Some industry people are now referring to the new System i5 as "System i" (without the "5"). I don't know why they're calling it that instead of "iSeries." After all, we only just recently stopped calling it "AS/400" and started using the "iSeries" nomenclature. I figure five to seven years from now, we'll get around to calling it "System i5," but by then, IBM will have changed the name at least two more times.
There's a Web site, SignGenerator.com, that allows you to build a customized image of those popular Dummies books. So after the last round of IBM name changes, I thought I'd go play around at the SignGenerator.com Web site. In doing so, I came up with a great idea for a new book, but I can't seem to find a publisher. I call it Computer Naming for Dummies—A Guide for the Rest of Us. I even created the cover artwork (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Cozzi has the cover for his new book ready for print.
Obviously, there's something I don't understand. I understand that if you've called your product something unusual or something that is similar to another product, it can create problems or cause confusion—or sometimes it can actually help in the product's acceptance.
Take AJAX for instance. Until Jesse James Garrett referred to the XmlHttpRequest object in JavaScript as "AJAX," people didn't realize what anyone was talking about. Now, it seems like everybody wants some AJAX.
AS/400 was an OK name back in the late 1980s. Today, you've got to come up with some really cool, trendy name before someone else does and hang onto it. System/38 and System/34 were also OK names. Today, System i5 seems like an interesting choice; i5/OS is also interesting. I've been a long-time advocate of renaming OS/400 to the name "Blue" and marketing it as BLUE. After all, people are suggesting that we move to Linux, so why not get people to start asking to move to BLUE? I mean, unless IBM no longer wants to be in the operating system business, the marketing folks should consider this idea. And in fact, even if they want to get out of the OS business, they could much more easily sell off a product built around an OS named "BLUE" than they could "OS/400 or "i5/OS."
Two things contributed to the idea of BLUE: 1) IBM is still occasionally referred to as "Big Blue," and 2) it is a name that my three-year-old grandson can pronounce. Since I first came up with the BLUE idea, American Express has come out with "Blue from American Express." So apparently it wasn't too dumb an idea.
I think the three-year-old pronunciation test should be applied when naming something, but I am certainly no whiz when it comes to product naming myself, although I think I did come up with some good ones over the years, including Visual RPG, Midrange, Q38, iSockets, and RPG xTools. However, since publishing RPG xTools, I've learned that many products out there have the term "XTOOLS" as part of their name (but not in our market).
I think the problem with AS/400-oriented products is that the people creating the name selections for the powers that be are trying to be like Microsoft. Take "WebSphere." It is arguably a really cool name, yet IBM somehow managed to turn this very cool, unique product identification into the most obscure term in computer history. The funny thing is that when some people say, "I'm going to install WebSphere," they actually believe the person they say that to knows what they're talking about. The term "WebSphere" only means "IBM software." So saying "I'm going to install WebSphere" is the same as saying "I'm going to install SEU and PDM."
Look at Microsoft's product names:
- Word
- Office
- Excel
- PowerPoint
- Visual Studio
- .NET
Look at Apple's product names:
- iTunes
- iPod
- iPhoto
- GarageBand
- iMovie
Now look at some of IBM's product names....
Oh, forget it; I can't think of any except WDSC, and I think even that acronym has changed to WDSCi.
Putting "WebSphere" in front of virtually every software product IBM sells effectively diminishes the identity of those product names.
Look at what Ford did. It changed the name of virtually every car it makes so that they all begin with the letter "F" (like in the word "Ford"). The company now has Focus, Fusion, Freestyle, Five Hundred, and so on. Now, nobody knows what car is what, including most of their own mechanics who work on them. Starting next year, they're going to another naming scheme. Interesting...a big American company changing the name of existing products rather than creating new ones or substantially updating the old ones so they contain the features people want and are priced at a level people want. Sounds familiar.
If IBM marketing is hell bent on including the term "WebSphere" (or "SAA") as the prefix to every software product line, then they need to shorten up their product names. If they're worried about how the name will translate into non-English languages, then they should simply change the name of the product in the affected countries. For example, if they call something "WebSphere Server Executive," and that name translates into something like "Kill Your Spider's House" in some obscure dialect of Portuguese, then rename the product in that country.
As a rule of thumb, if I have to stop and take a breath when pronouncing a product name or "acronymize" the product name because I can't pronounce it, then the name is too long.
The other thing IBM needs to stop doing is changing the names of products every time a new executive gets promoted into a position of product ownership. Can you image if Microsoft had changed the name of Word three to five times over the last 15 years or so?
Well, I suppose if someone came up with good names in the first place, you wouldn't need to change them so often, now would you?
Bob Cozzi is a programmer/consultant, writer/author, and software developer of the RPG xTools, a popular add-on subprocedure library for RPG IV. His book The Modern RPG Language has been the most widely used RPG programming book for nearly two decades. He, along with others, speaks at and runs the highly-popular RPG World conference for RPG programmers.
Bob Cozzi is a programmer/consultant, writer/author, and software developer. His popular RPG xTools add-on subprocedure library for RPG IV is fast becoming a standard with RPG developers. His book The Modern RPG Language has been the most widely used RPG programming book for more than a decade. He, along with others, speaks at and produces the highly popular RPG World conference for RPG programmers.
MC Press books written by Robert Cozzi available now on the MC Press Bookstore.
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