4 ms·
I tend to not like it when companies transform the meaning of a popular brand into a more general, "parent" brand. Why would you intentionally make the meaning
by dlandis 7y ago
I tend to not like it when companies transform the meaning of a popular brand into a more general, "parent" brand. Why would you intentionally make the meaning of a well-understood brand ambiguous?
In the Java ecosystem, Eclipse and Hibernate are examples. Do you want to download "Hibernate"? Which Hibernate project? https://hibernate.org/ https://hibernate.org/. Same question for Eclipse (https://projects.eclipse.org/ https://projects.eclipse.org/). They used to be well-understood words.
- wvenable 7y agoThe only successful example I can think of was RIM rebranding itself as Blackberry. There are probably a few others. Although they're likely all narrowing examples (company changes name to focus on single product) rather than widening ones like this.
- mjw1007 7y agoI think likewise. Even if they're willing to go to the huge effort to go through all their own documentation to make it tell the truth given the new definition of Firefox, third parties aren't going to. I don't think it went well for Apache.
- Macha 7y agoSpring for a while was the worst of this. You look for spring. Then docs. Then guides. Now which of these guides describes the DI framework: https://spring.io/guides https://spring.io/guides At least there's a Spring framework link on the Projects page nowadays: https://spring.io/projects https://spring.io/projects
- Vinnl 7y agoI generally agree that that's a risk, but not a certainty. For example, I don't think many people have problems discerning Google Docs from Google Search - or at least, not many more than were it still called Writely.