What's in a code name?

A shark fin, that is.

"There's an informal network of who you can get the fin from," says John Power, the marketing manager for the Enterprise Storage Server, who explains that the shark fin is a reference to the product's code name, Shark. "There are closets in IBM offices all over the world with these fins in them," Power says.

One of the most common requests he gets from customers is to assign the plastic fins a part number, so they can be ordered from IBM's product catalogue.

While most technology companies do not have official policies on how they create product code names, they are almost always dreamed up by engineers with the understanding that the code names will be for internal use only. It's assumed the company eventually will develop a name for the product that can be trademarked.

Though larger companies sometimes tell their development teams to pick code names that have not been trademarked - geographical locations or species of fish, for example - engineers typically are given latitude in the names they can use. This is because employers know that a popular code name can help engineering teams build an emotional attachment to the product, says Burt Alper, the founder of Catchword Branding, a consulting firm that provides technology companies with advice on naming products.

Most marketing folks think the code name will be unceremoniously dropped once the company goes public with the product's brand name, Alper says. But some products are the subject of such intense media scrutiny that their code names take on a momentum of their own. And that's where the problems begin.

Take Apple's Power Macintosh 7100. Designed in the early 1990s, it was code-named Sagan as a tip of the hat to the noted astronomer, Carl Sagan. But when Sagan heard that the next version of the Power Mac was going by his family name, he took exception. Before long, Sagan's lawyers were asking Apple to change the 7100's code name. Apple complied, but the product's new code name, BHA, which was widely taken to stand for "Butt-Head Astronomer," did little to appease Sagan. He sued Apple in 1994, and the case eventually was settled out of court.

Even companies that try to steer away from code-name trouble can find themselves in rough waters. For example, Intel has mandated that its engineers code-name products only after geographic locations, which generally cannot be trademarked. But that policy didn't prevent the folks who put on the Tanglewood music festival in western Massachusetts from asking the chip maker to rename its multicore Itanium 2 processor. Last December, Intel changed the product's code name from Tanglewood to Tukwila.

Intel, apparently, was following the same strategy that Alper recommends to his clients. "The counsel we provide is to use code names that are so ridiculous and so ludicrous that you would never consider launching them," he says.