“While a bad name isn’t enough to sink a brand on its own, several of the biggest shed some puzzling titles before becoming worldwide hit,” Pete D’Amato reports for The Daily Mail.
“According to CNBC, electronics chain Best Buy was still called Sound of Music back in 1981 when the brand’s Roseville, Minnesota, store was reduced to rubble by a tornado,” D’Amato reports. “Afterwards, the store held a ‘Tornado Sale’ in the parking lot advertising ‘best buys’ on damaged electronics. Two years later, all the stores were rebranded as Best Buy.”
“Google, the most popular search engine provider, earned that name two years after it was founded in 1986, under infinitely less catchy name BackRub,” D’Amato reports. “One of the most profitable companies in history, Apple Inc, made only a subtle change from Apple Computers [sic] in 2007 as the company moved into other areas of consumer electronics.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s funny that an article about old brand names gets Apple’s original name wrong, like oh-so-many unfortunately do. For us, at least, it’s tiring.
Apple was incorporated as “Apple Computer, Inc.” on January 3, 1977, and was renamed as “Apple Inc.” (they dropped the “Computer” and the comma) on January 9, 2007.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]