Re: I am being interviewed by OReilly

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Vince Vielhaber wrote:

> That's not what was said. Some people can play it over and over and
> still not be able to pronounce it. Same with my last name and yours
> for all that matter. But that's no reason to change it, or are you
> willing to change your last name so all of use can pronounce it?

Woah! I gather you are a techie, and don't care much about marketing, hmm?

Personally, if I were trying to market myself to a broader audience
than I have now, I would almost certainly change my name to something
less confusing, more memorable and easier to pronounce. And many others
agree with me, judging by the number of celebrities and wanna-be
celebrities that have done so. Not to mention products that have been
rebranded every decade or three to change with the changing tastes of
the target market.

A lot of the things that market-oriented folks want to do (such as
changing a name) may seem stupid and useless to you, as a techie, but
that doesn't mean that they don't work. It just means that they don't
work on people like you, who comprise a very small market. (I'm in that
market too, by the way; I just recognise that most people do not make
decisions the way I do about what to purchase and/or use.)

I don't know if you were one of the ones complaining about postgres not
being so popular (as, say, compared to MySQL), but if you want it to be
more popular, trying to stop the folks interesting in marketing it from
marketing it is not the way to help things.

> Tell me, do you pronounce "Linux" the same way Linus does or some
> other way? Should "Linux" be changed to something that has a more
> common pronunciation? And yes, I know how Linus pronounces it, I've
> heard it - someone sent me an mp3 of it.

This is a quite different situation. Linux is almost never misspelled,
or broken up into two incorrect pieces, and Linux is dead easy to
pronounce in English, even if it's not the same ("correct") Finnish
pronounciation. The incorrect pronounciation of "Linux" is no worse
a problem than your undoubtedly incorrect pronounciation of "Nissan,"
"Toyota", "Tokyo", and many other Japanese words (or the Japanese
pronounciation of many popular foreign names).

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC