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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Principles for new name
From:       Inge Wallin <inge () lysator ! liu ! se>
Date:       2010-11-05 12:55:06
Message-ID: 201011051355.06742.inge () lysator ! liu ! se
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The time has come to choose on a new name for our software. I'm sure there 
will be lots of suggestions, some good, some, eh, maybe not optimal. :-)

Before we start throwing out suggestions for names, I thought it would be 
useful to discuss a little about what we want to achieve. Here is my personal 
view; please add more input.

What we are creating now is something that will last a long time. A man 
teaching me about the advertising industry once said "A new trademark is 
completely empty. It almost doesn't matter what it is, but it should be simple 
and easy to remember. The real value comes from what you put into it." This 
means that whatever name we come up with will eventually be as good as any 
other, but it should still follow a few principles. The two below are based in 
science, the rest are my opinion.

1. It should sound friendly.  I think we in the KDE community is a bit unlucky 
here, because K is a very hard letter.  K<whatever> just has a slightly 
unfriendly feel to it. For instance Dolphin is a much friendlier name than 
Konqueror. Besides, the K names are not really favoured any more. 

2. It turns out that companies with a name that begins in A have on average 
50% higher revenue than other companies. This is because companies are mostly 
sorted alphabetically in lists. People often don't have the energy or 
knowledge to pick the best choice, so they just take something near the 
beginning. Perhaps we could take advantage of this and have a first letter 
near the start of the alphabet.  (Blue Office would be very good here, but 
there were other problems with that. Perhaps we could just call it A Office or 
the A Suite? :-P)

3. I think we should consider calling it <something> Suite instead of 
<something> Office.  This would make it more suitable(!) for Karbon and Krita 
since they have indicated that their users don't like them to be part of an 
office package. It would also be easier to enhance the package later with 
other applications. Maybe something like DigiKam could be part of the 
Suite(tm) sometimes in the future?  (note: this is not a suggestion, just an 
loose thought)

4. Regarding the individual applications, I think we have two choices:
 - to call them <name> writer, <name> calc or something generic like that, 
where <name> is the name we give the entire package.
 - to give them individual real names. A good example is the applications in 
Apple iWork: Pages, Numbers and Keynote
I would prefer the second, but I'm not strongly in either camp.

Then of course there are the other normal considerations like domain names, 
etc.

But PLEASE don't suggest any "funny" names that draw chuckles on an IRC 
channel but will be dragging us down for all future to come.
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