January 2, 2026, 7:04 am | Read time: 5 minutes
That the devices of the world’s leading tech company are named after an ancient fruit variety is now as commonplace to us as other—sometimes, upon closer inspection, unusual—names in the industry. TECHBOOK delves into why tech brands like Apple, Google, and others are named the way they are.
Marketing experts know: Success often hinges on the name. One of the most important rules in naming is the factor of authenticity. Additionally, a company name should ideally be short and catchy. Both apply to Apple, Google, and several comparable major tech brands without a doubt, and often, there are interesting stories behind them.
Apple
The name Apple traces back to Steve Jobs, co-founder and longtime CEO of the U.S. company. More about this can be found in Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of the entrepreneur. Jobs was on a fruit diet at the time, as he apparently often was, and the idea came to him after returning from an apple orchard. “The name sounded friendly, spirited, and not intimidating,” he once explained. It not only softened the term computer but also had another advantage: Apple would be listed “in the phone book” before Atari.
Amazon
For this company, founded about 20 years later, a prominent listing in alphabetically ordered lists also played a role in the naming. Jeff Bezos, who founded his company in 1994 in his garage in Seattle, according to the Amazon website, also wanted an exotic-sounding name that conveyed size. The Amazon, the world’s longest river, naturally came to mind as a symbol.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, named their tech brand after Googol. “It’s a 1 followed by a hundred zeros and looks quite impressive,” according to the Google blog. A fitting name for a search engine, as it symbolically represents a vast amount of available information—and thus also the company’s goal: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Samsung
The name of the Korean tech brand Samsung is a word: Samsung (삼성) means “Three Stars” in Korean, as explained on the company’s website. Founder Lee Byung-chull wanted to express his vision: a company that is large and strong and shines brightly like stars in the sky. The logo has changed several times over the years, but the name has remained.
Nvidia
Nvidia, a major developer of graphics processors and chipsets for gaming consoles and computers, was founded in 1993 by three electrical engineers—initially without a name, as reported by the brand lexicon “Brandslex.” The founders internally used the abbreviation “NV” for “Next Version” and wanted to incorporate it into the company name. During their search, they came across the Latin word invidia, meaning “envy”—a feeling that some competitors surely harbor toward them: Today, Nvidia is among the most valuable companies of all time by market value.
Microsoft
Microsoft is a so-called portmanteau, specifically a combination of the words “Microcomputer” and “software.” As “Brandslex” recalls, the terms “Home Computer” or “Personal Computer” were not yet common at the time. Co-founder Paul Allen initially suggested a hyphen for the tech brand’s name. But soon Micro-Soft became the well-known Microsoft.
Spotify
The story behind this tech brand’s name is quite amusing. At first glance, “Spotify” seems to make perfect sense: It’s logical to interpret it as a combination of “spot” and “identify,” meaning discovering music and identifying with it—an interpretation now officially communicated. However, as reported by the media trade magazine “W&V,” the name actually arose from a misunderstanding. During a brainstorming session, founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon shouted various name suggestions at each other, with one misunderstanding a suggestion—or, in hindsight, getting it just right.
Adobe Systems
John Warnock and Charles Geschke were considered visionaries when they founded Adobe in 1982. With the development and marketing of the page description language PostScript, they laid the foundation for the digitization of the printing and publishing industry. The now globally recognized company name traces back to Adobe Creek, as noted on the company blog: a river in California that ran directly behind co-founder John Warnock’s house.
Tesla
Elon Musk honored the life’s work of Serbian physicist and inventor Nikola Tesla with the name of his electric vehicle company. But he almost had to abandon this intention, as he revealed in 2019 on X (then still Twitter). “Tesla was almost called Faraday because the original owner of the Tesla Motors brand refused to sell it to us.”
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Nintendo
Today, Nintendo is primarily known as a tech brand and for its gaming consoles and video games. However, the company was founded in 1889—as a manufacturer of Hanafuda playing cards. The name Nintendo is often translated as “Leave luck to heaven,” which is derived from the Japanese characters used.
Interestingly, in his book “The History of Nintendo Vol. 1 – 1889–1980: From Playing-Cards to Game & Watch,” author Florent Gorges places the name more in the historical context of the company’s founding. Accordingly, the meaning can be directly linked to the original card game business. Luck and chance, as is well known, play a central role in it. The widespread translation is thus less a fixed definition than a symbolic description of the business idea at the time. To this day, there is no definitive explanation for the choice of name.
Nokia
According to “Brandslex,” the name Nokia traces back to a place and a river in southwestern Finland. In 1859, entrepreneur Adolf Törngren inherited the Nokia estate on the Nokianvirta River. The place name likely originates from Old Finnish and originally referred to fur animals like beavers or martens. After Törngren’s economic failure, engineer Knut Fredrik Idestam took over the land and, in 1871, founded the Nokia Corporation with politician Leo Mechelin. The name initially referred only to the location and later became the umbrella brand Nokia Osakeyhtiö, long before the company became known for technology.