Words Matter: High Tech, “Feminine Products” division
Most of the way through the Greatest Apple Announcement Ever and the#ipad twitter series is deeply fixated on the awesomeness of the fail in giving the new device a name that is such a short leap from a product that has little to do with computing, and a great deal to do, as one of the Twitterers noted, with the desperate shortage of possessors of double x chromosomes in the tech biz.
Just saying….
Image: Margaret Carpenter, “Ada Augusta Byron King (Ada Lovelace),” 1836
Tags: bad branding, iPad
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January 27, 2010 at 4:29 pm
My favorite comment so far is, “It only works every 28 days.”
Also, I think I am officially being classified as a Luddite at this point, at least according to the “I will buy anything and everything that Apple releases” crowd. Upon hearing several of my friends saying, “It’s only $500!” with much excitement, my reply was, “*Only* $500? We must be using a different number system.”
I really don’t see the attraction to this thing. It’s basically a giant iPhone without the “phone” part. Though since the iPhone is pretty lousy at being a phone, maybe that’s a good thing?
January 28, 2010 at 2:38 pm
…and the connection to Ms. Lovelace is..? Was she married to Charles Babbage of difference engine fame?
January 28, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Ada is generally credited as the first computer programmer in history, for her invention of a set of instructions to calculate a series of Bernoulli numbers on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. The method has been checked and shown to have been correct– that is, it would have run properly had the AE ever been built. (All this is in the second of the two links to her name above.)
Hence, I use her as an example of one of the too-few high ranking women in tech. A little visual joke, but mine own.
January 28, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Also — not married to Babbage, but a correspondent and F2F acquaintance/friend of same. She was Byron’s daughter and married a peer.
January 28, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Thanks for the memory refresh on Ada Lovelace. I think I read about her in Jacquard’s Web, a book I imagine you know. If not, you’d probably like it – it was quite good.