INQUIRER Top Five IT re-brands revealed

Palmsource was created in 2003 from the splitting of Palm into Palmone for hardware and Palmsource for platform software for sale to third-parties. Palmone later reverted to the name Palm.

Palm came out of the Graffiti handwriting recognition system for mobile devices, developed in the early 1990s. Unimpressed by the hardware then available, the team ended up creating its own device. When talking about a possible modem deal, US Robotics liked it so much it bought the company.

In the UK, the USR product was released as the Pilot in 1996. I was so impressed by the product I rang them up for an interview with Ed Colligan.

Later, the product became known as the Palmpilot, then Palm. 3Com briefly added its own brand after acquiring USR in 1997. In 1998, Palm-family Colligan and founding fathers and mothers started Handspring and got a licence to use the Palm platform in a new device called the Visor.

Where's Colligan today? He's CEO of Palm, silly.

So hopefully that's pretty clear. Anyhow, even if I'm certain to have missed an episode or two, all of this was really to introduce… The INQUIRER'S Top 10 Name Changes In IT.

5. Accenture. It feels like the consulting giant has been around forever thanks to mammoth branding exercises such as golf sponsorships and ubiquitous advertising. In fact the name goes back just five years when Andersen Consulting had to change its name after a dispute with its one-time parent, tax-audit giant Arthur Andersen. The name change was timely, however, given that the Andersen name had been dragged through the dirty and smelly via its involvement with Enron. Accenture was the choice of a Norwegian employee as a conflation of "accent" and "future", according to Wikipedia. Today, Accenture is flying and one of the top 50 most valuable brands, according to Interbrand, the organisation that follows these things.

4. Apricot. The brand is now defunct but was once a plucky PC competitor to American and Asian giants. It was named by founder Roger Foster after a naming company suggested Rascal. Former Apricot executive Chris Buckham recalls that Foster said anybody who liked that name should leave. Buckham liked it but stayed quiet, the rascal.

3. Ask.com. When IAC chief and former Hollywood mogul Barry Diller acquired Ask Jeeves he liked everything but its name. Always a source of contention for its connection with the PG Wodehouse fictional butler of that name, Ask Jeeves changed its name to Ask.com earlier this year, several years after most people thought adding .com to names was a good idea. "I don't like that fat butler," Diller said, offending all right-thinking Englishmen.

2. Agilent. In 1999, HP spun out its test and measurement business, calling it Agilent. This started a trend for obsessing with the word "agile", names that mean nothing, and pronunciations that are non-obvious. Similarly, storage and comms chip firm Agere's name is pronounced a-gear but, unfortunately, not a lot of people know this. Also, datacentre hosting firm Interxion is pronounced "interaction".

1. Monday. In 2002, PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting spent a reported £70m to rebrand as Monday, thereby associating an organisation working in a dull and dreary business with the dullest and dreariest day of the week. When IBM agreed to buy the firm two months later, it immediately said it would dump the Monday name. µ