There is an old Disney urban legend that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen and, when medical technology has evolved to cure his cancer, he will be thawed out and cured. In modern internet times, this tale really took off with Disney fans, leading to several books and even a movie:
The Further Adventures of Walt’s Frozen Head (2018) – IMDb
If I recall, my name is in the credits of that movie … because I backed it on Kickstarter or whatever fund raisingsite it was using at the time. ;-)
But I digress…
It has been claimed that Disney’s “ice princess” movie was released under the title Frozen so when people web search for “walt disney frozen” the search engines will return hits about the movie Frozen instead of the urban legend. “Ah! It’s a cover up! It must be true!”
And this is clearly not true, because if you web search for that, you get a bunch of front page results about the urban legend, well before you get to anything about the animated movie.
What Would Microsoft Do?
But this does give me an idea. Microsoft has released a number of games for Windows over the year, such as Microsoft Solitaire, Microsoft Freecell, Microsoft Minesweeper and Microsoft Pinball Arcade.
I propose Microsoft create a new game for Windows called “Bugs” — perhaps some modern update of Dung Beetles (known as Mega-Bug on the CoCo).
That way, when you web search “microsoft bugs” you get results about the game, and not about the frustrating thing that just got pushed to your PC in the latest Microsoft Windows Update.
Just a thought…
Until next time…
To some extent Microsoft did a sort of search engine optimization before search engines existed, by giving their products the most bland generic names as possible, like DOS, Word, Windows and so on.
There is something to be said of being the first to claim all the generic terms. Office makes senses, but neither Excel or Lotus-123 really screamed “spreadsheet” to me. I guess Google got that with “Sheets”.
Side track: When did the term spread sheet take on? Was it used by VisiCalc or was it something that for example the computer press made up?
Microsofts earlier spread sheet was called Multiplan. That might had been one of the last spreadsheet names that aimed at the finance market. Once spreadsheets became part of general office suits and something non-finance people had on their computers, I would think that the usage changed a lot and any name related to finance wouldn’t be as good any more. Although Excel as a name says nothing about what the program is about, I think it’s a good choice anyways.
Btw, in some cases a name might be good in some markets, but not that good in other markets. Filemaker is a great example. I assume that the name is great in English, but in Sweden it just seems weird. In Swedish the similar word “fil” is only used for files in a file system on a computer, or the tool you use to round off harsh surfaces. It’s never used to describe documents in a filing cabinet – those are called “dokument” = document or “akt” = act. Thus someone who’s a native Swedish speaker probably thinks that “Filemaker” is a weird name – almost every computer program creates files (except a few small utilities and whatnot where there is no reason to save the results, like a calculator or a small desktop game without a high score list). :)
Also re generic names:
I wonder what connotations they have in different markets?
Taking Sweden as an example again, the country wide cooperative supermarket chain used to have many basic products with generic names, and thus generic names have an aura of being a cheap basic product.
VisiCalc! Wow, totally forgot that one. I never saw it. Not sure what spreadsheets even existed for my CoCo, at least early on. I am sure we had them for OS-9, but it was not software I needed. Wish I had known about them, though. I use them often now. But I get the ones back then were not nearly as useful.
Interesting about the names. I expect the trash can is another example. I believe that is a “bin” in England?