There has been an increasing preoccupation with appearance that seems to be quite prevalent in the US. It seems to be quite pervasive through all aspects of th

There has been an increasing preoccupation with appearance that seems to be quite prevalent in the US. It seems to be quite pervasive through all aspects of the culture. People mock Lady Gaga for her clothing, similarly Lorde gets criticism for dancing funny. The occupy protesters were dismissed with comments like "They might have a point but they're not going to convince anyone dressed like that". People have said that DuckDuckGo is awesome but they can't recommend it to people because of the name. In the last few days I have seen people say they wouldn't trust the cubieboard because http://cubieboard.org/ http://cubieboard.org/ isn't a very good website. So appearance matters. Your name is part of your appearance. This means from a pragmatic perspective I agree with pg's comment comparing it to aerodynamic drag. On the other hand I don't thing this is a healthy state for the world. In all of the examples above the substance is far more important than the presentation. In many cases accepting the presentation in it's own right would be even better. Looking different should not be a sin, and often it should be embraced as adding flavour to the world. A final note, It is interesting to note that in the dotcom bubble, Many of the big survivers were businesses where their name did not reflect their function. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay. I think a big part of this is that while they built on a core product, their name didn't present the notion that they were restricted to their core product or even that their core product could change entirely.