[s1artibartfast]

It is less intuitive for me as an outsider that a trillion would be a million million millions instead of a billion billions

[eru]

Maybe, but either way is relatively quickly to learn by rote for the few orders of magnitude that come up in 'daily life'.

For anything bigger, you'd use 'scientific' notation anyway.

[Dylan16807]

You can make an argument for that, but neither system does that so it's not very relevant to the choice.

I think an exponential system would do better to have a different naming scheme.

[eru]

Yes, and something like scientific notation is used fairly often even in lay contexts.

Eg it's common to read sentences like the following in popular science texts: 'ACME produces one quintillion widgets per year, that's a one followed eighteen zeroes.' The second half is basically scientific notation, but written out.