When product naming clashes with H.P. Lovecraft
H.P Lovecraft's dark, weird fantastic fiction has become the first open source literature, where other writers have taken his mythos and his nihilistic view of human life in a dark and hostile universe and run with it.
Perhaps it is a vision of a dark and hostile mobile future, dominated by uncaring monstrosities that has driven Intel and Nokia to give their new mobile OS joint venture a name that comes straight from the pages of Lovecraft (or near enough for most purposes). It's just that the name they've chosen, MeeGo, is far too close to that of an animated, intelligent, malevolent fungus, the Mi-Go.
It's not quite the image we'd associate with a powerful high-tech operating system, designed to power Moorestown devices. Here's who Lovecraft describes the Mi-Go, in "The Whisperer in Darkness":
“They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be...."Flying, crustacean fungi from Yuggoth. It's enough to make anyone shudder in horror.
Of course there's one company that will be shuddering in horror (and that's not Intel and Nokia's naming consultants). The combination of Moblin and Maemo on Moorestown Atom SOC phones (like the LG device Intel demonstrated at CES in January) will be one that will worry Microsoft, which is watching its business phone market drift away. The prospect of Nokia bringing its business mobile experience to Intel's platform is one that will have Redmond looking carefully at its OS strategy and its devices.
Unless, of course, Intel is playing politics again, aiming to give Microsoft an incentive to port Windows Mobile - or even Windows - to Moorestown.
--Simon