Justin Fox, Columnist

We're Going to Run Out of Company Names

The English language is a finite resource. Are we running out of ideas, too?

January 13, 2017 at 6:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Huh?
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

The news this week that Yahoo! Inc. will be rechristened "Altaba Inc." elicited a lot of groans. "Apparently Yahoo renamed itself after an antihistamine," tweeted New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac. The name "sounded more like infantile babble than the remnants of a once-promising internet giant," wrote Fortune's Lucinda Shen.

The reason for the renaming is that Yahoo's operating businesses are being sold to Verizon, where they will retain the Yahoo brand. The remaining corporation doesn't do anything but own shares in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Yahoo! Japan (things were handled this way for tax reasons). The new name, according to somebody who talked to the Washington Post, is a portmanteau of "alternative" and "Alibaba."