What’s in a name? April 9
A lot of people ask us where the name Vgo Software comes from. (That’s pronounced Vee-Go Software in case you were wondering.) Since I’m in Greece this week with a client and I haven’t posted anything in a while, I thought I would expound upon where our name came from.
Back in the day, we were just a consulting company. At that time I had come up with a prototype for what eventually became our Rev product. I remember writing an e-mail to my business partner about this prototype. While writing the e-mail I realized that I did not have a name for the project and started to think about what I would call it.
Earlier that day I had talked to a consultant that was working for us and who was a friend of mine. He told me that he had been experiencing bouts of dizziness earlier in the week and didn’t know what was causing it. After suffering for a couple of days without it getting any better he went to the doctor to see what the problem was. As it turned out, the doctor told him he either had a cancerous tumor in his ear or he had Vertigo.
Thinking about what to name the software, which was a code generator, I thought “Vertigo!” what a perfect name! It generates code so fast it will give you Vertigo. Well, I put that in the e-mail as the name of the prototype and the name stuck for a while but at some point before we actually released it somebody did a name search and determined that the name Vertigo was actually being used by another software company for another product.
About a week later we held our monthly staff meeting where we gather everyone from wherever they may be, talk about current company events, and have beer and pizza. We decided it would be a good time to come up with a new name (esp. after the beer part). After everyone throwing out various names for about an hour, we finally settled on a mutilated version of Vertigo, Vgo.
Well, Vgo eventually became our code generator, Rev, and the product built on top of that which was once referred to as Vgo4Oracle became Evo (anybody notice a pattern emerging?). Both products were part of the “Vgo Software Suite” of products and we eventually just started using the name of the software itself as the name of the company.