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Comment by franky47 | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the funding, but I'd like to know what prompted the name change. ZEIT sounded mysterious and edgy, while Vercel sounds like a company selling expensive handbags (to me).

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Zeit means "time" in German, is the name of a German newspaper, and surely made organic SEO a challenge...much like Now did.

How about zeit.js, it worked fine for next.js

The name change makes a lot of sense to me, tactically (no matter what you think of the new name).

ZEIT is associated with full-stack hosting including backend servers, which they no longer want to focus on to. To solidify their pivot to frontend hosting in their users mind, they rename to strip all previous connotations from their brand.

Names are like colors and shapes, and their new one doesn't really indicate that they're innovators. Zeit was cool because german names in tech are quite rare, it was showing that they did things differently. Vercel sounds like a lame web 1.0 thing, it's more rigid, rolls way harder off the tongue.

Focusing on backend servers or not is just a implementation detail as a hosting company that want's you to not care about the underlying tech, the name itself is way more important at their size.

EDIT: Not sure why, but from the article:

> Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.

That's just marketing speak. It doesn't actually explain why they changed their name.

I mean it’s a complete and total wild ass guess but the obvious reason to change one’s name is if you’ve identified another entity that is using that name in a way which could prevent you from global exclusive use of the brand.

It’s the kind of thing that could easily have come up in due diligence for the large recent investment.

Doing a quick search of TESS2 for trademarks look they already have the trademark registered for ZEIT (registered in 2017). So it was probably for other reasons. Which is a shame, because Zeit is very concise, easy to remember, and has a strong brand today - at least with their initial audience.

Sounds like they're trying to go for a more corporate customer with their new name.

It’s a big world out there.

Yeah but that's why they chose Vercel not why the name ZEIT had to be changed in the first place

I connected it to none of those words. Instead, I connected it to a) some kind of telephone company that is dodgy b) incels.

Vercel sounds like something about vermin and incels.

Lmao... this is what I heard when I read the word the first time too. "Incel..?"

Self-delusional marketingspeak. To me 'Vercel' sounds like a brand of cheap batteries.

And to me it sounds like a plasma-physics simulation package running on supercomputers.

\shrug\

Sounds boring and enterprisey to me.

Batteries is what came to my mind. Like Duracell.

That's not the "reason" though, that's the rationalization

To me, it sounds like a medication.

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