Todd Bishop of the Seattle P-I writes about a couple of Search-related projects coming out of MSR that were recently covered in the Economist.
He also includes a pointer to a snipe about our choice of project names.
I have two responses. First, I think it's probably the right thing for us to spend more time on the research than on the name. After all, we're not a product or marketing organization; we're a research lab. Second, even as such, naming is hard. Since we're associated with Microsoft, everyone and their mother wants to sue us -- and to be fair, on the flip side, we have a pretty big footprint and can generate a lot of usage of a particular name. So we have to be careful not to pick names for things that are even in the neighborhood of existing trademarked names. We often get cease-and-desist letters from lawyers telling us to stop using codenames for projects. So we try to pick harmless and generic names that no one will get mad at us about -- like "AskMSR" and "AnswerBot."
Try it some time: invent a name for a product, and do a trademark search. You'll be shocked at how crowded the namespace has become. That's why in the last 5 years or so there has been a large trend in many industries towards making up words for new products: because it gives you some level of protection from trademark infringement cases.
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