A post about naming

Naming things is quite hard. See, I didn’t find a name for this blog post. And apparently if you get a child, you’ll realize how much people you actually hate when choosing a name.

Now some companies do it great by just naming stuff like it is. Or if they don’t, they at least stick to it.

A good name is the iPad. Everyone knows what an iPad is. Another name is Excel. You don’t know what Excel is by looking at its name, but Microsoft stuck to it through the years.

Now there are other companies, like Google. The product was originally named Chromecast and the API was named Google Cast (other products can use that API). They then said that OEMs had to call it Google Cast if they use that feature in their products. Now, they changed it again and it’s called Chromecast built-in. Now the app on your phone, for the actual Chromecast device, was originally called Chrome Cast, then Google Cast and now Google Home.

Enough of that, you can read the full story here. At least its name implies something related to movies and theaters and the rest goes from that.

Now I recently bought one of those 21:9 monitors from Asus - the ROG PG348Q. It has a little LED at the bottom of the stand that casts the ROG logo to your desk. I didn’t actually intend to use it but I didn’t even find it in the menus. I even thought, maybe it’s disabled somehow because I didn’t connect it properly.

Turns out, this thing is called “LIGHT IN MOTION”, What the actual fuck? It has no motion, it just looks like the ROG logo with some weird robotic stuff around it. Anything like “ROG logo light” would have been so much better.

So please, if you’re a product developer, give it a good name.