VPro could have been Deskpro

OK, SO WE KNOW that we were - alright, that I was -- wrong about the name for Intel's business PC platform.

It wasn't Sohomish, Exium, Deskbrand or Septium. It was, as the Inq's Charlie Demerjian predicted, VPro.

This is a little odd in more ways than one. First, because Intel has thus far failed to come up with a single reason why.

Chips can't be lined up as chevron-aligned cylinders in a Jaguar E-Type V6 engine, for instance.

Maybe they mean it's ‘Very Professional' but if so Intel isn't saying.

Renowned for its marketing successes such as Pentium, Intel Inside and Centrino, it seems the Otellini mob can't raise a clue for why they should opt for the name.

As we have discussed on these pages, Intel came up with reasons for the branding of Itanium in that the metallurgical urges former CEO Craig Barrett developed through his studies of that science told him to come up with something as close as possible to titanium.

Pentium cost Intel a pretty penny because a naming company hard-wired the Greek for ‘five', as in fifth-generation processor, with ‘-ium', the suffix that often denotes an elemental ingredient. Celeron suggested celerity or speed and Centrino the centralisation of bits you need to run a fast, energy-efficient wireless notebook. Viiv riffs on ‘viva' or life/living.

But with VPro, Intel has nothing but a ‘because we can' reason to name it so. Good luck to them with that thinking but what is odd is that the usual name combing that takes place to ensure nobody feels infringed upon, stolen from, or likely to create doppelganger effects, seems to have been passed over.

After all, VPro is mightily similar to Wipro, the Indian IT services giant if you say it with an accent that conflates ‘w' and ‘v' sounds as you might in French, Castilian Spanish, various Indian languages and dialects -- and even English if you have read of the exploits of Sam Weller in Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers. VPro also is the name of SGI's old graphics circuitry.

So how did Intel come up with VPro specifically? Maybe it was because others had already had first dibs on better sub-brands.

According to our sources, Intel previously came up with a bunch of alternatives, one of which almost got the go-ahead -- until some bright spark mentioned that the erstwhile Compaq already had Deskpro as a monicker. µ

See Also:
Intel doth protest too much, we thinks
Intel Woodcrest to ship in June, Conroe July, Merom August
Intel Pro Platform named and discovered