But as products evolve, their boring names become misleading. At least with non-boring names you can re-define what they represent in your company.

Do products/components really evolve so much that the name frequently become outdated?

Half the article is like, "There was a component called YamlParser, which is now a browser-based stable-diffusion renderer!"

I've worked on tools that were slightly misnamed after 6 months, and completely misnamed after 2 years. At that point they were also usually just nearly useless due to feature bloat and/or lack of scalability, so deprecated or replaced with something better.

They didn't change names, but their successors would get a new one.

Yep, enough that they need a caveat every time someone new is told of the product. It happens, and it's gotten worse due to Agile.

Look at IBM "Watson". It had evolved from an AI jeopardy and Q&A engine into basically whatever salespeople make up.

Isn't it even harder to re-define names in a company? There might be 3 people involved in re-definition, but it affects 15 people.

How are we going to notify those 15? Do we even know who those 15 are? Are we going to create a weekly redefinition newsletter?

I think in most cases new meaning deserves a new name. Everything else is just hacks.

How hard is it to change a name is a actually a really good metric for a company. If a simple rename takes several days, multiple approvals, rounds of QA, and a scheduled release next quarter, then you probably need those hacks.

I think that's very extreme. Products grow at a gradual pace. I don't think there are defining moments when a product no longer supports something, or is no longer used in a way that it was intended to.

I would argue it's easier to maintain peoples understanding of a product since that will also be done gradually. It's not easy to update naming inside of a code base without potentially breaking software significantly or causing unknown bugs elsewhere. I think most software would fail the renaming test. It's also generally not worth the money and time needed to make that change.

Terrific answer!

No idea which way you're arguing though! ;)

Better to be googlable than boring.