Hi — I’m Micah, a twelve-year-old tech blogger. Since this is my first post, I’ll give a brief outline of what you can expect from this blog in the future: opinionated pieces on AI browsers (indeed, a new one comes out every week), obsessive overviews of the latest high-end mechanical keyboard (useful if you have $3,600 to spare on a Norbauer Seneca), and thoughts on anything really that I read and find interesting — so stay tuned!
Regardless of how you feel about the product, or the ultimate acquisition price, it’s undeniable that Josh, Hursh, and the team brought an incredibly fresh perspective to what a startup brand could look and feel like. The name, the brand design, etc. were all incredibly thoughtful. But they weren’t new.
Roughly 150 years ago it was standard practice to name a company like they did:
- The Prudential Insurance Company of America, founded in 1875
- The Standard Oil Company of New York, founded in 1911
- Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York, founded in 1880
The Browser Company of New York was a perfect name for a specific reason: juxtaposing a hundred-and-fifty-year-old naming convention with a modern tool such as the web browser was an incredible way to stand out and signal to the world exactly what their mission was, and that they would be bringing inspired thinking to the category.
The Browser Company’s name, brand, and marketing materials were so effective that they catalyzed a wave of companies to adopt the same naming convention. Between The Browser Company’s emergence and their eventual exit, I’d estimate that between 50 to 100 companies adopted this type of legacy naming convention.
Naming a web browser company “The Browser Company of New York” signaled original, inspired thinking. The problem is that the second, third, fourth, etc. company to use the The [X] Company of [X] signals the exact opposite. I’m not automatically bearish on these companies, but I think many miss the point of what made The Browser Company a great name. At least one of these companies, The Interaction Company of California, has managed to really break through the noise and deliver a truly novel consumer AI product experience, but ironically they did it under the Poke brand, and I’d argue they should just abandon the original name entirely at this point. Poke dot com itself is a fantastic domain and name for their business and audience.
Reading this, I realized that I had never thought about The Browser Company’s influence on the tech world in terms of branding. I’ve followed The Browser Company for a couple of years now, and it’s certainly been apparent these past few months The Browser Company’s impact on the browser world (Zen, Click, and Nook are all heavily influenced by Arc), and Dia clearly inspired the whole wave of AI browsers (Comet, Neon, and Atlas, especially relevant this week). And while Arc, and later Dia, kicked off a browser revolution, and The Browser Company’s marketing and branding was extraordinary, I’d never noticed the impact it left on the branding of the tech industry.
I must admit — I had never heard of The Interaction Company of California, probably because it’s so new, but I’m definitely going to check it out. The resemblance to The Browser Company is quite striking. On a whim, I visited theinteraction.company to see if they owned that domain too. My hunch proved correct, and it redirected to interaction.co, with a message saying that the latter is their new web address.
That last part felt a little weird to me. I get the name — they were inspired by The Browser Company, reasonable. But copying the exact domain pattern feels a bit over-the-top to me. Are they going to name their next product Dia?
It feels a bit like cheating. You can hire some super-talented people to create an original brand identity, or you can hire some average people and copy those great people. I mean, you have a company either way, but the companies that are going to have a higher chance of succeeding are the ones that actually have that talent.
But maybe, in this AI ecosystem, there’ll be a few original ideas created by humans, and the rest will be those ideas regurgitated.
Well, there’s only so many words in the English dictionary with which to make a the___.company domain. I’d better buy them all, and it’s guaranteed I’ll make a profit.