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 How Companies Got their Name
Adobe
Came from name of the river Adobe Creek that
ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Apache
It got its name because its founders got
started by applying patches to code written for NCSA’s httpd daemon.
The result was ‘A PAtCHy’ server -– thus, the name Apache.
Apple Computers
It was the favourite fruit of founder Steve
Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and
he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other
colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 O'clock.
Cisco Systems
It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It
is short for San Francisco.
Compaq Computers
This name was formed by using COMp, for
computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.
Corel
The name was derived from the founder's name
Dr.Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.
Google
The name started as a joke boasting about the
amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It
was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1
followed by 100 zeros.After founders - Stanford graduate students
Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel
investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'
Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing
e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world.When Sabeer
Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried
all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as
it included the letters "html" - the programming language used to
write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with
selective uppercasing.
Hewlett Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to
decide whether the company they founded would be called
Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
Intel
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name
their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a
hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated
ELectronics.
Lotus (Notes)
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from
'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of
Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Microsoft
Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company
that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened
Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.
Motorola
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name
when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular
radio company at the time was called Victrola.
Oracle Corp
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a
consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code
name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system
to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was
designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project
eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what
they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and
created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the
company.
Red Hat
Company founder Marc Ewing was given the
Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at
college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it
desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an
appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!
SAP
“Systems, Applications, Products in Data
Processing”, formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the
‘Systems/Applications/Projects’ group of IBM.
Sony Entertainment
It originated from the Latin word 'sonus'
meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a
bright youngster.
Sun Microsystems
Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN
is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim
built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to
manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a
UNIX-based OS for the computer.
Xerox
The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his
product trying to say dry’ (as it was dry copying, markedly different
from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer‘ means dry.
Yahoo!
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and
used in his book 'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is
repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo!
Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they
considered themselves yahoos
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