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> > Trouble is, names are hard to change. > No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. I think this point from the article gets to the harder

> > Trouble is, names are hard to change. > No they’re not. People just aren’t determined or organized. I think this point from the article gets to the harder part. > Once you've said a name, it starts to stick in people's heads, and it slips beyond your control. Other people use the name in conversation and it ripples out through the organization. Technical modifications to change a name are one thing. Once people are stuck with using a particular name, it can be hard to change that.

hgomersall 4y ago
It's worse than that - the name is a brand so develops value in its own right. It's not just hard to change the name in peoples' minds, it's downright damaging (unless your product was crap, in which case changing the name might be a good strategy).
tialaramex 4y ago
Right, there are cases at work where users are like "Foo doesn't work" and you have no idea what Foo is, and turns out the users call it Foo because that was the name of an in-house service 15 years ago which did roughly the same thing, then we switched to Cloud Bar, and actually a few years ago Cloud Bar went on Our Incredible Journey https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ so we built a new in-house service Baz, which mimics most of what Cloud Bar did, yet the users still call it Foo even if they weren't here 15 years ago, that's what the person who taught them called it. You need to investigate a problem in Baz, even though the user said Foo, if you like you can tell them it's Baz as well, but like when teenagers correct their parents about teen slang it's not likely to have much real effect. And you might say, "Descriptive names would fix that". No they wouldn't. The user thinks Foo is a Wibbler Manager, if you called it "Wibbler Manager" they'd agree that's descriptive - but actually managing wibblers is trivial, its main purpose is to stop them from mis-managing the wibblers by providing detailed Doop-de-doop so they stop messing about with the wibblers when they're perfectly fine. Which means the Cloud product it got replaced by isn't really "managing wibblers" at all, it's a Doop-de-doop viewer. Except whoops, nobody makes a cloud Doop-de-doop viewer, so it's actually a Thingy viewer, and there's a shim turning Doop-de-doop into Thingy. When this gets in-housed again, chances are the in-house replacement still just handles Thingy. So in terms of description the user thinks their problem is with the Wibbler Manager, but it's actually the Thingy Viewer... we're no better off, you still need somebody to tell you what the hell the users are talking about. Names are what people call things, it is rude to call people by a name they don't like. But inanimate objects don't have feelings, so you should just call them whatever you want. Emperor Norton Bridge is a better name than "Bay Bridge".

hgomersall 4y ago

It's worse than that - the name is a brand so develops value in its own right. It's not just hard to change the name in peoples' minds, it's downright damaging (unless your product was crap, in which case changing the name might be a good strategy).

tialaramex 4y ago

Right, there are cases at work where users are like "Foo doesn't work" and you have no idea what Foo is, and turns out the users call it Foo because that was the name of an in-house service 15 years ago which did roughly the same thing, then we switched to Cloud Bar, and actually a few years ago Cloud Bar went on Our Incredible Journey https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ so we built a new in-house service Baz, which mimics most of what Cloud Bar did, yet the users still call it Foo even if they weren't here 15 years ago, that's what the person who taught them called it. You need to investigate a problem in Baz, even though the user said Foo, if you like you can tell them it's Baz as well, but like when teenagers correct their parents about teen slang it's not likely to have much real effect. And you might say, "Descriptive names would fix that". No they wouldn't. The user thinks Foo is a Wibbler Manager, if you called it "Wibbler Manager" they'd agree that's descriptive - but actually managing wibblers is trivial, its main purpose is to stop them from mis-managing the wibblers by providing detailed Doop-de-doop so they stop messing about with the wibblers when they're perfectly fine. Which means the Cloud product it got replaced by isn't really "managing wibblers" at all, it's a Doop-de-doop viewer. Except whoops, nobody makes a cloud Doop-de-doop viewer, so it's actually a Thingy viewer, and there's a shim turning Doop-de-doop into Thingy. When this gets in-housed again, chances are the in-house replacement still just handles Thingy. So in terms of description the user thinks their problem is with the Wibbler Manager, but it's actually the Thingy Viewer... we're no better off, you still need somebody to tell you what the hell the users are talking about. Names are what people call things, it is rude to call people by a name they don't like. But inanimate objects don't have feelings, so you should just call them whatever you want. Emperor Norton Bridge is a better name than "Bay Bridge".