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28 April 2006

Nintendo have announced that the name of their forthcoming console – previously codenamed Revolution – is Wii.

Wii

Pronounced we.

I’m not sure if I can think of any company in the world that would be audacious enough to name their forthcoming product Wii; if you compare it to its competitors, Sony’s Playstation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, it really stands out (in fact, both of those names are pretty awful).

I think that while obviously in some quarters – particular teenage American ones – the name sounds ridiculous, in time I think it will really work. It’s also worth remembering that teenage boys is not who Nintendo is really targeting with Wii – it’s after the true mass market, one that’s mostly untouched by Sony and Microsoft. Look at the success of Nintendogs on the DS, for example (which has sold something like 2 Million copies).

It all comes down to a larger trend for poor names; Microsoft is particularly good at taking good codenames, and then ditching them at the last minute (witness Origami turning to UMPC, and Monad turning to PowerShell), and the corporate world at large is really no better. Even Apple succumbs to name-itis every now and then; for every Aperture (which is a brilliant name), there’s an iWeb (the ‘i’ is supposed to stand for ‘internet’, so that’s ‘internetWeb’).

At least Nintendo are doing something different.

From: Articles

28 April 2006