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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

People wanting to download a Twitter clone and downloading a Slack clone by mistake. Both with a bland generic name. Describes the state of tech pretty well right now.

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In the past we never had generic names in tech, like windows or apple

Indeed. Nothing is as specific as that disk operating system.

Someone should start a company to sell business machines internationally.

Would be smart if they broke into integrated electronics.

Some savvy capitalist should start a shipping company and name it after a country in the east

And they should go to the oracle to have someone read their palm.

Maybe this time they can avoid enabling the holocaust

In the 1950s every company was literally called General X. General Electric, General Motors, and General Dynamics are still huge today

And it wasn't only in the US either, lots of big French companies were called Compagnie générale de X since the 1800s. Many modern behemoths such as Veolia, Transdev, Vivendi, Vinci trace their origins to such companies (sometimes the same - Compagnie générale des eaux was massive at some point).

Or "Fabrique Nationale"

I love how many banks are named First something or 1st something.

Less so now, the past it seemed like it was almost all local banks.

I think this actually had to with the specific legal framework some of those banks were chartered under.

"National banks" were established under a specific charter type, which included the authority to issue paper currency under certain Federally-sanctioned conditions, so a lot of them took names that focused on them being National Banks. Thus, you got a lot of First National Bank of Pacoima, Second National of Pacoima, Merchants National, Totally Not A Scam National, etc.

Even though that ended in the 1930s, the precedent for a lot of "First" and "National" names has persisted.

Absolutely love that naming convention. It’s so vague and specific at the same time. Like someone’s asked them what they do and they’ve just waved their hands vaguely and said, ‘oh stuff, you know, with electricity, that sort of thing’.

The best is General Magic, whoever thought of that should’ve taken the rest of the week off.

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