The Stories Behind Big Brandnames

 

 

There are many companies and brands whose names have been the result of strange circumstances. Here is a look at a few:

 

Mercedes-Benz:

Mercedes - a Spanish girl's name meaning 'grace' - was the name of the daughter born in 1889 to the Austrian businessman, Emil Jellinek. The first Mercedes, a Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (DMG) vehicle fitted with a new age engine, a 35hp racing car, was delivered to Jellinek on December 22,1900. The car was developed by Wilhelm Maybach, the chief engineer at DMG. Mercedes was lodged as a trade name in 1902 and legally registered on September 26. From June, 1903, Emil Jellinek obtained permission to call himself Jellinek Mercedes, commenting, "This is probably the first time that a father has taken his daughter's name."

 

Adobe Systems:

The name of this billion -dollar plus imaging, design and document technology company, which was founded in 1982 by current cochairmen Chuck Geschke and John Warnock (they left Xerox PARC to further develop and commercialise the PostScript page description language), came from the Adobe Creek that ran behind the company's original offices in Mountain View, California.

 

Apple Computers:

A lot of people wonder where the name Apple Computer came from, as it is a rather unusual name for a computer company. Co-founder Steve Jobs came up with the name in early 1976. At the time, he was often visiting and working on a small farm that friends of his owned. It was a hippie commune where Steve spent a few months of the year. When he returned from one of those stays, he told fellow co-founder Steve Wozniak about his idea. Jobs probably was working on apple plantages. Or it was a tribute to Apple Records, the music label of the Beatles. Wozniak knew instantly that they were going to have copyright problems with Apple Records, but as they were unable to find a name that sounded better than Apple Computer, the name was chosen. Wozniak's worries were to be justified. Apple Compute Inc. was sued by Apple Records over copyright infringement in 1989.

 

Cisco Systems:

Cisco is not an acronym as is popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco, near where the networking equipment giant is based. In the early days, when the founders (Cisco Systems was founded in 1984 by married couple Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner, who were employees on the computer operations staff at Stanford University) were looking for names, they always came up with those that were denied. Eventually someone suggested "cisco", with a lowercase "c." (Another company named CISCO already existed at that time.) The name with the lowercase "c" continued to be used for a long time, until it was capitalised due to problems getting the lowercase "c" right in publications.

 

Compaq:

Compaq Computer Corporation was founded in February, 1982, by Rod Canion, Him Harris and Bill Murto, three senior managers from semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments, who invested $1,000 apiece to form the company. The name of the company was formed by using Comp, for computer, and Paq to denote a small integral object.

 

Corel:

The name was derived from the founder's name Dr Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

 

Google:

The word Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938. Sirotta was inspired by his daughter to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organise the immense amount of information available on the web. The most popular search engine on the web (it handles upwards of 80 per cent of all internet searches) was originally named Googol, but after founders - Stanford University graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page - presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'. The first office of the company was set up in September 1998 in Mountain View, California.

 

Hobmail:

Hotmail, the largest web mail provider in the world, was founded by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia in 1995, and was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, the US Independence Day - symbolically representing freedom from internet service providers. Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "html" - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

 

Hewlett-Packard:

Partners Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

 

Intel:

Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

 

Lotus:

Mitchell Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana' . Kapor used to be a teacher of Maharshi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation. Lotus was taken over by Big Blue for $3.5 billion in July, 1995.

 

Microsoft:

Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the hyphen was removed later on.

 

Motorola:

Founder Paul Galvin came up with the name Motorola when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. A number of early companies making phonographs, radios, and other audio equipment in the early 20th century used the suffix" -ola", the most famous being the Victrola. Motorola started as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928. The name of the company was changed to Motorola in 1947, but the word had been used as a trademark since the 1930s.

 

Oracle:

Lawrence J Ellison was working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). Ellison, along with former co-workers Bob Miner and Ed Oates, had started a consultancy called Software Development Laboratories in 1977. They called their finished product Oracle, after the code name of a CIA-funded project they had worked on at a previous employer, Ampex. In 1979, SDL changed its company name to Relational Software, Inc, and in 1983, changed the name to Oracle Corporation.

 

Sony:

The name was coined by founder Akio Morita. It originated from the Latin word 'sonus,' meaning sound, and 'sonny', a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster. The company was founded in May, 1946, as Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering with about 20 employees. Today it has $63 billion in sales and nearly 190,000 employees.

 

Sun:

Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy (the current CEO) to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a Unix-based OS for the computer.

 

Yahoo!:

The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they liked this definition. It started out as 'Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web' but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is also an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The "yet another" phrasing goes back at least to the Unix utility yacc, whose name is an acronym for "yet another compiler compiler". But Yang and Filo insist they selected the name because they liked Jonathan Swift's definition of a Yahoo. Yahoo! Itself first resided on Yang's student workstation 'Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.

 

Acknowledgement : The above history of brandnames has been compiled with help from  

the www.theapplemuseum.com, www.mercedes-benz.com and other internet sources