Tench (and all): re Athlon
I know that there are people out there that make a living from coining commercial monikers, and maybe someone got paid for this. But I wonder...
1) Wouldn't it have been tremendous guerilla marketing to have had a "Name the K-7" contest? Lots of publicity, an ability to focus attention on the differentiating features, etc. at little or no cost.
2) Why in the world use anything that has even a remote resemblance to the name of the competitor's low-end product?
3) Krypton should would have been fun, and an ad campaign featuring the competitive aspects could have been a classic.
4) AMD could have rejuvenated the military ad campaign, and called the 0.25-micron version from Fab25 the Abrams and the 0.18-micron version from Fab30 the Panzer (sorry, dumb idea, just thought I'd run it up the flagpole to see if anybody would...well, you know).
5) My own choice would be to go the Artist-Formerly-Known-As-Prince route and call it the AND, but use the logic symbol. The concept is that like the AND function, the user makes no tradeoffs - integer performance, floating point performance, price/cost, etc. - and it would be an implied alliteration (the AMD AND) as well as a techie sort of thing. But this is unlikely to be approved by any corporate staff.
6) So why not go for alliteration and good imagery with Athena. Good things come in threes - a well-regarded rocket, the Goddess of wisdom and a new generation of microprocessor - and the association with speed and smarts ain't so bad. An agreement with Lockheed Martin to use the imagery in advertising probably wouldn't be very hard to secure. - Tad LaFountain
Note to AMD: You can call it Ray, you can call it Jay, just don't call it late to earnings. |
