[GroksBarnacles]

I wish we as a society would stop using random words for products. "Slacked about Oak, but they need in Fizzle. The deck's in Slate, the assets are in Vault, the timeline's in Pulse, the copy's in Quill, the build's in Forge, and the launch party's already in Ember."

[jayknight]

Aren't all product names "random" words before they become well known? Some are more descriptive than others, but they're all arbitrary to begin with.

[GroksBarnacles]

No, if a name gives some hint as to what the product does, it isn't random.

[gitpusher]

What alternative would you suggest? "Sent a message in our enterprise chat application about the version control system that our engineering team sometimes uses (no, not that one, the other one) but they need it in the project management app that our Design team uses (good luck requesting access from IT, we have more than a dozen project management tools in our catalog)"

[GroksBarnacles]

I'd suggest a descriptive name. Baking what makes it unique in the name would be ideal, but even narrowing it down to a category, like your version of my message had, would be an improvement. Knowing what class of thing the noun is would be an improvement over a tree or a or a sound effect or an obscure foreign concept being equally interchangeable as titles.

Further, while your version wven presupposes that the name is useful enough to narrow it down to a category, if the name was specific enough it would avoid the confusion of your example. "Which program of this category? Oh, the one with that unique feature."

[ianburrell]

The solution is to always add a second name. Like people, projects could have short name and full names. Could be organization (Apache Spark), could use type (Oak Versioncontrol), could be longer name (Violet Spring). Then can use short name internally, and full name globally. I like the type name cause tells what it is.