There's no doubt that the familiar Bitten Apple image
has been an incredibly effective part of Apple's brand identity.
But why are they named Apple in the first place? And how about these other giants?
If you know anything about the history of Apple, you probably know that Steve Jobs was kind of a hippie.
And around the time of Apple's formation, he visited a commune in Oregon,
where they grew, you guessed it, apples and maybe some other stuff.
And it didn't hurt that Jobs was also on a fruitarian diet at the time.
The name Apple also sounded unintimidating and fun,
and Jobs liked it, since choosing a name that started with A
meant they'd appear near the front of the phone book. And remember, this is 1976 we're talking about.
The other big A tech company, Amazon, chose its name for similar reasons,
minus the fruit commune stuff. Jeff Bezos originally named his company Cadabra,
as in Abra Cadabra, the Pokemon. But after someone misheard it as Cadabra,
and a friend suggested his alternative idea of relentless sounded too sinister,
Bezos cracked open the dictionary and picked Amazon, because it would appear at the top of many lists
since it started with A. Bezos also liked the exotic sound of the name,
as well as the fact the massive Amazon river could imply that he had the world's largest selection
of books. Okay.
Google also got its name as a way to suggest a large scale project.
The word Google had already existed,
and means the number you get when you take a one and write 100 zeros behind it.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin liked the name since Google was originally only a search engine,
and they wanted their brand message to be that you could use Google to access
huge amounts of information. They just changed the spelling
to something they liked better. Speaking of liking something better,
Facebook got its start because Mark Zuckerberg was frustrated that the administration at Harvard,
where he was a student, didn't offer an online version of, well, a Facebook.
Traditional Facebooks are just printed directories given out at colleges containing students photos
and a small amount of information to help everyone get to know each other. Facebook, the website, was originally a more detailed,
digitized version of a paper Facebook that Zuck built
because he didn't have any faith in the Harvard administration to do it themselves.
And if you've seen the movie, The Social Network, you might remember that it portrayed Napster founder,
Sean Parker, who later joined Zuck's team, as the person who convinced him to drop the
from thefacebook.com's original name.
The story of Microsoft's name might not seem that interesting.
It's just derived from microcomputer and software.
But did you know they actually wrote the operating system for the first successful home personal computer?
It was called the Altair 8800 and Microsoft OS for it called Altair basic
was successful enough for the fledgling company to make a name for itself back in the late 1970s
as a software developer for smaller systems. Larger mainframes and mini computers
were more common at the time. But after Microsoft struck a deal with IBM
to have their DOS operating system power the original IBM PC, the rest was history
as they still led the way in microcomputer OSes thanks to Windows.
But lest you think we're going to leave you with just the origin stories of the big five,
we have a bonus for those of you that remember PC maker Gateway, which hit its zenith in 2001
after shipping PCs in those familiar cow patterned boxes
all over the US. But why did they use a cow theme in the first place?
Well, Gateway was actually formed in a farmhouse in Sioux City, Iowa.
And the cow box wasn't just a reference to farm life in the Midwest, but also that the founder's family
had been in the cattle trade for generations. And at a time when there were lots of low cost
PC manufacturers cranking out systems that suffered from quality and reliability issues,
the homie farm motif made Gateway seem approachable
and trustworthy, both essential bovine qualities.
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