What is the most poorly named application out there?

Question

What application, language, or other software product name makes you cringe every time you hear it; or was just an astoundingly bad choice from a marketing perspective?

One name per answer, vote up the worst.

Answer 1

GIMP. It's hard to say GIMP with a straight face, and convince somebody that it's a good product if they've never heard of it before.

Answer 2

Pick any in the K(de) universe.

Answer 3

PMS - Policy Management System, except that's not what I think of every time I hear/say the acronym.

Answer 4

Microsoft Works

:)

Answer 5

EtheRape has a pretty bad name.

Answer 6

Apple's iTunes. Yes it does manage music, but anymore it does much more.

Answer 7

inclued has got to be near the top on my list.

Answer 8

FCKeditor is another really bad name for a product.

Answer 9

Do websites count? Experts Exchange even sounds bad if you say it fast.

Answer 10

TortoiseSVN

yes, I realize it's because we're using it vs a large, and I mean large, and long-standing repository, and I do realize that the name is not lying to me, but still...

Answer 11

OpenOffice.org - honestly, drop the .org, that's 4 bytes my hard drive could be using for something fun...

Answer 12

• word
• windows
• sql server

they're generic words, not names. it should be illegal to steal meaning like that

Answer 13

FogBugz

It's bad enough without a nickname :)

Answer 14

Another product, one I've seen demoed, had a much better name before HP bought it: Hewlett Packard Operations Orchestrator, or H-POO. It used to be Opsware Process Automation System (PAS).

Answer 15

LaTeX - you need to be careful when searching for help...

Answer 16

ViaGrafix

They used to make instrucional videos for computer-related stuff. Imagine newscasters walking you through how to build an HTML document. It was agonizing. The highlight was the day Viagra was released to the public, and suddenly everyone started referring to this company as "ViagraFix".

Which was actually an applicable name. The videos seemed to go on forever.

Answer 17

PikiPimp

Answer 18

Microsofts

Critical

Update

Notification

Tool

..now the Critical Update Notification Utility 'nuff said. That lasted about month.

Answer 19

Harvest

a very large, and very bad revision-control system. The name sounds like a low-budget horror movie. Using the software is best characterized by:

"Software by Stephen King, User Interface by Salvador Dali"

Answer 20

My pet peeve has always been paint.net.

Answer 21

ITITS

Information Technology Invoice Tracking System

was-is used to track contractor billing and payment.

Answer 22

Acrobat. When it was released, MacWeek awarded the "Feet of Clay Award" to Adobe marketing for waiting forever to select a name and then picking something meaningless.

Answer 23

The C and D programming languages always bug me because it is so hard to search for things about them. It's like giving something the acronym T.H.E. for something. Same goes for the X window system and for .net in general.

Answer 24

My favorite for the longest time was Microsoft's embedded operating system.

WinCE. Pronounced "Wince".

Answer 25

I know these are codecs and not applications, but I think it's hard to disagree with the fact that they could have chosen better names:

1) Ogg Theora 2) Ogg Vorbis

Answer 26

Dog pile (nothing like proclaiming your product to be s**t).

Answer 27

Visual Age for Java

slow clap

Answer 28

Maybe I missed it but I'm surprised no one mentioned Microsoft Bob.

Answer 29

LLBLGEN PRO

Answer 30

Cuil. I knew it was doomed as soon as I figured out how it was meant to be pronounced.

Answer 31

.NET.

Utterly meaningless, and impossible to search for.

Answer 32

http://www.libpr0n.com/

Its the library firefox uses to process its images.

I'm really not kidding.

There's also the handy library "confuse"

Which is a Configuration Parser Library.

And then theres LibEET, from the enlightenment family. The joke only shows up at link time with

 gcc   -leet

Answer 33

R

It's a statistics package. I think the name is some kind of play on S which was a similar preceding thing, but I find myself repeating it every time I bring it up to someone who's not familiar with it.

Answer 34

Naming one product after a substring contained in another product's name is rarely a good idea, especially when they do almost the same thing. The only way this could be more confusing is if the IBM version had used the word "Connector":

• Microsoft Office Outlook Connector
• Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for IBM Lotus Domino
• IBM Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO)

Answer 35

The Unix "kill" command is my favorite - kill is used to send messages to processes (including, but not limited to "kill yourself" messages).

Answer 36

Another trio of product names that still confuse people to this day:

• DIVX
• DivX ;-)
• DivX

Answer 37

The MS-DOS recover command had the opposite effect if you didn't know what it was for.

Answer 38

iPod,
do you pod too?

YouTube,
got problems with my tube? btw, you forgot the 'r' ...

MySQL,
it's not yours 'kay?

phpMyAdmin?
err, how do i php your admin?

.. okay not too funny though .. sorry :|

Answer 39

I know it's not strictly a product - maybe it falls under the category of language - but I think "JSON" (Javascript Object Notation) is a really weak name.

Try holding a debate about it when there's someone on the team called Jason.

Answer 40

I worked on a software called ZEUS. God of gods... The most pretentious name I´ve ever seen.

Answer 41

Anything with 'Smart', 'Intelli', 'My' or 'i' in its name.

Makes me want to puke.

'Mobile Partner' for extablishing GSM data connections (Yes, in windows land you need to have vendor specific application littering all over you system32 to accomplish this). I really don't want to have affairs with My Mobile Partners, at least not with the Huawai E220 ones.

Why not "My Little Secret Mobile Lover(TM)"?

Or 'My iSmart IntelliPartner Enterprise Edition'.

Answer 42

4D.

I remember searching for help about it on the Internet (Which was already difficult since it's kind of obscure) and finding memory dumps...

Answer 43

IIS it's so poor.

Answer 44

CLAiT. It's an IT qualification available in Europe. It stands for Computer Literacy and Information Technology. It may look fine on the surface but two things baffle me,

1. The make the "i" lowercase when it really should be the "a"
2. The A shouldn't be there - it represents "and" and conjunctions shouldn't be acronymised

So anyone who has done the course all have CLIT's. Apparently that's the reason for the strange name. I guess it was funnier when I was younger!

Answer 45

form1.exe ?

Answer 46

FastDic: Firefox Add-on

Answer 47

Windows Me?

I don't like Apple TV either, everytime I bring up people (who don't know what it is) think it's an actual TV made by Apple.

Some above reminded me of ECDL "European Computer Driving Licence". Awful name for what is a simple IT qualification. Makes it sound more important than it is (i.e it isn't important at all)

Answer 48

The Coq programming language/proof assistant is pretty poorly named (if you don't live in France).

Answer 49

Unix. Why would I want the name of my operating system to sound exactly the same as a word for castrated men (eunuchs)?

Answer 50

RSSBandit

otherwise known as arsebandit...

Answer 51

Yet Another Whatever

Answer 52

My company uses an IP phone setup by quite a popular provider. I can't recall whose product it is as I am away from the office right now. Anyway, the main Windows-based user application is called 'Desktop'. This creates much confusion.

Answer 53

Bicycle Repair Man, a Refactoring Tool for Python

JDIC, JDesktop Integration Components. I'm not sure if this was intentional

Answer 54

brainfuck, a programming language

Answer 55

Microsoft Oxite. Where I come from we read the 'x' as 'sh'. Now say with me: Oshite.

Answer 56

NU*DIST, now happily called NVivo.

Answer 57

LLBLGen Pro

It's brilliant, but what a name...

Answer 58

Well, not an application, but a gadget that is called:

A nother

S mall and

U nique

R obot

F rom

O berpfaffenhofen

Answer 59

Java - ruins my morning coffee experience.

Answer 60

Penis Size-O-Matic 1.1.2

http://wareseeker.com/Home-Leisure/penis-size-o-matic-1.1.2.zip/311435

Answer 61

FrontRange Systems' HEAT - Help Desk ticketing system that sounds unsanitary at times. Typically referred to by co-workers as follows:

"Are you in HEAT?"

"You need to be in HEAT before you can get any attention from the help desk staff."

etc.

Answer 62

A credit card processing company in the UK is called

CommIdea

say it out quickly, and sounds like chlymdia, always interesting in meetings.

Answer 63

Alcohol 120% is forbidden in Iran :)) no offense, just making the point...

Answer 64

Unless I've missed it, 'git' hasn't been mentioned. Perhaps it doesn't mean the same in the USA as it does in the UK.

Skizz

EDIT: I just looked it up and it does indeed appear to be a British-English slang.

Answer 65

SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model)

Answer 66

David Pollak's Goat Rodeo

Answer 67

Anything starting with:

* i - iPhone, iTunes, iPod, ...
* k - kMail, kOrganizer, kNode, kAddressBook ...
* programming language names with less than four letters: C,C++,C#,F#,R ...
* as well as those that are already used words: Ruby, Python ...
* anything with attributes in their names: Visual ..., Active ...,

The list goes on ...

But then again, what's in a name ?

Answer 68

I've got to go with Bing!

Answer 69

For me it's Immediacy CMS - anyone who has had the misfortune to try and develop for it will know what a misnomer that is...

Answer 70

Whilst it's a great product, Bugzilla has a poorly thought out name. It is actually a really useful issue-reporting tool, where issues could be actual bugs, but more-often-than-not are feature requests or questions about functionality etc.

However, as soon as you tell a client you will set them up a Bugzilla account to report issues, the name just gives the impression that your product is going to be riddled with errors. It just doesn't inspire confidence or give a good impression.

Answer 71

I'm not sure this counts as it's not an application but I was working on a piece of code once where I came across a class called AddressList.

Upon closer inspection, the class was nothing whatsoever to do with addresses, not a list or collection. No connection whatsoever to either Address or List

I guess before (stupid) people used IDEs, they'd re-use an existing file containing a class they no longer needed and just stick new functionality in there. Of course Java mandates that the class and file names are the same, so they kept the old class name. Pfft!

Answer 72

There's also the 'WMD' text editor right here on Stack Overflow.

Answer 73

Microsoft Windows ME

Answer 74

SourceSafe. No it isn't.

Answer 75

I hate that most Python modules' names start with py. Some are nice and creative, like pyjamas and pygments, but most of them don't add anything to the name. I don't need to tell apart non-Python modules while I'm programming in Python!

Answer 76

The programming language Lisp.

I am not a Lisp programmer, but it naming a language after a speech impediment just doesn't sound right. And I've heard it said a few times (only half-jokingly), that it's one of the reasons Lisp is so disliked.

Answer 77

Clean and Nice have always seemed to be particularly unfortunate choices of language names. Hard to google.

Answer 78

WIMP (windows iis mysql php)

Answer 79

Zune.
It actually means 'fuck' in Hebrew.

Answer 80

Qtpfsgui

Qtpfsgui is an open source HDR workflow tool (An open source alternative to Photomatix).

The Etymology of the name is:

Qt: A cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of GUI programs (in which case it is known as a widget toolkit)

pfs: pfstools package is a set of command line programs for reading, writing and manipulating high-dynamic range (HDR) images and video frames.

GUI: Graphical User Interface

The name of the program starts with six consecutive consonants which is technically impossible to pronounce!

Answer 81

Almost all custom software we write is destined to be called either:

• [name] Manager
• [name] Management System

Hypothetical e.g.:

• Bug Manager
• Time Management System
• Inventory Management System
• Keyboard Manager

The suffix's are redundant, and i wish they could have unique names, e.g.:

• Bug Splat
• Time Clock
• Wheresit
• Clack

Answer 82

Clarity - if you've ever used this program, you know that clarity is the very last thing you would get from it. Worst GUI ever, worst database ever and worst thought out project management process ever!

Answer 83

Brainf**k Programming Language

Answer 84

Moodle

It used to stand for Modular Object Orient Distributed Learning Environment. Unfortunately it only holds true for the Learning Environment part. It is neither modular nor object oriented.

Plus everything around it is oodle-ized.

When you have to say it in a meeting you sound like an idiot.

Answer 85

LAME

Summary from Sourceforge.net:

LAME is a high-quality MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder licensed under the LGPL.

Answer 86

Microsoft Works.

Answer 87

Any shareware with "Pro" in its name, they sound very money-hungry and lame.

Answer 88

I'd say that the company that Excel's at Access'ing the Outlook out of the Windows in your Office to make a Power Point wins. Word, man.

(apologies for apostrophe abuse)

Answer 89

In the category not-entirely-aptly named:

PlaysForSure (Microsoft, 2004)

A logo program for services and devices that used Windows Media DRM.

Answer 90

Extremely long product names are poor:

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Limited Numbered Signature Edition

It's just too long (and MWVUULNSE doesn't pronounce that easily)

Answer 91

OpenVMS

VMS stands for Virtual Memory System

It's all but open source.

Answer 92

Kijiji. That's a lame name.

Answer 93

How about company names? I think anything with the word "ass" in it is HORRIBLE.

Assetize Assetain

are two that come to mind. COMEON!

Answer 94

Anything with a name that is not google-compatible, either by containing lots of non-alphanumberic characters or by being a commonly used word where most results will give you unrelated things.

Answer 95

Not an application directly but this topic reminded me of this so...

Being in the Java land I'm already used to that a lot of the stuff available starts with J; just to give a few examples there's JDOM, JAXP, JSF, JMeter...well you get the point.

Now, for those who don't know, Groovy is a dynamic JVM language based on Java which allows for a very fast product development using Java-like syntax with closures and all that juicy stuff.

So on to the naming horror: Groovy nowadays supports class-specific dependencies through a system they call "The Groovy Adaptable Packaging Engine" or "Groovy Advanced Packaging Engine". Both of these would be Gape which sounds funny although a bit troublesome so they clearly thought for a moment that they should have a more friendly name for the system and decided to take the 'r' from Groovy and came up with Grape.

Combine this with the info in first paragraph and the notion that Groovy is meant for Java developers and I guess you can already see how people usually read that name...

Answer 96

grep

According to WikiPedia : global / regular expression / print

Answer 97

Windows Phone Seven Series. 'nuff said.

Answer 98

There's a linux front-end for MPD (Music Player Daemon) called ncmpcpp! Although it's a great program, couldn't they think up a name that's even remotemly pronounceable?

Answer 99

Not exactly a product so you could as well ban me for life, but the famous <conio.h> made our university classes funnier.
See, in Spain, (I'm Argentinian but we do speak in spanish) "Coño" means cunt, and it sounds just like conio.

Answer 100

screen. As in, GNU screen. An immensely useful tool, but for the uninitiated, doing a search for screen isn't going to get them anywhere.

Answer 101

PHP, which stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor"

this is crazy...

Answer 102

Jiglu. Or any of those goofy, awful "Web 2.0" startup names.

Answer 103

Each and everytime I hear someone from work say the word 'POCO' I go into a deep rage over the disease of making confusing acronyms for simple concepts.

Answer 104

I'm surprised no one has mentioned fsck... Useful as a covert curse, but wicked hard to pronounce.

Answer 105

The "Truth In Advertising" award goes to:

Microsoft PowersHell