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Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but I hate the name Assistant. It is the most uninspired name imaginable. There's no personality to it and no fun.

When did Google get so boring?

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Hasn't Google always been pretty boring? GMail, Reader, Docs, Sheets, Drive, etc. aren't exactly inspired names either.

Good point, it’s just really noticeable here because the competition is Alexa, Siri, and Bixby. (RIP Cortana)

You don't say "Hey Assistant" though, you say "Hey Google".

Bard calls itself Assistant no?

Much to the chagrin of people named Alexa, Siri and the handful of people named Bixby.

Hey, it's a family name.

Maybe they should have picked historical names that no one uses any more, like Hieronymus.

I’ve mentioned this before, but this is actually a godsend feature in their named product offerings in GCP. Amazon’s product names make no sense and it’s impossible to keep track of everything if you aren’t working with it all the time. Conversely, GCP’s product name is literally just what the product is. Nothing more. Google Cloud DNS vs Route 53. Amazon RDS vs Google CloudSQL. Cloud Pub/Sub vs SNS/SQS. Etc etc

Google CloudSQL Enterprise vs Google CloudSQL Enterprise Plus.

Dataplex, Dataflow, Dataproc, Data Fusion.

BigQuery, Bigtable.

Route 53 is arguably one of the more obviously named AWS offerings.

> Route 53 is arguably one of the more obviously named AWS offerings.

Er, then please humor my ignorance: What is it named for? Because the name means nothing to me, and even some light searching just turns up an actual highway and I still don't see what it would have to do with DNS.

Edit: Okay, I do feel a bit foolish for forgetting that DNS is traditionally port 53, so now half of the name makes sense to me. The other half still seems like a more or less random choice to me.

It's a play on "Route 66":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_66

Route 53 sounds like a service to forward DNS requests to the right DNS server (misapplying L2 naming of "route" for what sounds like proxying). Routing DNS does not sound like an authoritative DNS server.

What next, a HTTP server named Route 80 (or Route 443)?

    ♪ Rekognition, Fraud Detector's cool,
    Wavelength, Blockchain, Well-Architected Tool.
    Though half of 'em start with "Amazon", for reasons we can't guess..
    These are the major services of AWS. ♫

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtJAsvJOlhM

https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/

This is great. This one in particular got me:

> Device Farm - Should have been called Amazon Drawer of Old Android Devices

And another one

> Mobile Analytics - Should have been called Spot on Name, Amazon Product Managers take note

Funny enough you can't even extend Google Assistant (except for smart devices) on Google Home devices anymore.

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-shutting-down-assistant...

It's part of the Google informational branding, which is why you say, "Hey Google" instead of "Hey Alexa" or "Hey Siri".

For HN it seems boring, but for normies it's simply descriptive.

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