Can we all agree 'X' is the worst rebrand in tech history? | Hacker News Reader

Can we all agree 'X' is the worst rebrand in tech history?

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On my list would be the artist Prince, who changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, which was (and still is) not part of Unicode so newspapers weren't able to print it. We ended up with "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" for 7 years. He changed his name back. Maybe there's hope for Twitter, too.

That was kind of a genius move, though, despite its weirdness: performing under a different name gave him leverage in his contract battle with Warner Brothers, but using a name which was neither pronounceable nor printable meant that everyone (effectively) kept calling him "Prince" anyway.

How about these...

  Netflix->Qwikster
  Radio Shack->The Shack
  Homegrocer->Webvan
  Yummy.com->Kozmo.com
  Bokus.com->Boo.com
  Broadcast.com->Yahoo! Broadcast Services

What on earth was the idea behind "Quickster"? Napster?

Spin off of the DVD delivery service. Quickly cancelled.

Looks like this struck a nerve over on Reddit.

Curious to hear HN's take.

There are many cases of bad branding. Note Microsoft's habit of naming things without doing the simplest trademark search.

I used to covet 3 letter domains. If I had a 1 letter domain I would want to use it.

Musk was stuck on that name a long time ago, and it's a way to assert power over his platform and drive away people who won't play along with him but it is a real gift to Bluesky. People might not be so offended by the name if they weren't offended by everything else.

I don't disagree, but this is about *re*branding. Twitter was and is a globally iconic trademark, brand name, and has even entered the lexicon (tweeting, etc), and he flushed that for no obviously good reason. Worse he then replaced that branding with something unremarkable and generic.

I can't think of a similar case at this scale, where SO MUCH was traded in for so little, without any external pressure to do so.

There are a few takes.

One is that Elon Musk was able to curry Donald Trump's favor by destroying Twitter and setting an example. If he gets enough political power out of it to justify the cost it might be rational.

Another is that Elon just was not thinking straight. Like having a midlife crisis, possibly complicated by a neurodivergence. Remember how he tried to back out of the deal when the price collapsed but faced a lot of "external pressure?" Plenty of people spend money on something stupid around age 50, he just has a lot more money than most of us.

Well certainly if this has all been a carefully orchestrated plot to destroy Twitter, then Musk has been achieving his goal with a fairly high degree of plausible deniability. I do have some suspicions which lead me away from that conclusion though, such as the initial circumstances of the purchase, which seemed to be a case of him running his mouth and being held to it by a court. Or at least, being close to that, and then caving in.

Now if that was 5D chess all along, with the high price of the purchase being an investment in this long-term project, then my hat is off to the man.

To the second point I think that's probably closer to the truth. We recently had a post around here about someone contemplating their life after becoming wealthy, and by the time buying Twitter was even on the horizon, Musk had been unbelievably rich. For someone who may have wanted more- political power, attention, acclaim- maybe the combination of mid-life the above factors led him astray.

I can also imagine his alleged drug use could play a factor, the degree to which that kind of thing can derail ANYONE shouldn't be understated. Maybe he just has so much money that buying Twitter and running it into the ground doesn't actually matter; it certainly doesn't impact his lifestyle. Sure the numbers on the page went down, but did he really feel it? Tesla and SpaceX alone ensure his enduring success, not to mention wealth.

It's the fact that he got other investors involved which is mind-boggling to me. On the other hand I can imagine the last man bitterly complaining that we could have made it to Mars if Elon Musk just wasn't so obsessed about Twitter.

That said, there was always something about Twitter that seduced certain people, particularly journalists.

Exactly.

Twitter wasn't just a brand, it was a verb.

You can't 'X' anything, you don't 'X' your thoughts.

Brands that become verbs are rare gems, and Musk swapped his for a letter you can't even easily Google.

I was trying to look up search trends for the thing the other day and it's literally impossible.

Not a tech industry example, but the Royal Mail becoming ‘Consignia’ has to be on the same level (they changed it back pretty quickly; it was kind of at the height of early-noughties branding consultant madness, when quite a few silly short-lived renames were happening).

It should be obvious to everyone by now that Musk has some sort of ape-brained obsession with the letter "X," so discussing the rebrand as if it was some soft of carefully considered marketing decision is a bit silly. The point was to feed a man's ego, and I guess it succeeded in that.

> It should be obvious to everyone by now that Musk has some sort of ape-brained obsession with the letter "X,"

Yeah, it's not just some sort of commercial thing either, it's sad (perhaps even a "tragedeigh") how it gets inflicted on his offspring. (12 total, 3 mothers.)

In particular, he tried to name one "X Æ A-12", but state law required A-Z so he was forced to shorten it to "X", and later tried to name another "Exa Dark Sideræl", which seems like a terrible example of hand-me-downs.

Twitter was a product I saw no need for to begin with. I think the brain dead management decisions he made going in had a bigger impact than the brain dead branding seemingly done by a terrible agency or one that was just staffed with yes men (same difference). I am more than mildly disturbed that it hasn't gone completely under yet. The fact that so many poor quality name brands can underproduce and stay viable has clearly shaken any faith i had in market balancing or other tenets of Capitalism, leaving me certain we live in hell.

I feel it's gonna correct soon. Just make sure you're not overinvested in the wrong places.

Till now. Never underestimate idiots.

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