Origin of Famous Company Names

There are many companies / brands / products whose names were derived from strange circumstances.

Here are a list of some of these names:

Mercedes
This was actually the financier's daughter's name.

Adobe
This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
 
Apple Computers
It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 O'clock.
 
CISCO
It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.

Compaq
This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.
 
Corel
The name was derived from the founder's name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch
Laboratory.
 
Google
The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to
search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.
After founders- Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel
investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'.

Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending
in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters "html" - the programming language used to
write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.
 
Hewlett Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called
Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce'but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
 
Lotus (Notes)
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapoor used to be a
teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft
Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally
christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.  

Motorola
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The
popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
 
ORACLE
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence
Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers
to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring
it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.

Sony
It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer
to a bright youngster.
 
SUN
Founded by 4 Stanford Universitybuddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas
Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture
computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.
 
Yahoo!
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book 'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person
who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David
Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.