Opinion: What are six SQLs and four Jiras?

Over the years, many product names have become verbs that describe what the product does. The typical example is to google for something, or to super-glue something to something else, and so on. The first and dominant product in their markets tends to become associated with the action that they perform.

But was has me puzzled in recent years, is I keep hearing company names used as nouns for something that their applications deal with.

For example, I spent quite a while at a software developer (ISV) where every time they were talking about SQL queries, they’d call them SQLs. They’d say: “look at these four SQLs”, or “we have to write a new SQL for this”. I can’t tell you how much that jarred on me every time I heard it, yet almost everyone in the place said it.

But lately, I’ve been hearing this sort of thing everywhere. I hear people saying “I’ll create a Jira for that” or “we still have four Jiras to complete today”. They are referring to tasks.

One of my favorites is also ServiceDesk. Whenever someone says “I’ll raise a servicedesk for that”, it strikes me how surreal that language has become. They mean a ticket in ServiceDesk.

Does anyone else find this odd?

2019-04-02