Robin Wauters at The Next Web says in his business he comes across “a mountain of poorly executed websites and applications, or startups that have business models that you just know will never bring in a dime of revenue.”
Still, it’s the names he finds really awful. So he’s compiled a list of what he thinks are The 15 dumbest names for Web 2.0 startups. Here’s just one:
11. Oooooc.com
Provides a marketplace for contents and services.Much like Zooomr and ooooj, it’s just too many o’s. How do they refer to their service? Worse, how do they point people to their website on the phone? “No it’s 5 o’s, c, dot c-o-m, sir … No no no, 5 times the letter ‘o’ … ah crap.” If you want to be the next-generation eBay, you might want to consider changing the name first, guys.
Wauters has also pulled together a dozen interesting articles on naming.
I’m guessing Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch thinks Microsoft should have read some:
Microsoft has announced that the latest version of Windows, due in the next couple of years, will be called – drumroll please – Windows 7. It’s about time Microsoft adopted a naming system that might actually make some sense to users, but I can’t wait for hordes of customers to start asking if they somehow missed Windows 1 through 6.
Windows has had one of the most ridiculous naming schemes in the history of software. First there were logical (but ugly) version numbers, like the once commonplace “Windows 3.1?. Then with the release of the overhauled Windows 95 the company adopted a naming system based on the year of release, which it continued until Windows 98.
Windows Me (perhaps the worst operating system I’ve ever used), sacrificed the scheme for a chance to be clever (it stood for “me” and the millennium at the same time!) Next up we hit Windows XP, which has served most of us reasonably well since 2001. It sounds sort of cool, it’s catchy, and we have no idea what it means. Fine.
Finally we had Windows Vista, which seemed to stick with the naming convention of “something that sounds sort of cool but didn’t really mean anything”.
Windows 7 is tied to the build numbers, not the actual releases so, like Apple, we can expect more frequent incremental releases from Microsoft going forward.