If you're going to tell me that "Yahoo" means Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle you misses the point in the same way as the previous poster.

The point is that if you take a random person off the street who has never heard of Google, Yahoo, Nike, BMW and ask them what these mean to them the answer will be 'Nothing'.

No-one knows that Nike is a greek goddess or that BMW is an acronym for some German words that mean nothing to 99% of the world population.

What these names have in common is that they are simple and easy to remember. Success is then to make them mean something, and better yet, own a category like Google owns 'search engine' to the point it's become a generic verb.

I would highly recommend reading the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Ries and Trout.