On 9/25/07,
Satoshi Nagayasu <
snaga@snaga.org> wrote:
In Japan, many people pronounce 'Post-gres' or 'Pos-gre',
but such ambiguous pronunciation is not a serious problem
for us (PostgreSQL community). In fact, PostgreSQL has
many users and large market-share in Japan.
One of the proposals is to have 'Post-gre' become an accepted name along with PostgreSQL and Postgres. This may solve the situation.
Do you really think that changing the name could benefit/help
the PostgreSQL users/developers?
In the US market, it's quite possible that having an easy to pronounce name would help adoption. Business people wouldn't be corrected in their pronunciation, feel more comfortable and adopt it faster, creating more projects and jobs for PostgreSQL users/developers so there is a potential benefit.
I think it is a useful goal to get to the point where people aren't constantly correcting other people in how PostgreSQL is supposed to be pronounced. For an analogy, one goal of UI design is to eliminate extraneous steps to make the process as fast and convenient as possible, no extraneously mouse clicks or cursor movement. In marketing/sales, it's useful to eliminate extraneous steps like having many people be corrected in their pronunciation a lot. There are two ways to go about this:
(a) change the name so it's hard to mispronounce, e.g. Postgres
(b) accept alternate pronunciations like Postgre and Postgre Sequel
It would be nice if we got to the point where people weren't constantly being corrected in their pronunciation, whether it's through making the pronunciation more inline with the spelling or to have people be more accepting.
--
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/