There's a new startup in Silicon Valley called Soylent. You guessed it, they make a radical new foodstuff. It's raised a number of questions: have venture capitalists fallen into their bad habits of throwing money recklessly at any new idea? Is this an idea that will appeal only to techies rather than the general population? Is this really the most pressing food related problem right now?
I prefer to ask the question: is this the dumbest company name ever? I mean, even if there hadn't been a movie about a food with a nasty secret called Soylent Green, the name is still too close to Solyndra. I think it's vaulted to number one my list of the worst product names ever.
Herpecin: as you may know, cold sores are just the oral form of herpes. But that doesn't mean they wasn't too be reminded of it.
NWA (airline): Northwest Airlines decided - quite understandably - that they wanted to shorten their name. And while I realize that African Americans are under-represented in corporate America, I can't believe that name made it from the boardroom to the ground without a single person saying, hey, didn't there used to be a rap group named that? Perhaps we should look up some of their songs to see if it's the sort of thing we want to be associated with.
MATRIX: not actually a product, but a dumb name nonetheless. It was a computer system to share information between law-enforcement organizations to find terrorists. At a time when people were becoming concerned about the intrusion of government anti-terror agencies, they just had to come up with a name that doesn't make people think of big, evil computer systems. So they called it the Multi-state Anti-Terrorist Information eXchange.
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