Copyright 2008 Network World Inc.
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RE: Cool names By dan on August 20, 2007, 9:32 am Reply | Read entire comment need some names.
how about some of george By Anon on September 23, 2008, 2:00 pm Reply | Read entire comment how about some of george carlins names. sprunt; a womens hygiene product or thou shalt not smell; a christian deodorant. these must be worth mentioning.
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