How 10 Famous Technology Products Got Their Names
From iPod and BlackBerry to Twitter and Wikipedia, we take a look at the processes and people who came up with the names for these iconic tech products.
By Thomas Wailgum
Coming up with a great technology product or service is only half the battle these days. Creating a name for said product that is at once cool but not too cool or exclusionary, marketable to both early adopters and a broader audience, and, of course, isn't already in use and protected by various trademarks and copyright laws is difficult—to say the least.
The makers of these 10 tech products—the iPod, BlackBerry, Firefox, Twitter, Windows 7, ThinkPad, Android, Wikipedia, Mac OS X and the "Big Cats," and Red Hat Linux—all have displayed certain amounts marketing savvy, common sense and fun-loving spirit in settling on their products' names. Here are the intriguing, surprising and sometimes predictable accounts of their creation.
ThinkPad: Simplicity Wins Out
The venerable line of PC notebooks rolled onto the scene in 1992. While the concept was spot on, there was turmoil at
IBM as to what to call it. IBM's pen-computing group
wanted to keep it simple; they liked ThinkPad. But IBM's corporate naming committee didn't—it didn't have a number, and every IBM product
had to have a number, and how would ThinkPad translate into other languages? Due to the chutzpah of the IBMer who unveiled it, ThinkPad won out, and it was a huge hit for IBM, which eventually sold it to
Lenovo in 2005.
Image credit: André Karwath / Wikipedia
