Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

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Not to be an ass but...

It so far appears not to be hurting them. In the slightest.

This "warning" comes from the HN crowd every time something is posted about CockroachDB. I think it's time to LET IT GO.

I for one, completely disagree with you but that's because I have a different understanding of the relationship between the business side and engineering. We are already looked at as eccentric and strange people, rarely if ever has an absurd technology name caused issue.

Someone talking about "cockroach" is equivalent to talking about "unicorns" or "git." Its considerably less offensive than talk of "masters" and "slaves." If you think this is such a problem for you, then work on your salesmanship as I wouldn't hesitate to talk to other departments or investors about this product.

I was a CTO up until I took medical leave this past October and I cannot stress how important salesmanship is to the role. I think your examples of other databases are hyperbole and not the point. You want them to be equivalent but they aren't. This comes down to what you can sell in your organization and if there is merit to it, then selling it should not be a problem.

One last point is other departments don't give a shit what the database technology is called unless it's something to put on their CV. Just call it the "database" as they most certainly will.

> It so far appears not to be hurting them. In the slightest.

I feel like that is tough to judge because the public has only known them by one name as far as I know. If they switched to this name from another name and saw no difference then we could surmise that the name has had no affect.

I disagree that it's tough to judge but that's because they've raised a considerable amount of capital ($53 million over three rounds):

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cockroach-labs#/enti...

The end goal of a company is not to raise venture funding. So you cannot use "they raised capital" as proof that their name isn't a problem. Their name absolutely will hurt their adoption. Maybe the product is good enough that they'll still be successful, but if so, you would expect them to be even more successful if they didn't have such an off-putting name.

Did I say it was the end goal? It's merely a metric for a young company. What it means is that enough people have decided that there is a future that current revenue, growth, and expectations are being met or substantial. Raising $53 million dollars isn't easy. So I can say capital raised is a metric on which to base a judgement.

Your statement that it "absolutely will hurt adoption" is unqualified and nothing but opinion. And what exactly is "more successful?"

The handful of people who won't try this because of the name won't matter to their bottom line. If it's good enough then for even a large majority of those they'll end up using it anyway.

You're missing the point. Saying "they raised capital" is not a good counterargument to "it will hurt adoption". Your response would be a good counter to "they will never raise capital" or "no one will use this".

You can't know how many VCs didn't fund due to the name or how many tech decision-makers at companies will pass on this product due to the name. That being said, I doubt it will be/was significant in any case.

> And what exactly is "more successful?"

Pretty much any reasonable definition will do. For example, higher adoption is one metric that can be used to define success.

> Your statement that it "absolutely will hurt adoption" is unqualified and nothing but opinion.

It's an opinion that a lot of people share, judging from the HN threads I've seen about CockroachDB. And really, I shouldn't need to defend the idea that having a name that disgusts people will hurt adoption. It's just common sense. The only real question is how much damage will the name do? The better the product is, the more people will forgive things like bad names, but there will definitely be at least some level of damage.

In addition, if there's multiple products in the same category that are fairly close in quality, then subjective things like names will matter more. Maybe CockroachDB is significantly better than the alternatives right now (I really have no idea; this product category isn't something I know anything about), but if so, surely it won't remain "significantly better" forever. Other products will catch up, or other products will be created to compete, and we'll end up with several products that are similar, and once again, naming will become more important.

And finally, you're completely ignoring the fact that a lot of decisions about tech stack aren't actually made by technical people. They're frequently made by managers rather than engineers. And when the decision is made by non-technical people, marketing (e.g. name) is very important. Heck, even when the product is made by engineers, marketing is important, because that's how you convince the engineers to spend the time investigating the product to see if it lives up to its claims or does what they need.

Speaking as an engineer, if tomorrow I suddenly have the need for a cloud-native NewSQL database, I'm probably not even going to look at CockroachDB, simply based on the name, unless someone else convinces me that it's clearly superior. I find the name very off-putting and I'd rather not be confronted with the mental imagery of cockroaches any time I use the product.

You don't know that they wouldn't have raised more with a better name.

> I think it's time to LET IT GO.

It will never be let go, because each new person is a new interaction with the system that prompts the same point again.

It's like those '*porn' subreddits. You can explain and explain 'till you're blue in the face why the subs are so named, but there will always be some sniggering discussion when it is introduced to new users no matter how much you try and silence or control for it, because it's based on a natural response.

Capitalize all you like, but that's just how people work. :)

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