How these tech companies got their names

Wondering how Wipro, Apple, Microsoft, Accenture got their iconic brand names? We reveal the fascinating stories.

According to Steve Jobs, Apple was so named because Jobs was coming back from an apple farm, and he was on a fruitarian diet. He thought the name was "fun, spirited and not intimidating".

 

Wipro: From Western India Palm Refined Oil Ltd Wipro Technologies. The company started as a modest Vanaspati and laundry soap producer and is now also an IT services giant.

 

Hotmail: Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" – the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

 

Facebook: Name stems from the colloquial name of books given to newly enrolled students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. 

 

Twitter: Having rejected the name Twitch for their social networking service, co-founder Jack Dorsey says: "we looked in the dictionary for words around it and we came across the word 'twitter' and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential.

 

Accenture From "Accent on the future". The name Accenture was proposed by a company employee in Norway as part of an internal name finding process (BrandStorming). Before 1 January 2001, the company was called Andersen Consulting. 

 

According to the founder of Samsung Group, the meaning of Samsung is "tristar" or "three stars". The word "three" represents something "big, numerous and powerful"; the "stars" mean eternity. 

 

Adobe Systems: From the Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of co-founder John Warnock.

 

Google: An originally accidental misspelling of the word googol and settled upon because google.com was unregistered. Googol was proposed to reflect the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available online. (Googol is equivalent to ten raised to the power of a hundred.) 

 

Acer: Born as Multitech International in 1976, the company changed its name to Acer in 1987. The Latin word for “sharp, acute, able and facile”.

 

Skype: The original concept for the name was Sky-Peer-to-Peer, which morphed into Skyper, then Skype.

 

Dell: Named after its founder, Michael Dell. The company changed its name from Dell Computer in 2003.

 

Amazon.com: Founder Jeff Bezos renamed the company Amazon (from the earlier name of Cadabra.com) after the world's most voluminous river, the Amazon. He saw the potential for a larger volume of sales in an online (as opposed to a bricks and mortar) bookstore. (Another story goes that Amazon was chosen to cash in on the popularity of Yahoo, which listed entries alphabetically.) 

 

Infosys: Short form of ‘Information Systems’

 

Cisco : Short for San Francisco. 

 

Lenovo Group: A portmanteau of "Le-" (from former name Legend) and "novo", pseudo-Latin for "new". This Chinese company took over IBM's PC division. 

 

Microsoft : Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to microcomputer software. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' disappeared on 3/2/1987 with the introduction of a new corporate identity and logo. 

 

Epson: Epson Seiko Corporation, the Japanese printer and peripheral manufacturer, was named from "Son of Electronic Printer" after a highly successful model, the EP-101. 

 

Novell: Novell, Inc. was earlier Novell Data Systems co-founded by George Canova. The name was suggested by George's wife who mistakenly thought that "Novell" meant new in French. (Nouvelle is the feminine form of the French adjective 'Nouveau'. Nouvelle as a noun in French is 'news'.) 

 

Compaq: From computer and "pack" to denote a small integral object; or: Compatibility And Quality; or: from the company's first product, the very compact Compaq Portable.

 

Mozilla Foundation From the name of the web browser that preceded Netscape Navigator. When Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla) by Jamie Zawinski. 

 

HP: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett. 

 

Asus : Named after Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. The first three letters of the word were dropped to get a high position in alphabetical listings. An Asus company named Pegatron, using the spare letters, was spun off in 2008. 

 

Sun Microsystems Its founders designed their first workstation in their dorm at Stanford University, and chose the name Stanford University Network for their product, hoping to sell it to the college. They did not. 

 

HTC Corporation: A contraction of its original corporate name, High Tech Computer Corporation. 

 

Groupon: Chief executive Andrew Mason used the derivation as his five-word acceptance speech at the 2011 Webby Awards ceremony: "It's short for group coupon."

 

IBM: Named by Tom (Thomas John) Watson Sr, an ex-employee of National Cash Register (NCR Corporation). To one-up them in all respects, he called his company International Business Machines. 

 

Oracle : Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner were working on a consulting project for the CIA. The code name for the project was Oracle. The project was designed to use the newly written SQL database language from IBM. The project was eventually terminated but they decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. Later they changed the name of the company, Relational Software Inc., to the name of the product.

 

eBay: Pierre Omidyar, who had created the Auction Web trading website, had formed a web consulting concern called Echo Bay Technology Group. "Echo Bay" did not refer to the town in Nevada, "It just sounded cool", Omidyar reportedly said. Echo Bay Mines Limited, a gold mining company, had already taken EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered what (at the time) he thought was the second best name: eBay.com. 

 

SAP: SystemAnalyse und Programmentwicklung (German for "System analysis and program development"), a company formed by five ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects' group of IBM. Later, SAP was redefined to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung (Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing).

 

HCL: HCL is the short form of Hindustan Computers Ltd, Indian Software Company founded by Shiv Nadar. 

 

Nero – Nero Burning ROM named after Nero burning Rome ("Rom" is the German spelling of "Rome").