For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice
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- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/30/who_me/
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Our story, from a reader Regomised as "Will", concerns an unfortunately named service from much-missed computer company Wang.
It was back in the 1980s, when Wang was enjoying success with its computers and word-processing systems, "before they missed where the market was going and tanked themselves in the 1990s," observed Will.
Still, in the '80s, Wang was all the rage. It sought to take on IBM and cast itself in the role of David against the Big Blue Goliath and while it made some inroads into the tech giant's market, the arrival of the general-purpose PC and all the goodies that came with it would eventually seal the company's fate.
It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons [2]READ MORE
Will, who spent a chunk of the '80s working for an anonymous American minicomputer manufacturer, had a very good chum within Wang at the time. "He was in their field service team and was the UK-based person who had the responsibility for deploying new field services," Will recalled.
The latest wheeze from the bigwigs in the US corporate office was a new field service product. It had already been rolled out in the US and was regarded as a success. The bosses were naturally keen to replicate this success around the world and planned to roll out the service in Europe, starting with the UK.
Will's chum stared aghast at the name. There would be no internationalisation – the branding was popular in the US, so why should the same success not be replicated in the home of the English language, dear old Blighty?
The service was called "WangCare".
Our protagonist tried to explain that the name might run into trouble "because phonetically it sounded like a UK slang swear/insult."
However, his cries fell on deaf ears: "Being the 1980s, this word seemed not to have penetrated into the US lexicon and the US overlords decided to ignore the sage advice they were given."
The US ploughed on, blind to the warnings, and slapped the UK market with "WangCare".
"It lasted about 1 day before an avalanche of feedback was received from customer and computer press alike," sighed Will.
And his chum? As faces flushed "the US team were then looking to blame the UK team for not advising on the issue."
Of course they were. A shame then that, two decades later, the Windows behemoth Microsoft did not also ponder the phonetic implications of " [3]OneCare ". Memories in the corporate IT world can be all too short.
Ever spoken up, only to be slapped down and blamed when the wheels came off? Or did you manage to steer a corporate juggernaut away from an innuendo incident? The [4]Who, Me? is waiting to hear from you. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/23/who_me/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2006/05/31/onecare_microsoft_launch/
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But ......
...... Wayne Kerr is still going strong.
One company I worked in had Wayne Kerr ATE and no one ever got tired of the jokes - except possibly the ATE engineers, but who cared because they were all.....
At least some Americans were aware of the implication - as anyone who knows Peggy Bundy's maiden name and home county might remember.... Married with Children was first broadcast back in 1987.
Anyone watching the re-runs of Buffy The Vampire Slayer on E4 recently will no doubt have noticed they had both a [1]Wanker and a [2]Wankum in the credits.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0911173/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0911174/
There is an episode of the simpsons where bart declares "Everybody knows the first/last (cant remember which) day of school is a total wank"
Oh yes...
Ever spoken up, only to be slapped down and blamed when the wheels came off?
Yes, and it effectively cost me my job (although I was happy to take a substantial redundancy package rather than resign).
The American corporate I was working for had decided to implement Baan* globally at the same time as trying to re-engineer the European business units. I was specifically asked to check out whether the system could work in the way they wanted and told them categorically that no, it wouldn't, and nor would any other system. They wanted to run Europe as a single business unit with all accounting in Euros which simply wouldn't work in the UK without leaving them wide open to major issues. My advice was inevitably rejected right up until they were getting ready for launch when I was able to say, "I told you so!"
I don't know what happened in the US but in Europe they went with SAP and all-but closed down the UK operation, turning it into a pure distribution operation for German manufactured tools.
*That, of course, was their first mistake!
Re: Oh yes...
A similar thing happened to me a long time ago. One of my clients asked me to develop an off-shoot of one of his packages and it was to work in a particular way. I did my damnedest to explain why it wouldn't work very well in practice but he was adamant he wanted it done his way. So I did it his way and he was surprised that it didn't work as he'd hoped. He then blamed me for not pushing him hard enough not to do it that way in the first place. Sometime you just can't win.
I had more success …
In the late 70's, I was in UK pre-sales support for a US semiconductor company that had a side-line in small business computers, and wanted to promote them using the strapline The Informer . I managed to convince the ad agency that The Sweeney had probably queered the pitch (although I would also have had to explain that phrase) as far as the image of informers was concerned.
Re: I had more success …
The term "informer" has the same, exact set of meanings here in the US as it does in Blighty. And we had more than our fair share of bad cop shows that used it with the same monotonous regularity. I wonder why you Brits are more prone to take such terms out of context than us Yanks?
Re: I had more success …
Simple, we think rude thoughts before we think pure thoughts, also we get american tv so understand slang in both directions.
UK Crayon Departments are just as bad
About 10 years ago, our Internal Comms dept decided to push their new corporate brands to everyone with a snappy acronym. I can't remember what the words were, but I there are still mouse mats kicking about with "FFS" all over them
Re: UK Crayon Departments are just as bad
I remember working on an update to an aircraft loading system which had been running for years apparently without anyone noticing that the adjacent Fuel and CheckedBags column headers were abbreviated to save space (80-character screen) and so read FU CK
Working for a mainframe software company I am often confronted by the word Dump, used without even a smirk. It's perfect sensible, that's what happens when a mainframe program gets too full of crap, it produces a dump. Sadly no one managed to convince the owner not to choose a product name featuring that word. It's Marketing I feel sorry for (which is something I have never said before) when they always lose first place on Google to the urban dictionary.
They used to have an office in Germany - if you called it they answered by offering this advice - "Wang Cologne"
It's not just our business
The Vauxhall Nova did not sell well in Spanish speaking countries.
And the MR2 (m r deux) was seen as sh*tty in France.
Re: It's not just our business
Foden trucks are sold in Portuguese speaking countries as "Poden"
Re: It's not just our business
Mitsubishi's Pajero was renamed Montero in Spain (wouldn't you proudly drive your Mitsubishi 'Wanker'?)
Hyundai's Kona was renamed Kauai in Portugal (who knew that driving a 'Kunt' could be embarrassing for some?)
Re: It's not just our business
The Ford Escort sold just fine in the UK.
Re: It's not just our business
The Nova brand name has no issues in Spanish speaking countries. [1]See Snopes take on it here
I have no idea if the MR2 story is a similar myth, but it wouldn't surprise me.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevrolet-nova-name-spanish/
First of all ...
... the term "wanker" was very well known to most Yanks back then (and earlier). It came across the pond (oooh, matron!) with the GIs following one World War or another. We just didn't, and still don't, use it much.
However, Dr. Wang made it very well known that any and all attempts to make his name into an object of locker-room humo(u)r were to be ignored. And they pretty much were, company wide. Sometimes with sub-optimal results.
And now you know the rest of the story.
Learning Mandarin
When I was learning mandarin, it pleased me no end that the Chinese surname "Wang" translated as "King" (according to the instructor, some of the vocab we were taught was very incorrect...), unsurprisingly as I am still incredibly puerile that became my favourite character flash card...
"Ever spoken up, only to be slapped down and blamed when the wheels came off? "
Standard practise at one company I spent far too long at. Was one of the main reasons I left.
My university work placement was at Wang's manufacturing plant in Limerick, Ireland and because the Mr Wang's first name was An, he was known as The Wang, which makes perfect sense in that part of the world and would probably do so in Scotland too.
Abbreviations
In the software I work with we use Associated Products. We occasionally have to remind programmers and project managers that the correct abbreviation is Assoc Prod
Several years ago at my last company my CEO was flying out to France for meeting with the parent company. The day before he asked me to knock up some slides to explain what we were spending the money on and to justify spending more. So half an hour before his flight I emailed him the slides knowing what he'd not have time to read them before the meeting that afternoon.
He then stood up and presented project GONADS, of course it was more subtle than that but the main boss (a really likeable French guy) had very good English and immediately got what it was, started laughing and then explained to the rest of the board.
They thought it was so funny we got our cash and I wasn't sacked.
A former Wanger here too. For the launch of Wang Cares, Wang Ireland took delivery of a brochure and some baseball caps, to be sent to all customers during the launch week. I still have my "Wang Cares" cap somewhere.
And the title of the launch week? Why, "Wang Cares Awareness Week", of course!