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Comment by rzzzt | Hacker News Reader

The company name should be highlighted in the text somehow; in its current form, it sounds like an eloquent Gollum's internal monologue in my head. I found myself having to re-read quite a few sentences.

"We has gone from unicorn to distressed asset"

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I like how some websites format company and person names in a very specific way. Either like [We] or having them bold or in a different colour. Especially in this era of “name your company after a really common daily-use word for maximum confusion and ungoogleability!”.

> Especially in this era of “name your company after a really common daily-use word for maximum confusion and ungoogleability!”.

Don’t forget maximizing the ability to trademark the simple, common daily word and go after anyone using a variant of it when you’re big enough to do so.

Similarly, Yahoo insists on being called "Yahoo!" in their branding guidelines, but it just makes the writer look like an idiot. There's no reason you have to stick to the chosen name of a corporation if the chosen name is cutesy and dumb. :-)

Yes, and similarly for Apple’s insistence that you not use “the” with iPhone. (Which Nintendo also did for the Wii.)

I've noticed this, bht ahve never been sure why. Maybe some marketing guy can offer insight here? I don't see this making a huge difference. It seems as though they want it referred to as a proper noun? I guess maybe it increases significance or something?

Foreigners, does Apple do this in other languages, too?

They've tried it in France but it didn't work at all and was joked upon (among other things). They now use a pronoun in marketing materials. Weirdly enough, they insist on using 'iPhone' as a proper noun in Canadian French.

Oh wow, they tried that in French, a language that more strongly demands attaching "the" (le/la) to everything?

Btw, there was an interesting case where the inclusion of "the" in the French version caused conflict:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...

(And I think you mean a definite article rather than a pronoun?)

And on the contrary, it was rumored that Microsoft named Xbox One so that people would start calling it "the One." To my knowledge, this never worked, but instead "xbone" stuck better.

That's why The Register headlines about Yahoo turned out how they did, with every single word gaining a "!". Which is now a trope in itself.

I googled what you are talking about. Check this intercept article on Google: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/09/yahoo_data_thaft/

That's not the Intercept, nor about Google, unless I'm missing something.

The net effect really is delightful:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/Tag/yahoo

WE instead of We would help a great deal. Had the same issues the last four articles I read.

WE is a clothing retailer

WeWTF worked pretty well in part one :)

Kind of what happens when you name your company something insanely stupid like “We”.

And yes I read your last sentence in Gollum’s voice and it was perfect. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii

With the Wii, though, there were two important differences: you could call it "The Nintendo Wii", and it's spelled differently than the English word.

No problem. We can call this We The We We.

Big difference between a company and a product, though. Company names are typically the grammatical subject of a sentence, whereas product names are often the grammatical object. We the pronoun is used as a grammatical subject, so it's not confusable with objects.

Plus the spelling is different on Wii, so it's not confusable in written text regardless.

that is the joke

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