Principles for new name
Inge Wallin <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.kde.devel.koffice |
|---|---|
| Organization | Lysator Academic Computer Society |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
The time has come to choose on a new name for our software. I'm sure there will be lots of suggestions, some good, some, eh, maybe not optimal. :-) Before we start throwing out suggestions for names, I thought it would be useful to discuss a little about what we want to achieve. Here is my personal view; please add more input. What we are creating now is something that will last a long time. A man teaching me about the advertising industry once said "A new trademark is completely empty. It almost doesn't matter what it is, but it should be simple and easy to remember. The real value comes from what you put into it." This means that whatever name we come up with will eventually be as good as any other, but it should still follow a few principles. The two below are based in science, the rest are my opinion. 1. It should sound friendly. I think we in the KDE community is a bit unlucky here, because K is a very hard letter. K<whatever> just has a slightly unfriendly feel to it. For instance Dolphin is a much friendlier name than Konqueror. Besides, the K names are not really favoured any more. 2. It turns out that companies with a name that begins in A have on average 50% higher revenue than other companies. This is because companies are mostly sorted alphabetically in lists. People often don't have the energy or knowledge to pick the best choice, so they just take something near the beginning. Perhaps we could take advantage of this and have a first letter near the start of the alphabet. (Blue Office would be very good here, but there were other problems with that. Perhaps we could just call it A Office or the A Suite? :-P) 3. I think we should consider calling it <something> Suite instead of <something> Office. This would make it more suitable(!) for Karbon and Krita since they have indicated that their users don't like them to be part of an office package. It would also be easier to enhance the package later with other applications. Maybe something like DigiKam could be part of the Suite(tm) sometimes in the future? (note: this is not a suggestion, just an loose thought) 4. Regarding the individual applications, I think we have two choices: - to call them <name> writer, <name> calc or something generic like that, where <name> is the name we give the entire package. - to give them individual real names. A good example is the applications in Apple iWork: Pages, Numbers and Keynote I would prefer the second, but I'm not strongly in either camp. Then of course there are the other normal considerations like domain names, etc. But PLEASE don't suggest any "funny" names that draw chuckles on an IRC channel but will be dragging us down for all future to come.