Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by rhubarbtree | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

rhubarbtree

Incidentally, Zoom seems a terrible name for a video conferencing app - anyone know why they chose it?

View on HN

The Wikipedia editors know, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Communications#Early_year... :

> In May 2012, the company changed its name to Zoom, influenced by Thacher Hurd's children's book Zoom City.

It cites https://vator.tv/2020-03-26-when-zoom-was-young-the-early-ye... where Jim Scheinman says:

> “I loved this fun little book as much as my kids, and hoped to use the name someday for the perfect company that embodied the same values of creativity, exploration, happiness, and trust. And the name works perfectly with a product that connects us visually to one another and that always works so fast and seamlessly.“

The reference to "Zoom City" is from an article published in 2020. It seems like a remarkably fitting ret-conning of what is probably a very boring branding decision.

What would be the point of ret-conning some other decision?

> In May 2012, the company changed its name to Zoom, influenced by Thacher Hurd's children's book Zoom City.

To save people the agony of visiting Wikipedia for themselves to check, changed from Saasbee. Which, good call.

It is a one-syllable word, easy to pronounce in many languages, quite distinct from other words and brands, and can easily be turned into a verb.

Why does that make it a good name for video in particular?

Why does it have to be -- ever "googled" something? ;-)

Cameras often have zoom lenses for close ups.

Fits great with the idea of bringing people together with video.

Verbing your nouns is a great way to lose your trademark.

When they came up with it that would be a best case scenario.

Are there any actual recent examples of this? The major examples I've always heard are solidly in the 20th century. It's not like Google has had any problem holding their trademark.

Kleenex and Xerox were both (somewhat) recently in danger of loosing theirs. They both pulled pretty big campaigns to un-verb their trademarks. Google still has a bunch of other products that people are familiar with, so they are in less danger of loosing theirs right now, but give it some time (like 50 years, not 10) and it may happen, especially if they get broken up for being a monopoly. (Which has been mentioned)

I'm usually a big proponent of longer-term corporate thinking, but deciding your name around problems you might have five decades after becoming a household name is a little much.

It’s all relative. Is “Webex” better? “Skype”? “BlueJeans”??

Fair. They are worse.

Especially Skype, which is getting shit down. In favour of Teams, which is so much worse it’s hard to describe.

That's a really fantastic typo. I know it was unintentional, but still...

We use Skype and it is worst atm. Skype freezes every minute.

BlueJeans is one of those absolutely catastrophically stupid branding decisions. There's just........ no justification. It's confusing at best, and abbreviated as BJ at worst.

Subjective, Zoom is a pretty cool name

One guess - fast video.

Added context: Zoom delivered a step change in video conferencing quality for the many, vs the few, and in a lot of ways did seem to force others to be better.

During the pandemic many people used zoom more than their cell phones.

I immediately agreed with this, but at the same time it’s not “fast” is it? It’s higher quality or more reliably, something like that. But emotionally I agree it does feel “faster”.

Fair point - it's smoother video that gives a better quality experience.

The speed of starting a call sometimes could take a bit more but once established was higher quality than the alternatives at the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com