The Name Game: It’s hard to keep up with all the changes.
By David Scott, Managing Member at Avid Communications.
When you’re a company named Alphabet and you own a sprawling empire that controls 87% of all global economic activity, I suppose it should be no surprise when you struggle to name your products and services consistently. And of course by “Alphabet,” I really mean “Google.” Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
We use G-Suite, formerly known as Google Apps for Business, and I’m treated to a frequent email notification that something is being renamed.
Recently, Team Drives became Shared Drives. According to the notice, “Shared” Drives is a much more accurate descriptor of drives that a team uses. Whatever. I dutifully went about the task of revising all of our internal documentation that said Team Drives to say Shared Drives so nobody here at Avid would be confused. (Actually I did no such thing… it’s a monumental waste of time when names change so often.)
And so it goes with Google.
Do a Google search on “Google Groups” and you will see that Google (or Alphabet) has (or had) at least two services called Google Groups. Now we use Google Groups as a part of our Google Apps for… er… G-Suite setup but we don’t use Google Groups where people talk about their hobbies. I think this is the thing that became Google+ before Google killed it, but I really can’t be sure.
The name game can plague any organization, including Avid.
Our network vendor MetaSwitch (if that is still their name), has released a platform of services under the “Accession” label. And some of the individual services use “Accession” in the name.
So we have Accession, Accession Communicator (“a unified services client”), Accession Meetings and Accession Chat.
To get to all of these services–you guessed it–you go to: CommPortal. By MetaSwitch. And the mobile app is conveniently named “CommPortal Accession.”
As far as I can see, that name gives you precisely no clue about what it does. My first guess would be that it provides predictions about who will follow Xi Jinping as leader of China.
So while we’re working hard to use up every permutation of the terms: MetaSwitch, CommPortal, Accession, and Communicator (as I remember from 8th grade math, that would be four factorial), guess what MetaSwitch is up to? Changing the names, of course.
A Single Name to Remember
(Warning: shameless marketing plug ahead.)
When it comes down to it, the only name you really have to remember is “Avid”. If you’re a customer and press the AVID button on your phone, a friendly voice will answer to straighten out any confusion you have with all this technology. (Just the Avid stuff; when it comes to Google’s stuff, you’re on your own.)
