If successful trade expos are a good barometer of the market place (and they are), then things are going very well indeed with the homegrown category of apps named by Macromedia (soon to become Adobe), namely "RIAs."

Whether "rich Internet applications" are going to be dominated by Adobe in the future, just as Macromedia has dominated them in the past, is open to question. There are many pretenders to the throne, not least those in the AJAX camp.

One of the first hurdles for their coinage, "RIAs," to jump though is that of passing into common currency. Developers are definitely using the term, but they don't seem to be taking to it as fast as they took to, say, "Web services" or "podcasts" or "social software." Which started me thinking: To what extent are the winners in the game of personal and enterprise software those who first and foremost win The Name Game?

It's nothing new, of course. Douglas Coupland wrote, in Microserfs, that "everybody's trying to find a word that expresses more bigness than the mere word 'supermodel'" and instanced attempts like 'hypermodel,' 'gigamodel,' and 'megamodel' - none of which, so far as I am aware, has caught on.

That was originally published in WIRED 2.01, though, back in the mid-'90s. Ten years on, I am happy to report that humankind is no longer suffering from any such inability to come up with a word bigger than "supermodel." Of course it's the technology sector that has come to our rescue, just when it was maybe looking like this word-poverty was reflecting some kind of collective "inability to deal with the crushing weight of history we've created for ourselves as a species" (Coupland's - marvelous - words again).

The rescue-words I have in mind? '"Terabyte" and 'gigabyte," for starters. PCs containing a terabyte or more of storage space have recently become possible using combinations of high-capacity mass-market hard drives. As of about mid-2005, common commercial hard drives exceeded 400 gigabytes in size, so storage capacity totaling a terabyte or more can be reached using as few as two or three hard disks, at a street cost of as little as $450, down from over $1000 in 2003.

I would go so far as to say that any company who dares to disturb the lexicon (for want of any better way of describing it) sufficiently early in the product release cycle is 50 times as likely to catch on, whether it be with VCs or the general public. It's why the iPod Nano got off to such a roaring start in spite of its subsequent screen difficulties; and why Nick Kamen's invention, codenamed "Ginger" or "IT," neither of them exactly dictionary-busters to start with, was doomed from the moment it was unveiled as the even less lexicon-disturbing "Segway Human Transporter."

This is not overly scientific, I hear you say. Yet I fear you may immediately remember what I'm saying when next any of the following terms trip off your tongue: "Java SE 6," "Java EE 5," and "Java ME."

Josephine Baker once wrote: "I was learning the importance of names - having them, making them - but at the same time I sensed the dangers. Recognition was followed by oblivion, a yawning maw whose victims disappeared without trace."

Baker, who died in 1975, never lived to see the birth of Java. I do hope that no yawning maw ever swallows it up only 15 years later just because those in charge of naming and renaming it were afraid to sufficiently disturb the lexicon.

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