What's in a name...

After my last post, it got me thinking about the power and peril of product naming.    

A good product name can describe, define, and identify your product, it can energize customers to buy, attach an ideal, culture, or image to a widget (think iPod), and it can even make your product memorable or seem unique amongst a sea of identical products.  Of course, the corollary is that a bad product name can mislead customers, plant negative connotations, subject the product to parody and ridicule (remember Microsoft Bob?), set too high or too low expectations, and generally lead to disappointment when the name doesn’t match the product.

Microsoft gets themselves into more trouble over their poor judgment in naming than anything else.   It’s not just the verbosity of their product names such as “Windows {workflow/communications/presentation} Foundation” that bothers me (more humor for me), it’s the way that every product must have some Over-The-Top name that makes it sound like it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread (whatever that means).

Take, for example, Microsoft Sql Server Management Studio (SSMS).

Sql Server Management Studio somehow implies that you have a suite of tools that covers all features of Sql Server 2005.  The word “Suite” implies many tools joined together in some Sql Server equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife.  It plants the thought that you should be able to use this tool to do whatever development and DBA work you need for Sql Server 2005.   Little of this matches reality, as the tool is very basic and although is a jack-of-all-trades, is absolutely a master-of-none.

Yeah, I read the marketing blurb, and it does seem like they are talking about the integration of TSQL Query, OLAP, Reporting (tho that integration is laughable), etc.  However, this all seems more like saying they combined a text-editor with a spell-checker.  Hmmm, who would have ever thought of that? J

I guess when you follow a name like Sql Server Enterprise Manager, its hard not to get a little nutty with naming, but what’s wrong with the more concise Query Analyzer.   Arguably, SSMS is far more similar to Query Analyzer than Enterprise Manager in features.

Next time, how about a name more like “Sql Server Admin Basic” or “Sql Server Query Tool”?

Of course, within the world of relational database vendors, Microsoft is hardly the only one to misrepresent their product.     All I have to say is whoever named Oracle’s query tool “Sql Plus” has some serious explaining about where the “Plus” features are hidden.  J