I see this trend all over the place. I just found out Sony has something called “MySony”. My bank has “MySpending Cards”. My company uses Paycom and it has something called “MyCom”, and i think i remember it also having more things with the MyNoun name format.
What and why is this?
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I find that the harder they work to brand something is “mine”, the more they are stealing with their other hand while I’m distracted.
This has always annoyed the piss out of me
What pisses me off the most about this is when I search for your app. It doesn’t start with your actual company name, I have to check alphabetical, see it’s not there. Go to install your app only to find I already had it, it’s just listed as MyInsertnamehere. Infuriating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Intentional dumbing-down of the entire market.
Microsoft was pioneer in doing that, decades ago.
( the whole instinct to dumb-down everything is culturally-ingrained, & helps prevent critical-thinking, so it automatically gets backing by incorporated DarkTriad “persons”.
John Taylor Gatto’s perspective on education is pertinent,
hell, a bit in a book I read decades ago is pertinent: 2 psychologists who had a daughter herd her talking to herself, while in bed…
so, being psychologists, they stuck a tape-recorder in her bed, to discover what she was saying.
They discovered that she was telling herself the story-of-her-day.
They ALSO discovered that she was complying with their pressure to dumb herself down, to meet their expectations: she was significantly un-dumbed-down in that recording.
That was one of the most-depressing things I’ve ever read.
Mere toddlers are already programmed by our culture into dumbing themselves down, & we’re blind to that, by default??
Makes our whole population significantly less-viable, in this century, that’s for sure.
Dumbing-down & ideological oversimplification are related, & form a positive-feedback-loop, unfortunately )
I don’t know but it’s out of control, it’s spread to my fucking hearing aids
MyFucking Hearing Aids™
Is MyPoop taken?
marketers are dumb sheeps.
I think it’s more “marketers know that people are dumb sheeps”
Nah… They think they know. Denning-Kruger syndrom is flying high in these spheres.
I can confirm this to at least some degree. Part of my job involves marketing and this unfortunately requires at least some minimum peripheral contact with professional marketing people.
They’re idiots, at least on the creative side. They live in a bubble of their own making and are among the worst people on Earth for predicting how regular people think, interact with products or websites, or make decisions.
However, they also get piles and piles of cash shoveled in their direction by executive types who are also idiots, in the vain hope of an ROI that is legendarily fuzzy and also extremely easy to fudge. Thus, the machine churns on.
Yeah. They are parasites. There are so many functions like that, that must circle jerk with other useless functions, so they can justify each other existence.
It’s better that prefixing everything with “i.”
At least Sony has some historical reason for this…
Clears throat
I like pizza pie and I like pepperoni! But what I love is My First Sony!
Or Nounr.
Give the user a sense of control
While covering up the fact that you more than likely don’t even own the product, you simply paid full price for license to use it that they can revoke at any time.
Yay modern corporate garbage!
The worst thing about this is that I can never find my apps. I need to check on Verizon, so I scroll down to the Vs. Nope, it’s in with the Ms.
Oh I hate when companies name their app something generic like Account or MyChart. I always just go in my launcher and rename them to something that makes sense.
It started with making office computers personable for home use in Windows 95 e.g. “My Computer”, “My Documents”.
This carried on into web services like My Yahoo, or terms like My Account.
Smashing it into one word was also a thing back in the late 90s / early 00s because it (a) was easy for searching in older search engines and (b) sounded like Apple’s iPod, iMac etc (MyPod, MyMac).
Continued use today is usually because of either (a) it’s been called that for a couple of decades already or (b) the product manager is themselves old and has forgotten how old the trend of trying to make those new fangled computerybobs sound welcoming and friendly.
I’ve been using Linux for so long i’d almost forgotten Windows does that. Just calling it “Documents” and not having to worry about a space in the file path breaking things is so much easier.
There’s no place like
/home
I noticed that at some point the “My…”. Switched to a “You” branding. YouTube, yougov, youpic, YouNow, …
This trend started with what’s now called “Web 2.0” around 2000. Before that (“Web 1.0”) websites were largely used only for information dissemination: here’s who we are, what we do, how to contact us. As interactive technologies became more powerful and companies started hiring Web development teams, we started to see personal “portals” that allowed users to see or do something specific to their account or relationship with the company running the site. It was novel enough at the time that developers differentiated these features with the “My” prefix.
Nowadays we all expect the websites for our bank, utility company, phone provider etc. to have individual account management features so it just sounds lame.
Remember a few years back when all new companies were just normal words with (all/most of) the vowels removed?
It’s all fads. Creativity requires more risk than the current environment is willing to accept. So you just do whatever everyone else is doing and call it revolutionary anyway.
