PalmOne goes back to just Palm

Shakespeare once asked, what’s in a name?Quite a bit, if recent developments are any indication. PalmOne has given up its two-year long, futile fight to establish itself under that name and is reverting to Palm. I’m surprised it took it this long – they’d been through a forced rebranding before, and it didn’t really take either.
Palm should have known this; it never shook off the PalmPilot moniker, despite being forced to remove the word “Pilot” from its official branding thanks to a lawsuit by the Pilot pen people. I suppose Pilot just wanted to protect its brand, but how someone could confuse a pen with a PDA eludes me.
Still, it’s better to be a bit overenthusiastic than to lose a trademark. Just ask the folks at Bayer, who lost the brand name Aspirin when they failed to defend it against generic usage. It took them many years to recover it.
So PalmOne is now Palm again, though with an orange logo instead of a blue one. It cost the company a whack of money to buy back the rights to the Palm name, which it shared with its software spinoff, PalmSource, but it’ll probably pay off in the long run.
Borland can testify to that. In an effort to recreate itself, it decided to become Inprise. Remember that?
Neither does anyone else. “Inprise” had no meaning to Borland’s core developer community. After two years, the company became Borland again.
Sometimes a company changes its name to align itself with its flagship brand. Apple Computer subsidiary Claris Corporation became FileMaker Inc. for just that reason, and MadOnion rechristened itself FutureMark to leverage the brand equity in its line of benchmarking products.
A name change can also be used to try to escape an unhappy past. When Gator switched to Claria, and WorldCom became MCI, they were distancing themselves from the negative connotations of their previous brands.
But what of a name change after a merger or acquisition? When it’s an acquisition, it’s easy – the purchaser’s name becomes dominant, and history is sometimes rewritten. An HP person once told me, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, that HP “invented” clustering. He knew perfectly well that Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) developed the technology, but explained, with a semi-straight face, that since Compaq had acquired DEC, and HP had in turn bought Compaq, HP was now the developer.
Mergers can be messier. When Nexxlink, Charon Systems and CSB Systems recently came together as Bell Business Solutions, the three brands disappeared.
President and CEO Robert Courteau is adamant that the three will become one as fast as humanly possible, and he sidestepped the question of brand equity. But then again, the cachet of the Bell brand may override any other branding issues.
Time will tell.