Darren,
Yes, naming of product lines is an interesting issue.
To add to your collection of confusing name conventions, - I'd mention
Ikea's lines of furniture. Besides the difficulty of identifying a
specific piece of furniture, - you are forced to train you memory in
memorizing words that include non-ASCII (or extended-ASCII) characters.
As for the "Pentax Apocalypse", it will happen after "Pentax Two
Corinthians". ;-)
Cheers,
Igor
Darren Addy Wed, 17 Feb 2016 20:06:07 -0800 wrote:
As someone who has more than a passing interest in "branding" this is
an interesting subject to me. Think of the naming conventions for
automobiles (a subject near and dear to many on this list). Auto
manufacturers take slightly different tacks, but a model name (such as
the Chevrolet "Impala" existed for many years. According to Wikipedia,
it existed from 1958 to 1985, 1994 to 1996, and 2000 to present. Of
course the differentiator was the model year. For some reason, camera
makers have not seen the sensibleness of using the model YEAR in their
naming convention. It would be rather easy to say: "I have the Pentax
Flagship APS-C" by simply calling it the 2001 Kz as opposed to the
2014 Kz. But no, Pentax needs to change the K-whatever part for each
and every revision. Eventually you run out of letters (or your numbers
approach ZERO and then need to go into the negative numbers... or
perhaps the arena of irrational numbers like the
"K-square-root-of-three"
Microsoft sucked at this game, giving us things
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions
Apple had system 7, system 8, then finally decided the "X" made a cool
symbol and has been stuck at OS X for many years, but giving each a
cool animal name that started with a bear, detoured into Big Cats and
after a detour into the Wild West, is currently lost somewhere in
Yosemite National Park: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X
If the Big Dogs of American Business can't get their act together in
this regard, it should be of little surprise to us that a Japanese
country would have problems with a strategy that would TRANSLATE well
into english. However, P.J.'s point is taken with regard to SEO
(Search Engine Optimization). They seem rather clueless at how Google
works, which is sort of a Big Deal in this age of the InterWeb. The
asterisk is a particularly aggregious sin, since it often refers to a
"wildcard" character in computer search engines.. They would do much
better to have chosen to use Model Years or Animals, or perhaps Books
of the Bible in naming their camera models. Who wouldn't want to own a
collectible Pentax Genesis or Pentax Exodus - now long superceded by
the Pentax Lamentations or the Pentax Song of Solomon? The original
Pentax 1st John would be superceded by the 2nd John and 3rd John
models. All of this leading to what we all knew was coming: The Pentax
Apocalypse (or Pentax Revelations) depending upon your market area?
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