Answer
Nov 27, 2018 - 08:26 AM
Can a name really make or break a company? Some modern brands have sleek, easily marketable names, like Lyft or Uber. Other brands have become mega-successes with seemingly awkward, clunky, or even creepy names, like Facebook, which would sound weird if it wasn’t a part of everyday life for a billion people.
Names don’t matter for brands as much as having a great product or service that addresses pain points does. But brands still invest thousands of dollars and hours of research into choosing and changing names. And to a point, the name does matter.
To me, brand names that start with “My” read as outdated now. But when they first became popular, “My” names were a perfect fit for the times. They celebrated a relatively new internet trend of customizability. MySpace allowed people to design their own personal pages, with customized songs and colors. It was your own little corner of the internet, and the concept was new and exciting.
Today, though, everything online is customized. Social media is ubiquitous. Our “newsfeeds” are algorithmically curated for us. Even our ads are targeted based on what we search for, or the conversations we have when our phone microphones are on. The prefix “My” has become almost meaningless in the internet sphere. A new company using it would probably sound out of touch.
The prefix “My” was less about forming attachment to the brand, and more about the idea of creating your own space online. Since that concept is old news now, it’s not a good naming convention anymore. But as I said above, names can only do so much. You’re right in suggesting that a name change would not have saved MySpace: the company failed due to other, bigger problems, like not innovating to keep up with competition.
MySQL, however, has a slightly different story. The “My” in the name is apparently in homage to founder Michael Widenius’s daughter, who is named My. The name seems to lend a sense of ownership, and might make the software sound more approachable or interesting. But who knows if the founder was thinking of that, or just thinking that he wanted to name a brand after his daughter. (MariaDB and MaxDB, branches of the MySQL system, are named after his other children.)
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