It's 2026 folks. The game is up on your digital offerings. We aren't in the early days of "here's this new 'on top of the regular' service or platform" anymore. Just call it what it is and move the fuck on. You may be wondering where this sudden passionate eruption regarding the shoddy "cool factor" naming of services and platforms is coming from, other than just pure common sense of what the world is now. Believe it or not, I'm not talking about your streaming services or cloud-storage-email-photos-whatever traps... no... I'm actually talking about employee benefits. On Monday, now that it's public, I can openly say the company I work for was acquired and has a new business daddy. Some might say this was inevitable given our size, I actually contend it wasn't so much an "AI is inevitable" moment, but more of well-placed strategic move on their part to buy and our part to sell. Our company, especially for as small as it was, had rockstar no-nonsense benefits. The pay was decent, a bit below market but still comfortable, but the real benefit was the 100% employer-paid insurance plan not only for ourselves but our families. And this wasn't the shittiest Aetna plan, this was some Cadillac-class Blue Cross Blue Shield plan that covered more things than I even knew existed for preventative care screening. But I digress. It doesn't matter now, what matters is what's on the table now with our new business daddy. And that's where the grating "web3" techbro marketing bullshit really chaps my ass. Blame the "appification" of everything in our lives- our cars, our insurance, our mortgages, our banking, our food, everything... whatever. These entities have pivoted from "let's just tell the truth about who we are, what we provide, etc." and let our company stand on those merits. That's the way our (old) company always did business. And maybe that's why it made sense for us to get acquired, we weren't notorious for our marketing strategies or flashing ad campaigns or product names. Hell, the company name was so generic that I thought for sure this was either a front or a scam when I went in for my interview back in 2018. Turns out it was neither, it just wasn't a "loud brand". And maybe that's why it hits a certain way when I am constantly getting a barrage of onboarding emails welcoming me to this random 365 portal, that weirdly spelled "Go" platform, etc. These names don't tell me who they are or what they do, except that the marketing team was so uncreative they decided to start dropping vowels from names and tacking on numbers because they probably couldn't get the domain name they wanted. You know what I see in your brand when I see the numbers 365 tacked on the end? You're going to have hours of random downtime with a global productivity impact that are met with incredibly vague yellow dots next to specific services on your status page and no description other than "yeah we've had reports and we are looking into those reports". As if my ability to utilize the benefits I now have to pay you for are now only usable when you determine they are, not when I need them. I know that's an incredibly "first-world-problem" problem to have. Hell, I know I should be grateful to even have a job post-acquisition. The cold truth there is I probably won't 12 months from now. This is a company literally thousands of times larger in terms of staff than our little group. My function, while critical to the company in the past, is so fucking redundant I'm practically as valuable as the servers I used to maintain. A little value through the transition, but the minute me as an "asset" can be depreciated off the books for a tax credit it's gonna happen. I'm accepting of that. I know I'm basically a piece of furniture now. If I took issue with it, I wouldn't have spent the past 25 years in this industry, I would have just gone back to mowing cemetaries, delivering pizzas, or washing dishes at the local nursing home when I got out of the military. But again, I'm getting off topic here. Look- if you're a marketing or branding person for your company, stop this bullshit. When I see your company name with no vowels I associate you with a cult that some actress trafficked humans through. I don't see "uptime" adding 365 to the end, I see limitations, outages, and an offering so bland you can keep whatever private equity assholes that own you entertained with over the top returns whilst depriving people paying for your services of what they've paid for. Oh you wanna tack on "Go" to the end? Yeah I'm gonna "go" the other fucking direction. And if you're a company "providing" these "services" to your employees, bear in mind how much of a reflection the offerings make on your new employees. You got them in the door- whether outside hire, acquihire, whatever. Now it's your time to advertise why they made the right decision and why they should keep coming back. Otherwise, you're just another trap like every other platform out there, spewing their employee information to all of these programs and enriching THEM and not the employees themselves. You're no better than Amazon, Google, Facebook, or any other company harvesting personal data and selling it for profit. You're digital pimps- trafficking your employees without their informed consent. And that says a lot about your morals as a corporation.