Great Companies & Their Names

Mercedes: This was actually financier's daughter's name.

Adobe: This came from the name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the
house of founder John Warnock.

Apple Computers: It was the favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobbs.He was three months late for filing a name for the business, and he threatened to
call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a
better name by 5 0'clock.

CISCO: It is not an acronym as popuraily believed.Its short for San
Francisco.

Compaq: This name was formed by using COMp, for computer and PAQ to denote a small integral object.

Corel: The name was derived from the founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland Research Laboratory.

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 programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred
to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

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

Intel: Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Microsoft: Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.

Motorola: Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

ORACLE: Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.

Sony: It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

SUN : Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer;
Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.

LG: Combination of two popular Korean brands Lucky and Goldstar.

Red Hat: Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!

SAP: "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by 4
ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/Projects
' group of IBM. SCO (UNIX): From Santa Cruz Operation. The company's office was in Santa Cruz.

UNIX: When Bell Labs pulled out of MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing System), which was originally a joint Bell/GE/MIT project, Ken
Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs wrote a simpler version of the
OS.They needed the OS to run the game Space War which was compiled under MULTICS.It was called UNICS - UNIplexed operating and Computing System by Brian Kernighan. It was later shortened to UNIX.

Xerox: The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say `dry' (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet
copying).The Greek root `xer' means dry.

Yahoo!: The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book
'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance
and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo
selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.