> "It was a “political” decision to change project name and I don’t want to talk about it right now. Maybe I’ll blog about it some day. But there was another reason to change the name: I plan to use “Emmet” brand name for other developer products, and they will have nothing with “coding” (so Zen Coding was a bit restrictive name)."

http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/174cyu/emmet_pre...

Never seen any more fleshed-out explanation of the rename. The linked post pretty much repeats the final phrase:

> At first, the project name has been changed. “Emmet” is gonna be brand name for new tools and not all of them will be related to “coding”.