Webinar is similar in spanish to the word huevina that means "egg beaters" (a replacement cheap and second quality). It sounds also like "web-vaina" (a vaina is "something" and specially used when something annoying happens) and has common roots with words like "huevín" (little testicle) and "huevada" (something irrelevant, lacking of any real interest and a total lose of time).
Definitely looks like something created to be dismissed. I can't thing in a worst 'hype' word for replace (without any real need or reason) the perfectly neutral and good old term 'videoconference'. Webinar is the kind of term that Ned Flanders would use.
Seeing that webinars have caught on like wildfire, become a multi-billion dollar business, and forced all kinds of eLearning and online platforms to say they offer the ability to produce/share "webinars", I'd say this is rather a counter-example.
I.e. more like "A few might find X or Y name off-putting, some outliers might even come with contrived meanings in unrelated not-exactly homonyms in different languages that supposedly would make a name unsuitable, but in most cases nobody really cares".
The execution, the thing, the multibillion dollar industry, are excellent, and the world would be worse for their nonexistence.
The naming, on the other hand, is indeed a disaster. I too can't take it seriously, although I can't quite put my finger on why as well as the GP can. To me it just sounds like the "lite" version of something, but to the extreme where it might as well be the toy version.
Yet another case of buzzword intolerance, it would seem.
That created some kind of limbo where people weren't sure if they should use perl 5 or perl 6 (”why develop in perl 5, when it is probably a dead end and perl 6 is the future” and at the same time "why should I convert to perl 6, what if it will be a failure and I wasted my time?")
By renaming it, it revives Perl 5 so developent can continue, and at the same time Perl 6 is presented as a new language, now whichever wins will be based on its merit.
When Perl 6 finally arrived, it was too much of a step change from Perl 5 to convince many people (myself included). Meanwhile, Perl 5 had continued to develop and was, in no way, in need of a replacement.
The name Perl 6 was damaging to the popularity of Perl because beginners were confused whether they should learn Perl 5 or Perl 6. The same confusion existed in Python: Python 2 vs. Python 3 but the Python Wiki was always very clear. Until a certain point, it recommended Python 2 and after Python 3 became very popular, it recommended Python 3. That sort of clarity was missing in Perl. Due to the number of new programmers learning Perl decreased rapidly and finally Python overtook in popularity.
I started to use Python when 3 was taking off. Did some code on 2 for a few months, then just swapped the interpreter without any modification of the code (beside print).
For advanced devs the story may be different.
Not that much.
>Nim changing from "Nimrod" matters
Hardly.
>Cockroachdb's name is offputting.
Not enough to matter. They still raised over $60 million in funding...
Many people have internalized Marketing/SEO/enterprise-pointy-hair-boss thinking about "what matters", but in the grand scheme of things, naming is not really that relevant...