What's in a name? (25 Jul 2009)

This weekend, I finally bit the bullet: I went over all CoCreate Modeling pages on the site, and fixed most references to the old product name "OneSpace Modeling". John Scheffel, who maintains the International CoCreate Users Group site at http://www.cocreateusers.org, had sent me a friendly note about all those dated names on my site - precisely the kind of kick in the behind that I sorely needed to finally get the job done. Thanks, John!

And by the way, John, thanks as well for all your work to keep the user group site going strong! When you, dear reader, stop by at the CoCreate user group forum next time, drop John a line to say "thank you". He deserves it.

I'm not done with all the renaming on the site yet; for example, there are a number of pages which I called "OsdmSomething" (silly me). "Osdm" is the abbreviation for "OneSpace Designer Modeling", which is yet another older name for what we now know as "CoCreate Modeling"...

As you can see, "CoCreate Modeling" was rechristened a lot in the past:

Official name	Colloquial	Versions	When
HP PE/SolidDesigner	SolidDesigner	1-7	1992-1999
CoCreate SolidDesigner	SolidDesigner	8-9	2000-2001
CoCreate OneSpace Designer Dynamic Modeling	?	11	2001-2002
CoCreate OneSpace Designer Modeling	OSDM	11.6-14	2002-2006
CoCreate OneSpace Modeling	OneSpace Modeling	15	2007
PTC CoCreate Modeling	CoCreate Modeling	16 and later	2008-

This is from memory - corrections most welcome. CoCreate users out there, what's your favorite product name?

I'm not a creative marketeer - just a lowly engineer and therefore not too imaginative. You see, I call my apples apples, my typos typos, and my bugs features. Simple and straightforward, that's what us engineers are like.

So personally, I would never have fiddled with the product name at all. Granted, some name changes were inevitable. After all, we separated from HP in 1996 and became independent as CoCreate, and so we couldn't use the "HP" prefix anymore, of course. And in late 2007, PTC acquired us, and our products needed to be integrated into PTC's portfolio. My own - way too simplistic - engineering approach to branding would have been:

• HP PE/SolidDesigner (colloquially: SolidDesigner)
• CoCreate SolidDesigner (colloquially: SolidDesigner)
• PTC CoCreate SolidDesigner (colloquially: SolidDesigner)

In fact, many of our customers still call the product SolidDesigner; apparently, that name stuck with people. And not quite incidentally, the name of the main executable on disk is SolidDesigner.exe

Anyway - I'll have to admit that I start to like "CoCreate Modeling" as well. It's reasonably short, simple to remember, alludes to what the product does, and it reminds users of our past as CoCreate - which is a nice nostalgic touch for old f*rts like me who've been with the team for almost two decades now...

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Thanks for these historical naming infomations !

Two comments from my side

1) PE means "Precision Engineering"

2) I am not that sure, whether the first version(s) of SolidDesigner already included the marketing brand "PE" or it was simply called HP SolidDesigner.

Mehmet Akyar

-- MehmetAkyar - 26 Jul 2009

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