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Comment by couchand | Hacker News Reader

This is ugly, and probably much more of a disclosure than most of these companies were expecting.

That being said, everyone railing about "unreleased product names" seem to have forgotten this is exactly the purpose of code names: they're pretty much expected to be leaked at some point, but it's okay since the stakes are intentionally low. Use code names!

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Except it will forever be called that. A quick example is where I work we have a 'new product x billing' system and it is still called the 'new' one five years later when it is also the only one.

There is some debate internally over whether 'new' refers to 'new as in old' or 'new' as in the opposite of 'renewal'. No one knows why it is called what it is called.

The solution is to use a name that will never get pass legal, like a trademark of another company.

That's what Sun did with Swing, which was originally called Kentucky Fried Chicken[0] internally.

[0] https://blogs.oracle.com/thejavatutorials/entry/why_is_swing...

In this case, it is an internal project so it never would have touched legal.

That's why you give it a nonsense name. Windows XP was codenamed 'Whistler'. Nobody calls it Whistler (except when reminiscing about the warez scene). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_name

I came very close to including a "Longhorn" example in my original comment.

This reminds me of so many times doing ad-hoc manual ETL with co-workers, e-mailing back and forth files with names like "accounts-final.csv", "accounts-really-final.csv", "accounts-this-is-the-last-one-for-sure.csv", and inevitably descending into obscenity.

Except it will forever be called that.

Not as long as you replace it with a new name. Your "new" problem doesn't sound like a problem of stickiness, it's a problem of never giving it an actual name in the first place, or when it was rolled out.

Look at the Orbis and Durango for names widely used in when the press was rumor-mongering that went away as soon as the devices were revealed. We've even changed our internal code names on projects without much fanfare, as long as the name change represents a milestone in the project or a difference in audience it's easy to cut over.

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