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This is wildly irrelevant, but I have to ask: does anyone else experience profound irritation at the name "HBGary"? Every time I read the name, my reading flo
by georgieporgie 16y ago
This is wildly irrelevant, but I have to ask: does anyone else experience profound irritation at the name "HBGary"?
Every time I read the name, my reading flow stops and I stare at the name. HBWhat? Does that stand for something? Are they initials? Who is Gary? Are they from Indiana?
It triggers this bizarre, deep-down irritation like nothing else I've ever seen.
- michaelcampbell 16y agoI don't have quite the same reaction, but my gut instinct thinks the company name is something my 10 year old son would have come up with. If his name was Gary, anyway. It's right on par with naming your company "ImSo$#@!Awesome Inc." or something.
- edkennedy 16y agoIn pick up artist lingo, HB stands for "Hot Babe" to keep their names anonymous. So for example you meet a girl with a hotrod you would call her HBHotrod. Had to chuckle when I saw the name HBGary.
- GHFigs 16y agoLikewise for GoDaddy, hhgregg, and scores of startup names. It's like my brain is looking for a meaningful word and halts briefly when it can't find one. Textual basilisks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Langford#Basilisks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Langford#Basilisks
- Groxx 16y agoGoDaddy just always makes me think porn before DNS. I can't imagine what thoughts were going through their heads when they thought "GoDaddy. Yeah. That makes me think 'major DNS server'. Lets go with that." To make matters worse, they've got women wearing shirts that say "GoDaddy" on their front page. Gotta wonder what their target audience is, with that featuring so prominently.
- m_myers 16y agoHave you seen their TV and magazine ads? Their ads are the only reason I do not use them.
- georgieporgie 16y agoI've been using GoDaddy for quite some time now. Their user interface is atrocious, and much of their business model seems to be "let's hope they don't notice extra services we conveniently added." I put up with it for years, though, because of low prices. Lately, though, I'm bothered in a different way. It seems like they want to create an image of celebrating empowered women. Their execution, however, revolves around turning them immediately into sex objects. My conclusion is that Bob Parsons has a fetish about putting women under his control, he made it his corporate image, and it creeps me out.
- dekz 16y agoDon't you just love the daily email about their sales?
- bodyfour 16y agoI reluctantly switched to GoDaddy because none of the TUCOWS-based registrars could handle IPv6 glue records, and I wanted to get my external nameservers running dual-stack. GoDaddy was surprisingly ahead of the curve on IPv6 support. Their marketing is truly cringe-worthy though. I only keep the registration of that single domain there, and I will probably move it elsewhere when it expires in a couple years.
- pak 16y agoGoDaddy is the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world, so their target audience of "everybody with a functioning libido" seems to have worked out well for them. I think it was the Super Bowl ads starting in 2005 that basically got their brand stuck in the head of anybody considering starting a website. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Inc magazine did a segment on Bob Parsons: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/the-way-i-work-bob-parsons-go-daddy.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/the-way-i-work-bob-pars...
- Splines 16y agoWhenever I was reading the news about HBGary, I kept scanning the articles for someone named Gary. I don't think I ever found any (is there one?).
- sp_ 16y agoThe name comes from the three co-founders. The H is for Hoglund (Greg). The B is for Bracken (Shawn). The Gary is for Jon Gary who left the company shortly after it was founded.
- georgieporgie 16y agoThank you for that. The name is still irritating to me, but at least now I know it's not nonsensical.
- phlux 16y agoIt is also indicative of how uncreative the founders were. To me, I intuit this as clear confirmation that it was a company founded with no strategy other than to suckle from the teat of defense spending. How much you want to bet that the H. B. and G. of this company had ties/tenure in DoD or other governmental departments and were thus situated to reply to RFPs from their previous colleagues. This is very common in the MIC.
- jarin 16y agoMy question is what did Jon Gary do to get his whole name in there?
- w1ntermute 16y agoLeave the company shortly after it was founded?
- khafra 16y agoWhich, in retrospect, looks like it may have been smart enough to deserve the extra visibility.
- gojomo 16y agoI had just assumed it was based on names of people associated with its founding, like JDEdwards, JDPower, TD Waterhouse, HP, Lockheed-Martin or even the Debian project. (Do those other arbitrary names trigger a similar irritation?) With HBGary, though, only the 'H' can be clearly attributed to a founder declared on their 'about' page, Greg Hogland. But they probably had other people in mind for the rest at the founding.
- icegreentea 16y agoThe TD in TD Waterhouse actually stands for Toronto-Dominion. They picked that up after the merger of the Bank of Toronto and the Dominion Bank of Canada waaaaay back then.
- Maro 16y agoI agree. I always want to pronounce it H-G-Barry instead of H-B-Gary, for some reason that's how it flows in my mind. They should just stick with HBG.
- phlux 16y agoI have the same problem with any company that has the word "solutions" in their name. My problem with it is that by having the term "solutions" in your name, you have a clearly defined problem for which your company is the only answer. Invariably, I find that any company with the word "solutions" in their name cannot succinctly define what it is they do. They imply they are the solution to something, but I just see it as a company founded by the marketing department.