Lack of Names

What is happening to company names? These days, and the trend has been growing exponentially since at least a few years, new companies have nonsense names - names that have absolutely no meaning, and are totally made up of random syllables.

In the past, you could see a company name as word combinations (like all the companies that have "soft", "tec/tech" or "micro" in their name), the founder(s)'s name(s) (like Hewlett-Packard and countless others), and acronyms (like IBM). You very rarely saw a nonsense name. Even Xerox's name comes from the xerography process, and Amiga from the Spanish word for female friend.

So many recent companies have nonsense names. What does "Zynga" tell? Would someone not familiar with the name know that it's a social network game company? How about "Zumba"? Do you know it's a latino dance fitness program? "Etsy"? "Meebo"? "Tuango"? These names and increasingly countless others have something in common, and it's not that it doesn't tell anything about the company. After all, "Apple", "Adobe", "Google", or even "Symantec" doesn't really mean anything.

What they have in common is that they are not words. They don't feel English, nor French, nor Japanese, nor Mandarin/Cantonese, and I don't think they feel Spanish either (my knowledge in languages stops here). They are just random syllables put together.

So, why this weird trend?


Internationalization, and the Web
When you create a company, you need a presence on the web. There's no question about it. In the past you could have a company in, say, Germany, and another company with the same name in Italy. You could even have similarly-named smaller companies in different cities of a country.

The web brings everything together, so only one company can have [mycompanyname].com. Of course, they need the .net, .org, and all the other domain extensions. You combine that with the fact that there are more and more companies out there, and you get a name shortage. It was only a matter of time.

If you create a startup, you have three choices for your company name:

• Use your name, your family name, and/or an amalgam of the cofounders' names;
• Use an annoying word play, or be clever enough to find a good unused combination ("Facebook" is a book of faces... "Groupon" is the concept of buying coupons as a group... effective names, but slightly annoying); or
• Make something up.

You can pretty easily make a random nonsense word that isn't taken, or isn't close enough to another one so that you get sued.

But these names are easy to forget, and it's only the tip of the iceberg. The current trend is five or six letters, two syllables names. What will happen when these easier names are depleted? Yeah, three syllables names, even harder to remember. "Mufygo" will one day pop-up as a name (assuming, of course, that "Mufy", "Mugo", and "Fygo" are not already taken) , and that name will sound even less like a real word. Where will it end?


Domain Extensions
Adding new domain extensions (like .com or .net) will not solve the problem. Companies will get their extension before someone else gets it (more than likely for scamming purposes), possibly getting a first shot (remember the new .xxx extension?).

Companies will have to rely on country extensions (.ca) more and more, then administrative region extensions (.on.ca). But this is a very short-lived solution.

This will have to change soon, before companies start being created and known by a number.


Conclusion
In guess anyone could predict that in 2 years, the pool of two syllables names will start drying up. In 5 to 10 years, it will be the three syllables names' turn. By then, the need for a revolution on the web will be clear.

I can't begin to imagine what kind of revolution we're talking about (the people who will come up with it are paid about 5-10x more than me). One thing is for sure: we will need a way to easily reference an infinity of companies.