How 10 popular tech companies got their names

How 10 popular tech companies got their names

You might be surprised to find out how some of these global names originated.

BY JEFFREY BAUSCH

What’s in a name? For these 10 companies, a lot; billions and billions of dollars as a matter of fact. These are global, some would even argue, universal, companies that make very calculated decisions on every move they make.

At one point, though, they were all start-ups. And when you’re a start-up, you tend to be a bit more, how do you say, carefree, with the decisions you make. Decisions like coming up with a name for your company.

Here are some head-scratching snippets on how 10 of the world’s largest tech companies came up with their household names.

Apple

Before starting the company, founder Steve Jobs worked during summer at an apple farm. He also very much admired the Beatles’ record label “Apple.” Jobs suggested calling the company Apple Computers to partner Steve Wozniak and the duo decided that if they couldn’t come up with a better name by the end of the day, that they would just go ahead with Apple.

Cisco Systems

As opposed to being an acronym, which many believe it to be, Cisco is actually short for the city in which it was founded: San Francisco .

Google

Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page originally meant the name to be a joke that played off the amount of information that the search engine would be able to search. They used the name “Googol” and changed it after they presented the project to an angel investor who made a check out to “Google”.

Hewlett-Packard

Bill Hewlett and David Packard actually flipped a coin to decide whose name would show up first on their company.

Intel

Founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore originally wanted to call their company “Moore Noyce”, but that name was already taken by a hotel chain. Also, it was somewhat a homophone for “more noise” which, obviously, would be a bad name for an electronics company.

Noyce and Moore instead settled on Intel as an acronym for int egrated el ectronics.

Microsoft

Bill Gates came up with this as an acronym to represent his company’s devotion to micro computer soft ware. It was originally called “Micro-Soft”, but after some discussion, it was decided that the hyphen should be dropped.

Motorola

Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company, Galvin Manufacturing Company, was commissioned to start manufacturing radios for cars. It was a popular trend, at the time, among the audio equipment maker community, to use “ola” at the end of their products. Knowing this makes Motorola a bit of an obvious choice.

Oracle

Larry Ellison, Ed Oates, and Bob Miner were brought in to work on a consulting project with the CIA. The project, referred to as “Oracle”, was to develop a system that gave answers to all questions using newly written SQL code by IBM. After some time, the project was terminated by the CIA. Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started, though, keeping the same name and going on to create the relational database management system (RDBMS) engine.

Sony

The name Sony came from the Latin word “sonus”, which means sound, and “sonny”, the slang term used to refer to bright young children. It was a play on the young founders working in sound and vision. It was also chosen because the name itself is easy to pronounce in multiple languages.

Yahoo!

Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo chose “Yahoo” because they considered themselves yahoos, as per Jonathan Swift’s usage of the word in his book “Gulliver’s Travels”; that is, a person who is repulsive in appearance/action and barely human. ■

Via: TheChive.com