Red Pill Development … what a name …

You certainly think I am going to rip apart that name now, but on the contrary. I think it is pretty good. Here is why:

My first thought was: „Oh my goodness“ and then my marketing brain kicked in. „You idiot“, it said, „have you forgotten everything you learned“. Because I immediately start to think about it, it is a good name. Might it be good or bad at first sight, it sticks. It is really one of the best choices I have seen in a long time.
Choosing a name for your company is never easy. Informica for example, together with the ant works well with Italians. They get it on first sight. German speaking people … oh bugger. I had quite a few variations until now. But the ant works. We get at least high marks for that.
Notes911 wasn’t a bad name, too, but that works only in North America. Here we think about a Porsche 911 and in North America 911 makes you think about an emergency. Do we want that, if we want to sell high quality IT infrastructure? Probably not. But it sounded good and it also stuck on first sight, therefore it worked.
What I don’t like and think seldom works, are fantasy names, which don’t trigger a picture or history in the brains of most of us. There are examples out there, that are in everybody’s mind, but that would be despite the name, but most of them I just can’t remember even after ten times reading them.

Too many „blablabla it service“ or any variation of it out there.

What I don’t believe in either, are three letter abbreviations. They are often confusing.
Imagine an IBM sales visits a farmer and for him IBM means „Ideal Breeding Material“.
Yes, IBM is a bad example, because everybody knows it, but where I live around the corner is an electrical company called IBM. That has already led to confusions. Everybody thought I was ranting about IBM, but I was ranting about IBM.
Three letter abreviations or acronyms are just out. Forget it. They have all been used at least 10 times.
If possible, I don’t even use them in normal speech, because I am so often confused between IT, accounting, controlling and aviation. The later is very good at acronyms and if you ever talk to a bunch of aviation professionals, you might end up with a laughing audience. While you are talking about Virtual Machine Configuration (VMC), they’d rather be flying in VMC (Visual meteorologic conditions).
Red Pill Development – I wouldn’t use RDP, too many police departments with the same name – does not trigger any stupid or otherwise bad picture in my brain. Blue Pill would have, green, too, yellow not, pink … yes, would have. Even after thinking a lot about it, still no bad picture. And with the intention to modernise Notes applications worldwide, the  message works, too. But that’s just my view and since marketing is a very, very precise science (at least a tiny little bit more than astrology), try to prove me wrong.