Re: Principles for new name

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Inge Wallin <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Point 5 would be that the name needs to be available in a legal sense. That
would exclude e.g. BlueOffice. Completely artificial name have the advantage
that they are not used yet. Of all points that is that is the only rule that
needs to be kept.

Another things that also matter is pronunciation. Best example of the KDE
world is Kopete where almost everybody pronounces it differently. There can
be ambiguity in the name though. We have that for Krita which is used as
Kri-ta and Krit-ta (I use both ;) In Calligra I could think of Cal-ligra and
Calli-gra.

I like Calligra. I think without the "phy" it will not be associated with
calligraphy. The name is rather generic, but I don't think that we can find
a name that fits every application and suits everybody as the application
range from KWord to Krita to KSpread to Kexi is simply to big.

For the name decisions we should decide the application names by the
maintainers/teams of that application. For the suite name I would suggest
that everyone can suggest one name and we than put everything to a vote.
Every name should be allowed unless there are legal problem or it includes
"Office" which we already decided not to use.

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