There's no doubt that the familiar bitten apple image has
been an incredibly effective part of Apple's brand identity but why are they
named Apple in the first place and how about these other Giants if you know
anything about the history of Apple you probably know that Steve Jobs was kind
of a hippie and around the time of Apple's formation he visited a commune in
Oregon where they grew you guessed it apples and maybe some other stuff and it
didn't hurt the jobs was also on a fruitarian diet at the time the name Apple
also sounded unintimidating and fun and jobs liked it since choosing a name
that started with a meant they'd appeared near the front of the phone book and remember
this is 1976 we're talking about the other big a tech company Amazon chose its
name for similar reasons minus the fruit commune stuff Jeff Bezos originally
named his company cadabra as in Abracadabra the Pokémon but after someone
misheard it as cadaver and a friend suggested his alternative idea of relent
less sounded too sinister Bezos cracked open the dictionary and picked Amazon
because it would appear at the top of many lists since it started with a Bezos
also liked the Exotic sound of the name as well as the fact the massive Amazon
River could imply that he had the world's largest selection of books Okay
Google also got its name as a way to suggest a large-scale project the word
Google had already existed and means the number you get when you take a one and
write 100 zeros behind it Larry Page and Sergey Brin liked the name since
Google was originally only a search engine and they wanted their brand message
to be that you could use Google to access huge amounts of information they just
changed the spelling to something they liked better speaking of liking
something better Facebook got its start because Mark Zuckerberg was frustrated
that the administration at Harvard where he was a student didn't offer an
online version of well uh Facebook traditional Facebooks are just printed
directories given out of colleges containing students photos and a small amount
of information to help everyone get to know each other Facebook the website was
originally a more detailed digitized version of a paper Facebook that Zuck
built because he didn't have any faith in the Harvard Administration to do it
themselves and if you've seen the movie The Social Network you might remember
that it portrayed Napster founder Sean Parker who later joined Zuck’s team as
the person who convinced him to drop the from the facebook.com original name of
course we'd be very remiss if we didn't talk about the last member of the big five.
The story of Microsoft's name might not seem that interesting
it's just derived from microcomputer and software but did you know they
actually wrote the operating system for the first successful home personal
computer it was called the Altair 8800 and Microsoft OS for it called Altair
basic was successful enough for the fledgling company to make a name for itself
back in the late 1970s as a software developer for smaller systems larger
mainframes and mini computers were more common at the time but after Microsoft
struck a deal with IBM to have their dos operating system power the original
IBM PC the rest was history as they still led the way in microcomputer os's
thanks to Windows but lest you think we're going to leave you with just the
origin stories of the big five we have a bonus for those of you that remember
PC maker Gateway which hit its Zenith in 2001 after shipping PCS in those from
familiar cow patterned boxes all over the U.S but why did they use a cow theme
in the first place well Gateway was actually formed in a farmhouse in Sioux
City Iowa and the cow box wasn't just a reference to farm life in the Midwest
but also that the founders family had been in the cattle trade for generations
and at a time when there were lots of low-cost PC manufacturers cranking out
systems that suffered from quality and reliability issues the home Farm Motif
made Gateway seem approachable and trustworthy both essential bovine qualities.