I have heard many interesting stories of how companies come up with their names. Here’s a pretty exhaustive list of etymologies. My favorite one:

Apple — for the favourite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple orchard. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call the company Apple Computer if his colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 p.m. Apple wanted to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time — which had names such as IBM, DEC, Cincom and Tesseract — in order to get people to use them at home. They looked for a name that supported a brand positioning strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different. Note: Apple had to get approval from the Beatle’s Apple Corps to use the name ‘Apple’ and paid a one-time royalty of $100,000 to McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., a maker of high-end audio equipment, to use the derivative name ‘Macintosh’ (’Mac’).

Google recently struck a deal with Dell to ship new PC’s pre-loaded with Google Desktop and setting Google as the default search engine in IE. Now this is really interesting news.

Didn’t Google recently file an anti-trust suit against Microsoft saying it was using its Desktop monopoly to drive people using IE7 to use its Search Engine.  Now, although this was turned down, what does this tell about Google? I think its beginning to see the threat from Microsoft’s new search technologies. And then the hypocrite deal with Dell.

How valuable is this deal? When Google and MSN (Windows Desktop Search) came out with their desktop search tools, it was meant to improve the search on Windows XP. Search on XP was slow and these tools did add value to the Operating System. However, in Windows Vista, search has improved drastically, (it also happens to be my favorite core feature in Vista.) Why would someone need to install additional software when the inbuilt search in Vista really rocks!!.

This is what I work on. Now that Windows Vista Beta 2 is out, go check out all the cool stuff in it.