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Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expens
by franky47 7y ago
Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).
- tango12 7y agoEDIT: Not sure why, but from the article: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.
- choward 7y agoThat's just marketing speak. It doesn't actually explain why they changed their name.
- CPLX 7y agoI mean it’s a complete and total wild ass guess but the obvious reason to change one’s name is if you’ve identified another entity that is using that name in a way which could prevent you from global exclusive use of the brand. It’s the kind of thing that could easily have come up in due diligence for the large recent investment.
- kernelsanderz 7y agoDoing a quick search of TESS2 for trademarks look they already have the trademark registered for ZEIT (registered in 2017). So it was probably for other reasons. Which is a shame, because Zeit is very concise, easy to remember, and has a strong brand today - at least with their initial audience. Sounds like they're trying to go for a more corporate customer with their new name.
- CPLX 7y agoIt’s a big world out there.
- adim86 7y agoYeah but that's why they chose Vercel not why the name ZEIT had to be changed in the first place
- DagAgren 7y agoI connected it to none of those words. Instead, I connected it to a) some kind of telephone company that is dodgy b) incels.
- Nextgrid 7y agoVercel sounds like something about vermin and incels.
- RonanTheGrey 7y agoLmao... this is what I heard when I read the word the first time too. "Incel..?"
- mikro2nd 7y agoSelf-delusional marketingspeak. To me 'Vercel' sounds like a brand of cheap batteries.
- neutronicus 7y agoAnd to me it sounds like a plasma-physics simulation package running on supercomputers. \shrug\
- ljm 7y agoSounds boring and enterprisey to me.
- BossingAround 7y agoBatteries is what came to my mind. Like Duracell.
- PKop 7y agoThat's not the "reason" though, that's the rationalization
- mxstbr 7y agoThe name change makes a lot of sense to me, tactically (no matter what you think of the new name). ZEIT is associated with full-stack hosting including backend servers, which they no longer want to focus on to. To solidify their pivot to frontend hosting in their users mind, they rename to strip all previous connotations from their brand.
- deltron3030 7y agoNames are like colors and shapes, and their new one doesn't really indicate that they're innovators. Zeit was cool because german names in tech are quite rare, it was showing that they did things differently. Vercel sounds like a lame web 1.0 thing, it's more rigid, rolls way harder off the tongue. Focusing on backend servers or not is just a implementation detail as a hosting company that want's you to not care about the underlying tech, the name itself is way more important at their size.
- subpixel 7y agoZeit means "time" in German, is the name of a German newspaper, and surely made organic SEO a challenge...much like Now did.
- jonny_eh 7y agoHow about zeit.js, it worked fine for next.js
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xky 7y agoTo me, it sounds like a medication.