Product Rename-itis – A Pandemic?

Is it me, or has the IT industry recently been afflicted with an extremely bad case Product Rename-itis?

Product Rename-itis. (Noun)
Def: An affliction that causes companies to constantly rename their products.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some valid reasons why a company should rename their products/services/offerings etc… For example, the release date of the product (Windows 95, 98), M&A activity, product consolidations/integrations, key functional changes, etc…

With that said, it seems to me that recently IT companies in particular are renaming products at an accelerated pace, with vastly different names, and for the wrong reasons.

Reasons NOT to rename your products:

Pressure from Marketing, where I assume revenues have not been great the last 4-8 quarters. The economy, not the name, is more likely the reason for slower sales.
Knee-jerk reactions to competitors actions/offerings. Keep an eye on your competition, but do not try to align and force-fit your company offerings and strategies with them.
Attempting to keep up with ever-changing technologies. You can try. Good luck with that, let me know your CAGR for marketing costs.
To position products as a panacea via the popular keywords of the day. “Now introducing the Clouded Virtual Green eWidget 3.0!”

I believe the law of diminishing returns can be used in the case of product renaming. After a certain point consumers will, in the end, become both confused and frustrated. There is information overload already in society, why put the onus on us to keep up to date on your ever-changing product names?

Case in point for me is VMWare. It would be very interesting to find out how many products and how many times in the last 2 years have they changed names. How and why did the proven version/number system become so obsolete?

‘Til next time…