Be Quackable (or Googleable if you haven't kept up with the times).

I'd actually prefer to avoid either the utterly boring generic name (in the sense of something that's not readily searchable or differentiable), or something overly descriptive: "Facebook" may well prove to be a liability in another ten years (assuming the company survives), if the present "social network" mania has faded or moved on, and the company with it.

Other than that: beware of short acronyms which might be adopted by others. "SAS" is an airline, a shoe company, a special operations force, a hard drive specification (now obsolete), an environmental activist group, a homonym for an online application provisioning technology ... and the name of the largest privately held software company in the US.

The worst possible case I can think of is "R", a statistics software package, by way of command abbreviations, UNIX traditions, and free-software in-jokes. "S" was the stats package for AT&T's UNIX, a quickly typeable command a'la 'ls', 'rm', 'cc', 'vi', etc. "R" was "iterated S" as a free software project. It actually survives pretty well as a search term, though only for its popularity -- trying to break out now would likely be difficult.

Microsoft isn't a bad name (though overly descriptive), but many of its product names ("Word", "Windows", "Server", "SQL Server", "Outlook", "Exchange") are hard to differentiate. Even its most significant product offering, NT, was at the time predominantly associated with a Canadian telecoms concern, since bankrupted.

Though brief, IBM is spectacularly resilient, as is its description, "International Business Machines". SUN, the Stanford University Network, did pretty well. "Apple", despite being relatively generic, is distinctive in its space. I'm partial to companies named for people, if only indirectly: RSA was an exception in the IT space, though New Relic is an anagram of its founder and CEO's name, Lew Cerne. If nothing else it suggests a possible long-term investment by the founder, though there's some risk: Debian outlived Deborah and Ian's marriage.

"Google" as a made-up word has survived pretty well, and can even transition (assuming trust in the company does) outside search. "Cisco" for routers strikes me as good. "Salesforce.com" seems to me to be ripe for a renaming eventually, as "dot com" anything still carries (for me at least) a taint of the get-rich-quick schemes of the late 1990s. I see either "Salesforce" or "SFC" in its future. "Peoplesoft" was similarly limited. "Oracle" took its name from a government project. Most of these are robust names, though each effectively created its brand image by filling an empty vessel. On the other hand, "Computer Associates" is so generic (and tainted as "where software goes to die) as to be pejorative.

Outside heavy manufacturing or specific service industries requiring specialization (e.g., transport, airlines, hospitality), I'd tend to avoid a very strong product tie. "General Motors" has worked fairly well, "Xerox" isn't too bad. Software and services tend to be more ... fluid.

"Lenovo" doesn't mean anything to me other than "sells IBM kit I like", but I can find their website (if not anything on it once I'm there). "Apache" was an in-joke to slapdash development efforts, "vim" a one-letter extension to a two-letter command. "Chrome" seems to me to be getting overloaded with meanings (is it a browser, an OS, an "environment", whatever that is)? I suspect Android may be shed at some point as overly techy, though I could be wrong on that. "AWK" is another founder's name. "C" is another don't-do-that-but-it-worked single-letter name, and also something of a line of jokes: BCPL -> B -> C -> C++, C#, C--, D.

There's also the case of names which are meant to be hard to remember or recall: "Xe Services" (formerly Blackwater, now Academi), Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris Companies). Collections agencies often operate under extremely generic names which defy both recollection and search ("Prestige Services"). Another favorite for reasons of obscurity is "Various, Inc.", once described as a photo-oriented relationship networking organization. Bail bondsmen like to be the first name in the book -- easy to find in a time of pressing need. Pick your name to suit your goals for noteriety or not.uuuuuuuu

If you go back through history there are trends in company names: place and description (New York Times, Pennsylvania Oil, Bethlehem Steel), founder(s) (Woolworths, Westinghouse, Pullman, Johnson Wax), size or generality (IBM, GE, NCR, NBC), mythology or culture (Mazda -- both lights and motorcars, Ajax, CBS). In the 1920s, airlines were popular, though these referred to rail companies, as were radio companies (the dot-coms of the day). In the 1960s, everything was "-onic" as transistors hit the scene. TLAs blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s, as did made-up words, often based on trademark considerations. Later .com, e-whatever, i-whatever, and Whatevr in the 2000s, which all seem dated now.