Evolution of U.S. Corporate Technology Names in the 20^th Century

Barry Cowan & Laurel Sutton

 

Both Laurel and I are trained in linguistics, and over the course of the last several years (five for me, seven for Laurel) we have worked as corporate naming consultants in the San Francisco Bay Area. We happened to be working in this field in a place of extraordinary innovation and expansion at a time of rapid economic growth in the late 1990s. We found ourselves smack in the middle of some tumultuous times from a corporate naming perspective. Companies that wanted corporate names consisting of real words found that these types of names were almost completely unavailable in relevant trademark classes (most notably classes 9 and 42), and much desired URLs (or Internet domain names) were either already being used or were being held ransom by cyber-squatters for enormous sums of money.

 

While these developments partially explain why corporate technology names changed so much towards the end of the century, it struck Laurel and me that there was probably a lot more to the story. Looking back at other periods of industrial and economic expansion, we observed that corporate names had maintained a relatively consistent form over the years, but there were a couple periods that seemed to alter previously accepted norms of corporate name acceptability and we wanted to investigate what may have initiated these changes. Additionally, we felt that there was a need to develop a corporate name taxonomy that could help us describe and explain some of the changes that we were observing.

 

This paper is the outgrowth of our observations. Our goal is to use the work that went into this paper to help us begin to understand motivations and rationale for why corporate names have changed so much in the past hundred years or so.

 

Before going too much further, I want to establish the scope of this paper and define an important term that I'll be using throughout. First the scope: rather than looking at product names, which are likely to be governed by a distinct set of naming practices, we are focusing on corporate names given to U.S.-founded technology companies. This begs the question, what is technology?

 

We will define technology, or more specifically the technology industry, as companies whose offerings allow their customers to be more efficient (either faster or more productive) and/or entertained through the use of advanced and sophisticated devices.

 

In the first part of my paper, I'll briefly define corporate technology names from the early part of the 20^th century, these tended to be very generic and descriptive. Then I'll jump to the middle of the century to an event that we think had a major impact on subsequent naming practices. Next, I'll describe and define contemporary corporate technology names that tend to play with the language more than older names, and finally I'll raise some questions about what might be underlying the evolution of corporate technology names over the last 100 years.

 

The two most prominent types of U.S. corporate technology names that we've identified for the early part of the 20^th century are descriptive names and familial names.

 

Descriptive names tended to be very straightforward, industry-defining, and institutional-sounding. Names like General Electric (1890), American Telegraph and Telephone (1885), Radio Corporation of America (1919), and International Business Machines (1924). These names would not seem out of place as names of official government agencies and in many cases (for example, AT&T and RCA) these companies had quasi-governmental roles and powers. A subtype of descriptive names is acronyms and initialisms (for example, IBM and RCA), which have always been common in technology, probably because technology names often contain three or more words.

 

At this stage of our research we haven't been able to identify exactly when and how specific acronyms and initialisms start being used. It is quite possible that General Electric, for example, was called GE right from the beginning but we have not yet solved this mystery. One thing is clear: many of the most successful and long-lasting companies end up using the acronym as their primary name over the course of time. For example, AT&T, IBM and later HP (from Hewlett-Packard) use the acronyms exclusively today[1].

 

Like descriptive names, familial names also have an air of institutionalism and authority. Applying a familial name to a corporate entity typically ensured that a strong man and/or family stood behind the company's offerings. (Familiar names for businesses have a long history, starting with the rise of a middle class of merchants in the 15^th century following the Black Plague in Europe) Names like Carnegie and Rockefeller were inherent to the foundation of early 20^th century industry in the U.S. and these names stood for the patriarchal leadership of the corporations. In technology, names such as Ford (1903), Remington (1865 - incorporated), Pitney Bowes (1920), Hoover (1908), and Westinghouse were used. While familial naming is still quite common across industries, most particularly in advertising agencies (for example Ogilvy and Mather [1948], Young and Rubicam [1923], etc.), Legal firms (for example, Shearman and Sterling [1873], Morgan Lewis [1873], Fenwick and West [1972]) and other service-related industries, in the early part of the 20^th century it was a typical manner of naming technology companies as well.

 

There are always exceptions, of course, and it's worth mentioning at least one of them[2]. The Kodak (1891)[3] name, which was associated with one of the best known technology companies of the 20^th century, was originally developed as a product name. George Eastman had developed a new kind of film and an entirely new kind of camera for that film. He was determined to christen the camera with a name that had never been used before, and one which he coined himself. In an excellent book called, Why Did They Name It...?, Hannah Campbell quotes Eastman as saying:

 

I chose that name because I knew a trade name must be short, vigorous, incapable of being misspelled to an extent that will destroy its identity, and in order to satisfy trademark laws, it must mean nothing.

 

 

The name has a lot of advantages over the typical descriptive or familial name: it is easily trademarkable and protectable; it is unique, and in the minds of consumers therefore memorable and tied to only one company; it is easily pronounceable and difficult to mispronounce; and it need not be translated into any other language. This name, an 'exception' in the early part of the century is an example of the type of name that becomes prominent in the latter part of the century: an 'empty vessel': since it has no inherent meaning, it can be made to mean anything the owner wishes.

 

Now let's jump to the middle part of the century and the 'major naming event' that I mentioned earlier; an event that we think had a slowly realized but important impact on subsequent technology names. In 1961 The Haloid Company, founded in 1906 and named for a chemical used to develop photographic prints, changed their name to The Xerox Corporation and came to be commonly referred to as Xerox. 'Xerography' was a neo-scientific word, which was coined by Haloid in the 1940s to refer to electronic photography (from the Greek words xero "dry" and graph "writing"). The Haloid Company subsequently trademarked the word 'Xerox' in 1949 for their patented technology and associated products. As xerography took over the bulk of their business, the company changed its name to Haloid Xerox in 1958 before changing it to Xerox three years later. We view this naming event as a turning point, or at least as the beginning of a slow change that continued through the 1960s, 70s and 80s to the use of more fanciful corporate names that were less transparently descriptive than before.

 

Just to run through some examples in the emerging software industry, from the 1950s through the early part of the 1960s when companies had names like: Computer Usage Corporation (1955), Applied Data Research and Computer Sciences Corporation (1959), Advanced Computer Techniques, Electronic Data Systems, and Informatics (1962). Here we see the threads of Xerox starting to appear.

 

Continuing down the path, or following that Xerox thread, names of software companies in the mid-1960s through the 1970s started to look like this: Tymshare (1965), Comshare (1966), Dylakor, Pansophic, Syncsort (1969), Fortex Data Corporation (1970), Argonaut Information Systems (1972), Compuware (1973), Cyborg Systems (1974), Microsoft (1975), Oracle, Softool (1977), and Catalyst (1978). The tokens of more fanciful corporate names steadily increase through the 60s and 70s. The threads of change that began with Xerox have woven themselves into the fabric of corporate technology naming by the end of the 1970s. Long before crowded trademark classes and pre-dating the need for World Wide Web addresses by nearly ten years, technology corporations had begun to redefine corporate naming practices.

 

In the early 1980s, when the U.S. government broke apart the telecommunications monopoly that was AT&T into seven 'baby bells', we witness the continuation and spread of the Xerox effect across the technology industry. Corporate names begin to sound less like stolid monolithic institutions and more like localized individualistic - sometimes friendly - characters that insert themselves into our lives. Take note of the evolution of the baby bells:

 

In 1984 AT&T spawned Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis (or more colloquially Pacific Bell), Southwestern Bell and U.S. West

 

Today those seven baby bells have condensed down to Verizon (consisting of Bell Atlantic and NYNEX [+GTE]), SBC (consisting of Pacific Telesis, Ameritech and Southwestern Bell), Bell South, and Qwest (consisting of U.S. West and an emergent telecommunications company). Other competitive telecommunications companies (or CLECs) that emerged after the AT&T breakup used names like Sprint (1986), Global Crossing (1997), XO (1994) and Rhythms (1997). These names exemplify the types of names that emerge and become the most prominent type of corporate technology name in the last years of the 20^th century.

 

In addition to the two types of names (descriptive and familial names) that were prominent in the early part of the century, we have identified two new types (and two subtypes) that have become most prominent in the late 20^th century to the present.

Arbitrary names can be real English words as in the case of Apple (1977) or coined words as in the case of Avaya[4] (2000), a company that sells communications systems and products.  Although some arbitrary names are meaningful in languages other than English, the average English speaker will not know that Atari (1972) means "check" (as used in chess, taken from the game Go) in Japanese, or that Inktomi (1996) means "spider" in Lakota. These names are arbitrary in the sense that the association with the products or services offered by the company is opaque; Most English speakers cannot guess what products or services are offered by Apple, Cisco (1984), Red Hat (1993) or Avaya simply by looking at their names. They are 'empty vessel' names, as mentioned earlier. 

Suggestive names can be real English words as in the case of Oracle (a company that makes database applications that helps customers manage information); in this case, the term 'oracle' suggests that some sort of knowledge is being offered (along with the suggestion that this knowledge comes from a higher power).  Suggestive names can also be real non-English - usually Indo-European - words connote meaning for English speakers.  For example, Veritas (1989), meaning "truth" in Latin, connotes 'truth' in English through it's relationship with words like "verity"and "veritable", suggests faithful reproduction, an essential quality for a company that protects computer data Suggestive names can also be coined words such as Microsoft where 'micro' suggests that the company's offerings are small or perhaps related to micro-computing while 'soft' in this context suggests software.  Cinergy (1994) reflects the literal energy and synergy that resulted from the merger of Cincinnati Gas & Electric (1901) and PSI (Public Service Company of Indiana) Energy (1931). 

 

Certainly the explosion of these types of contemporary names can be traced, at least in part, to the difficulty of obtaining trademarks. This was due partly to the economic boom of the mid 1990s, as well as a 1990 change in US trademark law that allowed companies to files ITUs ('intent to use' trademark applications that allow for the filing of a trademark application based on intended, rather than actual, use), thus opening the way for claims on many trademarks that might not ever be used. The last quarter of the 20^th century also saw the U.S. become more integrated into the 'global village', through both the ubiquity of the Internet and the continuing rise in the immigrant population. Non-English words, indeed non-Indo-European words, have become more frequently heard and seen as multilingual communities of speakers have become more common. It is not surprising then that as sociolinguistic landscapes evolve in the U.S., non-English words and word parts have become more acceptable as brands. These words signify a willingness to push boundaries and embrace the unexpected.

 

But there's more to the story than just practical considerations. We began our inquiry with the simple observation that corporate names in the early part of the 20^th century either seemed to be very concrete descriptive terms or names of the people who founded the company, while more contemporary corporate names are less prosaic and more fanciful. We posit that corporate names from the early part of the 20^th century are monolithic and institutional in their tone. They seem to be intended to make the companies themselves sound official, governmental, more part of a great institutional system rather than part of a socio-cultural system. These names don't lend themselves to cultural interaction, they are beyond commentary, they are exactly what they are, and the companies' offerings are perfectly reflected by the names themselves, either in the form of the offerings or the people behind the offerings.

 

While there were exceptions to these types of names - Kodak, as discussed earlier - it struck us how differently so many companies are named today. We still find companies born in the latter part of the 20^th century with descriptive and familial names, but there has been a major shift toward the use of names that are more suggestive or arbitrary in nature. These kinds of names seem intended to make the companies sound more friendly and approachable. Typically lighter in tone, these kinds of names lend themselves well to social interaction in the form of dialogue with customers, investors and other parties such as the press. By using a name that is less officious in nature, the company can take on more of a friendly persona and in turn sounds as if it can build more of an interactive relationship with constituents, recognizing needs and providing products and services to meet those needs.

 

The preeminent example must be Yahoo! (1994). The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,"[5] but founders David Filo and Jerry Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." The name is arbitrary; there is no obvious association with the company's business, features, or benefits, and certainly not its target audience. Today it's held up as a great brand success. In the professional naming business, clients often cite it as a name they admire and want to emulate. A typical request is: "We want a name like Yahoo!, only better." Although they're likely referring to the brand rather than the name itself, there is something in the name that Jonathan Swift could never have anticipated. It sounds friendly, it sounds fun - an exclamation of joy; it sounds approachable; light-years away from IBM or even InfoSeek (1995).

 

We believe that these changes in corporate naming practices in technology are part of a larger social trend in the U.S. This trend, discussed in much of the work of sociologist Robert D. Putnam (most notably 'Bowling Alone'), has to do with the notion that civic engagement and social connectedness, what he calls "social capital", diminished over the course of the past forty years or so, most noticeably since the end of World War II (but starting even before that). Putnam cites various factors including the movement of women into the workforce, increased mobility (or decreased residential stability), and the technological transformation of leisure as reasons for this decline.

 

In parallel with the loss of civic engagement has been a rise in what Putnam calls "tertiary associations" - involvement in mass-membership organizations like the Sierra Club and AARP, along with membership in support groups, ranging from AA to book discussion groups to myriad Yahoo mailing lists. Both of these trends point to an even further extension of individualism, the desire to associate only with those who have identical likes and dislikes - 'the cult of cliques'. And while social interaction may be achieved through cliques, businesses have refined the art of marketing to pinpoint accuracy, to the point where an ad campaign may be so minutely targeted to your particular demographic that read the advertising and buying the products seems like a mere formality.

 

In the sphere of corporate technology, the cult of cliques is accessed by a name like Blue Martini (1998), a superb example of a clique name. It combines a random color, blue, with a drink that was popular in the 1950s and has made a comeback among the newly rich or newly hip. Martinis connote fun, sophistication, a relaxed view of the world. It presents a vivid visual image. It is self-consciously arbitrary, clearly chosen to signal that the founders have a sense of humor and are not afraid to take risks. The audaciousness of the name signals that it is in some way associated with the Internet and the "new economy". And for those in the clique, it is a sly joke about the founder, Monte Zweben, whose previous company was called Red Pepper Software (1994). Blue Martini is designed to appeal to exactly the same type of customer: Internet-savvy, forward-thinking, hip, and open to risk.

 

It is evident that the role of a brand (both for corporations and products) has changed significantly over the course of the 20^th century. People have more personal relationships with brands today than they did in the past and the name is, naturally, an integral part of the brand. As consumer culture took off in the post-war prosperity of the 1950s, the importance of brands, and how consumers responded to them, became crucial. Prosperity meant choice, and choice meant competition in the marketplace. As Naomi Klein puts it in No Logo, "Corporations manufacture products, but what consumers buy are brands." A friendly brand - a friendly name - is better than an unfriendly one. The components of a brand - the name, logo, design and advertising - achieve that friendliness by relating to consumers as individuals, rather than as anonymous sources of revenue.

 

 

References

 

Campbell, Hannah; Why Did They Name It...? 1964: Bell Publishing Company, NY

 

Putnam, Robert D.; Bowling Alone. 1995. Journal of Democracy 6:1, 65-78

 

Klein, Naomi; No Logo. 1999. Picador, N.Y.