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...