The tyranny of product names

For a long time computer manufacturers have tried to differentiate themselves and their products from their competitors with fancy names with odd capitalisation and spelling. But as an author, using these names does a disservice to the reader: how are they to know that DEC is pronounced as if it was written Dec ("deck").

It's time we pushed back, and wrote for our readers, not for corporations.

It's time to use standard English rules for these Corporate Fancy Names. Proper names begin with a capital, unlike "ciscoSystems®" (so bad that Cisco itself moved away from it). Words are separated by spaces, so "Cisco Systems". Abbreviations and acronyms are written in lower case if they are pronounced as a word, in upper case if each letter is pronounced: so "ram" and "IBM®".

So from here on in I'll be using the following:

• Face Book. Formerly, "Facebook®".
• Junos. Formerly JUNOS®.
• ram. Formerly RAM.
• Pan OS. Formerly PAN-OS®.
• Unix. Formerly UNIX®.

I'd encourage you to try this in your own writing. It does look odd for the first time, but the result is undeniably more readable. If we are not writing to be understood by our audience then we are nothing more than an unpaid member of some corporation's marketing team.