The name Superhuman makes a lot more sense for a company with a suite of AI productivity products. The "Grammarly" name was too focused on their original use case of just improving writing.
I know it has a positive connotation with super heroes in US culture but for me it sounds like Übermensch. Especially as it is the direct opposite of "subhuman".
Plus outside of tech bro circles, people either actively hate generative AI or are at least super annoyed by the over-hype of it. Duolingo went all in on AI and got a huge shitstorm.
Branding your company on a current hype that might either burst soon or/and leave lots of people unemployed is maybe not a wise decisions.
It failed for financial reasons and the rather harsh environment. They ditched the vegetarianism and started selling meat to get some money, spiraling into alcohol and morphine abuse. In 1889 Bernhard killed himself with strychnine, after which Elisabeth started her career as a fake chronicler by writing a book aimed at creating a much nicer and 'Aryan' image of Bernhard and the colony than the truth would have allowed.
As you allude to, Friedrich Nietzsche poured buckets and buckets of abuse over people like his sister and other german nationalists, refusing for the entirety of his life to identify as german, and towards the end of his life he even claimed to be a polish nobleman, free of the tainted blood of the germans.
GP doesn’t imply Nazis used ‘Supermensch’, just that the ‘superhuman’ translates to übermensch and that the branding might evoke this concept for European ears.
Shame for what Germany did during the Nazi regime is something for Germans to bear, not Americans. We are not at fault for that, and we have no obligation to change our own culture to accommodate your guilt.
I am not sure how important the German or general European market is so hard to say whether it even should be a consideration for Grammarly.
That said the ideas of some people being intrinsically better than other people isn't specific to Germany. Eugenics used to be popular in many countries including the US. It is very advisable for other countries to learn from German history so our mistakes are not repeated.
I'm sure a large population of second language English speakers is a huge market for grammarly, no?
I'm not sure about this. I'm a US citizen, but it absolutely does not have positive connotations to me at all. It has very negative ones.
Yes, I am. Born and raised in the US.
There are instances where the term is used in a positive sense, yes, but those are limited in scope. "Superhuman strength" rather than just "superhuman".
"Superhuman" on its own is a term that has long been tightly associated with a wide variety of horrible things. Eugenics, for example.