Behind The Name

Yahoo 
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in
his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person
who is repulsive in appearance and action and is
barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David
Filo selected the name because they considered
themselves yahoos.

Xerox 
The Greek root "xer" means dry. The inventor, Chestor
Carlson, named his product Xerox as it was dry
copying, markedly different from the then prevailing
wet copying.

Sun Microsystems 
Founded by four Stanford University buddies, Sun is the acronym
for Stanford University Network.

Sony
From the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and
'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a
bright youngster.

SAP 
"Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing", formed by four
ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Application s/Projects' group of IBM

Red Hat
Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!

Oracle
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a
consulting project for the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA). The code name for the project was
called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to
give answers to all questions or something such).

Motorola 
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when
his company started manufacturing radios for
cars. The popular radio company at the time was
called Victrola.

Microsoft
It was coined by Bill Gates to represent the company
that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware.
Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed
later on.

Lotus
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from the
lotus position or 'padmasana.' Kapor used to be a
teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi.

Intel
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new
company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already
trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle
for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Hewlett-Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide
whether the company they founded would be called
Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email via the web from a computer
anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail
service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail
as it included the letters "html" - the programming language used to write web pages.
It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casings.

Google
The name started as a jockey boast about the amount of
information the search-engine would be able to search.
It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the
number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After
founders - Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and
Larry Page presented their project to an angel
investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google

Cisco
The name is not an acronym but an abbreviation
of San Francisco. The company's logo reflects
its San Francisco name heritage. It represents a
stylized Golden Gate Bridge.

Apple Computers
Favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was
three months late in filing a name for the
business, and he threatened to call his company
Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't
suggest a better name by 5 o'clock.

Apache
It got its name because its founders got started by
applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd
daemon. The result was 'A PAtCHy' server - thus, the
name Apache.

Adobe
The name came from the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.