Re: Change the name

On 9/25/07, Satoshi Nagayasu <snaga(at)snaga(dot)org> wrote:
>
> In Japan, many people pronounce 'Post-gres' or 'Pos-gre',
> but such ambiguous pronunciation is not a serious problem
> for us (PostgreSQL community). In fact, PostgreSQL has
> many users and large market-share in Japan.

One of the proposals is to have 'Post-gre' become an accepted name along
with PostgreSQL and Postgres. This may solve the situation.

Do you really think that changing the name could benefit/help
> the PostgreSQL users/developers?

In the US market, it's quite possible that having an easy to pronounce name
would help adoption. Business people wouldn't be corrected in their
pronunciation, feel more comfortable and adopt it faster, creating more
projects and jobs for PostgreSQL users/developers so there is a potential
benefit.

I think it is a useful goal to get to the point where people aren't
constantly correcting other people in how PostgreSQL is supposed to be
pronounced. For an analogy, one goal of UI design is to eliminate extraneous
steps to make the process as fast and convenient as possible, no
extraneously mouse clicks or cursor movement. In marketing/sales, it's
useful to eliminate extraneous steps like having many people be corrected in
their pronunciation a lot. There are two ways to go about this:

(a) change the name so it's hard to mispronounce, e.g. Postgres
(b) accept alternate pronunciations like Postgre and Postgre Sequel

It would be nice if we got to the point where people weren't constantly
being corrected in their pronunciation, whether it's through making the
pronunciation more inline with the spelling or to have people be more
accepting.

--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/