Paul Boddie wrote: > John Pote wrote: > >>Over this side of the pond the good old British Post Office changed its name >>to 'Consignia' in 2001. > > > I thought it was actually the Royal Mail, but the brand history can be > found here: > > http://www.royalmailgroup.com/aboutus/aboutus8.asp > > The fact that people confuse "Royal Mail" with "Post Office" might > suggest something to brand experts, but I'd argue that pulling one of > the names out of use, especially the one people tend not to use (but > the one they've now chosen for the parent company), would suggest > something else to normal people: it would either weaken the dual-named > "superbrand" or merely be regarded with contempt. Examples can be found > for this and other re-branding cases quite readily on the Internet, but > don't search for 'Consignia "Royal Mail"' in Google, though, as it > seems to result in a bizarre error page: > > """ > We're sorry... > ... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer > virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process > your request right now. > """ > > Anyway, aside from bizarre technical moments like this, what you've > described can probably be termed "brand suicide": the scrapping of a > recognisable brand identity with something fashionable at a particular > point in time that looks dated within a few years, and which has people > wondering who they're doing business with (despite extensive > publicity), only to discover that it's been the same company all along. > > [...] > > >>what's in a name? fortran, algol, rexx, hope, haskell, pascal, modula, >>eiffel, B, C, J, tcl, pearl, ruby, rebol, cobol, basic, vb, .net, assembler, >>forth, snobol, ada, prolog, simula, smalltalk, oberon, dylan, bob, ML et al >>ad nauseum. >> - is Python any less meaningful? Anyway I LIKE the chesse shop sketch! > > > The problem with the Cheese Shop name, aside from sounding ridiculous, > is that it isn't self-explanatory in an area which needs > self-explanatory labelling. Consider the following conversations: > > A: "I need to find something in Python that does this." > B: "Have you tried the Python Package Index?" > A: "Don't know why I didn't think of that!" > > A: "I need to find something in Python that does this." > B: "Have you tried the Cheese Shop?" > A: "WTF is that?" > [Lengthy, embarrassed explanation follows.] > > Bizarre names may be cute (to some people) but they don't lend > themselves to guessing or searching. Consequently, people who want > answers yesterday aren't likely to be amused to eventually discover > that the name of the resource they've been looking for is some opaque, > three-levels-of-indirection-via-irony, in-crowd joke. And even acronyms > like CPAN are better than wacky names, anyway. > > Paul > All true to some extent, but rather negated byt he fact that the first Google hot for "python package" is:
Python Cheese Shop : Home Updated, Package, Description. 2006-03-09, PyISAPIe 1.0.0, Python ISAPI ... 2006-03-07, matplotlib 0.87.1, Matlab(TM) style python plotting package ... cheeseshop.python.org/pypi - 10k - 8 Mar 2006 - Cached - Similar pages I still wish it had some explanaotry text on there, though. i can't help agreeing with you that "Cheese Shop" is just, well, cheesy. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd www.holdenweb.com Love me, love my blog holdenweb.blogspot.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list