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I don't know how Amazon comes up with names for its products, but recently they all strike me as weird and stupid names. Do they confer with marketing first? Zo

I don't know how Amazon comes up with names for its products, but recently they all strike me as weird and stupid names. Do they confer with marketing first? Zocalo, Cognito? Really? These are the kinds of names you invent when you're looking for a cheap domain name for your startup. For Amazon, they don't make a lot of sense. They just seem like some executive out of their marketing depth and out of touch trying to be clever and anyone with sense afraid to speak up during the meeting when they come up with these names.

jonknee 12y ago
Amazon is a weird name too.
- xhroot 12y ago
  As were the originally proposed names "Cadabra" and "Relentless" (http://www.relentless.com http://www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon).
danso 12y ago
What cloud service names, off the top of your head, do you consider to be exemplary? "Parse"? OK, sure...but that's not any more functionally descriptive than "Cognito"...and Parse is a more narrowly focused company with a primary service...In the case of "Cognito" and "Zocalo"..., Amazon has to come up with names that are distinctive because they provide so many core services...so many that even me, an engineer, get them confused. Imagine the difficulty of a fly-by marketing person trying to differentiate between similar sounding names. Furthermore, these names are distinctive industry wide...presumably, if Zocalo becomes big, you will no longer have to say "AWS Zocalo", but just, "Zocalo"...just like you do with "S3" and "EC2". To drive home the situation that Amazon is in, let's consider another great product name: Dropbox. Unlike Parse, it is very easy to relate to the core service. But consider the phrase, "Amazon Dropbox"..."Dropbox" is unique compared to the currently named AWS services...but it has a huge collision with Amazon's core service, which is, stocking and shipping products. If Dropbox.com didn't exist, and Amazon used it instead of "Zocalo"...there is a considerable risk that people associate "dropbox" with some kind of packaging thing.
uptown 12y ago
Out of their recently-launched services, I liked the name "MatchBook" the most. It was intended to provide cheap or free Kindle versions of books which you'd previously purchased physical versions of. Unfortunately, it's a product that virtually no publishers have adopted.
danneu 12y ago
They're unique while remaining loosely related to the products they describe. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo is the city center (of Mexico City's historical district), a simple and untaken metaphor for a service that "...provides users with a central location for both the documents and files they are...".
- Chronic28 12y ago
  Great. You are 1 out of 100,000 people that understand the metaphor.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
curun1r 12y ago
Zocalo, sure...but Cognito makes complete sense. The word incognito basically means anonymous. The prefix 'in-' frequently negates the meaning of the word it's attached to. So when you remove the negation from anonymous, you get a known identity, which seems very apropos to an identity service.
ColinCera 12y ago
Cognito means known, recognized, identified; contrast with incognito. Is that really such a terrible, horrible, no good name for a service that verifies user identities and manages user profile data? It's a shame Amazon can't afford to hire a marketing genius like you, but I think they're doing the best they can with the idiots they have to work with.
- doctorstupid 12y ago
  But as a user enters cognito, they then become incognito. That does not make sense.
  - Chronic28 12y ago
    This. Maybe Amazon should have hired the marketing geniuses here on HN.

jonknee 12y ago

Amazon is a weird name too.

xhroot 12y ago
As were the originally proposed names "Cadabra" and "Relentless" (http://www.relentless.com http://www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon).

danso 12y ago

What cloud service names, off the top of your head, do you consider to be exemplary? "Parse"? OK, sure...but that's not any more functionally descriptive than "Cognito"...and Parse is a more narrowly focused company with a primary service...In the case of "Cognito" and "Zocalo"..., Amazon has to come up with names that are distinctive because they provide so many core services...so many that even me, an engineer, get them confused. Imagine the difficulty of a fly-by marketing person trying to differentiate between similar sounding names. Furthermore, these names are distinctive industry wide...presumably, if Zocalo becomes big, you will no longer have to say "AWS Zocalo", but just, "Zocalo"...just like you do with "S3" and "EC2". To drive home the situation that Amazon is in, let's consider another great product name: Dropbox. Unlike Parse, it is very easy to relate to the core service. But consider the phrase, "Amazon Dropbox"..."Dropbox" is unique compared to the currently named AWS services...but it has a huge collision with Amazon's core service, which is, stocking and shipping products. If Dropbox.com didn't exist, and Amazon used it instead of "Zocalo"...there is a considerable risk that people associate "dropbox" with some kind of packaging thing.

uptown 12y ago

Out of their recently-launched services, I liked the name "MatchBook" the most. It was intended to provide cheap or free Kindle versions of books which you'd previously purchased physical versions of. Unfortunately, it's a product that virtually no publishers have adopted.

danneu 12y ago

They're unique while remaining loosely related to the products they describe. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo is the city center (of Mexico City's historical district), a simple and untaken metaphor for a service that "...provides users with a central location for both the documents and files they are...".

Chronic28 12y ago
Great. You are 1 out of 100,000 people that understand the metaphor.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

curun1r 12y ago

Zocalo, sure...but Cognito makes complete sense. The word incognito basically means anonymous. The prefix 'in-' frequently negates the meaning of the word it's attached to. So when you remove the negation from anonymous, you get a known identity, which seems very apropos to an identity service.

ColinCera 12y ago

Cognito means known, recognized, identified; contrast with incognito. Is that really such a terrible, horrible, no good name for a service that verifies user identities and manages user profile data? It's a shame Amazon can't afford to hire a marketing genius like you, but I think they're doing the best they can with the idiots they have to work with.

doctorstupid 12y ago
But as a user enters cognito, they then become incognito. That does not make sense.
- Chronic28 12y ago
  This. Maybe Amazon should have hired the marketing geniuses here on HN.