Sharp by name, sharp by nature

Of all the Japanese brands that have ebbed and flowed on the tide of electronic product innovation over the last two decades, Sharp is the name that sticks in the mind.

Sharp. It’s a stab of a name that says, quite literally, cutting edge and precision. With its monosyllabic concision and directness of meaning, how exquisitely apposite it is for a maker of liquid crystal display panels. It tells you so much more about the pin-sharp brilliance of television picture quality than the likes of Panasonic, Toshiba, Sanyo and sorry old Sony.

Except, of course, that rationale is a complete fantasy. It’s what I’d like to think the name was meant to mean. In fact, Sharp has nothing to do with clarity or TV pictures: the $36 billion corporation owes its name to a pencil.

The company was founded in 1912 as the Hayakawa Metal Industrial Laboratory by Tokuji Hayakawa, an inventor and tinkerer.

Hayakawa made a mechanical pencil that consisted of a retractable graphite lead in a metal rod. He named it the ‘Ever-Ready Sharp’ pencil (not to be confused with Charles Keeran’s Eversharp pencil – that’s another story entirely).

Hayakawa's Ever-Ready Sharp pencil

Demand for this simple and durable instrument was immense. Its success provided Hayakawa with the means to turn his attention to radios and in 1951 the company began development of an experimental TV set. Two years later when television broadcasting started, Hayakawa Electric (as it was then) introduced its first commercial television set under the brand name ‘Sharp’ in honor of the pencil.

Hayakawa retired from the day-to-day operations in 1970, assuming the title of chairman. That year, Hayakawa Electric also adopted a new name: Sharp Corporation

Sharp owes its ascendancy as a global brand to its devotion to and far-sighted investment in LCD technology, which gives us today’s color computer screens and flat panel TVs.

An immensely satisfying aspect of the Sharp name is the direct connection it has to the inventiveness of the company and its founder, and to the honest integrity of that most basic of creative tools: the pencil.

Putting the ‘i’ in iMac

So, Steve Jobs wanted to call this little game-changer ‘MacMan’.

In a new book* about working for Apple, Ken Segall tells how he was on a team tasked with naming the new Mac. Jobs liked the name MacMan (maybe a subliminal nod to the Sony Walkman name) and wanted to use it. The team thought it was terrible. They had to persuade Jobs not to use MacMan by offering a better name.

Segall tells Cult of Mac that he came up with the lowercase “i” in iMac simply because he thought it looked better. Jobs hated the name and said so repeatedly.

Segall said his team had five finalist names for what would become the iMac. One was “MiniMac.” Another was “EveryMac.” Jobs didn’t like any of them and told the team to keep working on it. The employees kept pushing “iMac”. Eventually, Jobs relented. The “i” went on to become an integral part of Apple’s product strategy.

Segall wasn’t around at the company for the naming of iTunes, the iPod and the iPad. But he said “iMac” clearly was a foundational name that other products could build on.

“It was one of those things that you have no idea it was going to turn into what it turns into,” he said on CNBC. “I wish we could say we were all that smart.”

So much, then, for the visionary ‘iName’ strategy that transformed the computer, telecommunications and music industries.

*Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success

Stupendous! Colossal! Titanic!

As a symbol of might and power, Titanic was designed to make a big splash.

It was conceived by the White Star Line as the second of three giant ocean liners intended to compete with archrival Cunard for the burgeoning trans-Atlantic passenger business of the early Twentieth century.

The Cunard Line was famed for the speed of its ships, such as the Lusitania and Mauretania. In a classic positioning exercise White Star decided to focus on size and luxury. The names of these floating palaces had to get the competitive advantage across in no uncertain terms.

White Star looked to Greek mythology. The Titans were powerful god’s called the “elder god’s” that ruled the earth. But they were overthrown by the Olympians.

The new line of ships were to be of Olympian scale and size. The first, named Olympic, was duly launched in October 1910 and sailed on its maiden voyage in June 1911.

Then came Titanic. It was bigger than Olympic. Launched in May 1911, it was the largest ship in the world.

Titanic left Southampton for its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912 calling at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland before heading westwards towards New York.  Four days into the crossing she hit an iceberg and sank the next day, April 15 1912.

The third ship in the White Star’s grand plan for trans-Atlantic domination was already under construction. It would be even more grandiose. It would be gigantic.

References in contemporary publications indicate that White Star had abandoned all restraint in the naming of the third sea monster. Gone was the gentile veil of classical allusion. They just put it out there – Gigantic. Size matters! The hyperbolic naming sequence had all the populist urgency of Cecil B. DeMille-style Hollywood hype – Olympic! Titanic! Gigantic!

But the feverish public interest in these massive ocean liners abated after the Titanic disaster. Passengers were suddenly less concerned with grandiosity than they were with safety. ‘Gigantic’ underwent extensive modifications and was launched quietly in April 1914 with the dignified name Britannic.

Britannic was promptly requisitioned by the British government to serve as a World War I hospital ship. It hit a mine and sank in November 1916. Olympic fared better. It had a long and illustrious career before it was consigned to the scrapyard in 1935.

Titanic lives on, if only as a synonym for hubris and disaster movies.

Why Apple’s future is in the clouds

When Apple dropped the word “Computer” from its name it was regarded at the time as little more than a tactical tweak.

“The Mac, iPod, Apple TV and iPhone. Only one of those is a computer. So we’re changing the name,” said Steve Jobs, making the announcement at the 2007 Macworld Expo.

The significance of the name change from Apple Computer to Apple, Inc. has since become more evident. Far from being a tweak, it marked the tipping point in Apple’s transition from a personal computer hardware company towards a vision of an ecosystem connected by a diverse collection of devices and services.

Tying this ecosystem together is iCloud. As Macworld reports, Apple—like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others—is driving hard to teach people about the personal cloud experience in which content will flow from device to device, screen to screen, and location to location no matter whether that device is a Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV or some device not even on the market that can tie into the cloud functionality.

Companies that have invested into this new paradigm will see the greatest success. And that’s why iCloud isn’t just a feature for Apple devices, it’s the key that will determine the company’s success in the future.

The question is: what does that future look like? And what is Apple, Inc. becoming?