I made a comprehensive list of the world's greatest brand names and the reason why they were named like that and where the it basically came from. Here are just the few and the most famous:
Adobe - named after Adobe Creek, a river located and ran behind the house of its founder, John Warnock.
Apache - it got its name from 'A PAtCHy' server, a result when its founders applied patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon, in which the program started from. Thus, the name Apache.
Apple Computers - the name came from Steve Jobs' favorite fruit. The issue was he was actually late for filling a name for his business, he threatened his colleagues that if they did not suggest any better name by 5 o'clock, he is going to call the company Apple Computers.
CISCO - short for San Francisco.
Google - it was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. But is was later changed by its founders when they got their cheque after presenting the project to its investors, which was made out to "Google".
Hotmail - its founders formulated the best name for the service that would end with "mail". They settled with Hotmail, originally because it had HTML on it. And it was originally written as HoTMaiL with the uppercasses on it.
HP - its founders, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether they would name the company as 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 (Notes) - Mitch Kapor, who used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'.
Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the dash was later removed.
Motorola - the name came originally from the company Victrola, which manufactures radios for cars and was the where Paul Galvin started.
ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the Central Intelligence Agency. The code name for the project was called Oracle which stands for "One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison".
Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap, with red and white stripes, while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone !
SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the "Systems/Applications/Projects"
SUN - the acronym for Stanford University Network.
Xerox - came from the Greek word "xer" which means dry. The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say "dry", as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying.
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 considered themselves yahoos.
These are just a few but it was fun to know that some of these company names where actually formulated with weird reasons. A proof that indeed technology has a human side.
DISCLAIMER: The following information used was not approved by its founders and I do not own any of these images. The logo is copyrighted by its preceding companies. .
If you have time, go ahead and try it. And just for curiosity, educational and testing (or any other kinds of) purposes, I decided to try it to the universal sentence we all love to type in our grade school. Check it out.
