I see this trend all over the place. I just found out Sony has something called “MySony”. My bank has “MySpending Cards”. My company uses Paycom and it has something called “MyCom”, and i think i remember it also having more things with the MyNoun name format.
What and why is this?
Same reason everything was XTREAM in the 90s, or O-Matic in the 50s. Or “i” in the 2000s.
I find that the harder they work to brand something is “mine”, the more they are stealing with their other hand while I’m distracted.
I don’t know but it’s out of control, it’s spread to my fucking hearing aids
MyFucking Hearing Aids™
Yup, myPhonak. They’d better be mine, given the cost!
Yeah I just ordered new ones and the features look awesome, definitely an upgrade over my 5 year old ones, but holy crap they’re starting to creep into used car prices. Thank fuck my insurance is helping
It started with making office computers personable for home use in Windows 95 e.g. “My Computer”, “My Documents”.
This carried on into web services like My Yahoo, or terms like My Account.
Smashing it into one word was also a thing back in the late 90s / early 00s because it (a) was easy for searching in older search engines and (b) sounded like Apple’s iPod, iMac etc (MyPod, MyMac).
Continued use today is usually because of either (a) it’s been called that for a couple of decades already or (b) the product manager is themselves old and has forgotten how old the trend of trying to make those new fangled computerybobs sound welcoming and friendly.
I’ve been using Linux for so long i’d almost forgotten Windows does that. Just calling it “Documents” and not having to worry about a space in the file path breaking things is so much easier.
It doesn’t anymore. I think they dropped the My with Vista? Certainly it was gone by Windows 7.
There’s no place like
/home
I noticed that at some point the “My…”. Switched to a “You” branding. YouTube, yougov, youpic, YouNow, …
This has always annoyed the piss out of me
for me it’s “iCrap” or “pro” what’s so fucking pro about your device?
It’s better that prefixing everything with “i.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Intentional dumbing-down of the entire market.
Microsoft was pioneer in doing that, decades ago.
( the whole instinct to dumb-down everything is culturally-ingrained, & helps prevent critical-thinking, so it automatically gets backing by incorporated DarkTriad “persons”.
John Taylor Gatto’s perspective on education is pertinent,
hell, a bit in a book I read decades ago is pertinent: 2 psychologists who had a daughter herd her talking to herself, while in bed…
so, being psychologists, they stuck a tape-recorder in her bed, to discover what she was saying.
They discovered that she was telling herself the story-of-her-day.
They ALSO discovered that she was complying with their pressure to dumb herself down, to meet their expectations: she was significantly un-dumbed-down in that recording.
That was one of the most-depressing things I’ve ever read.
Mere toddlers are already programmed by our culture into dumbing themselves down, & we’re blind to that, by default??
Makes our whole population significantly less-viable, in this century, that’s for sure.
Dumbing-down & ideological oversimplification are related, & form a positive-feedback-loop, unfortunately )
Wait, do you mean their parents wanted her to behave like dumb? Or is it they had low expectations of what she could achieve at that age and it lowered her self esteem?
Is MyPoop taken?
I’m not touching your poop, it’s all yours
Didn’t Microsoft start this with the “My Computer” icon on Windows 95?
I think you’re probably right, though I feel like there’s something nagging me in the back of my mind that I’d seen that somewhere in software pre-Windows 95 but I can’t think of it. They were using it a lot in the 90s definitely.
What pisses me off the most about this is when I search for your app. It doesn’t start with your actual company name, I have to check alphabetical, see it’s not there. Go to install your app only to find I already had it, it’s just listed as MyInsertnamehere. Infuriating.
Or Nounr.
Fad. Someone started doing it, and it caught on so no everyone does. The iPod started the iEverything phase. A local car dealer near me uses NameTube.com because they decided they needed a website about the time youtube got a lot press. There are many more things over the years that became a fad for a while, and there will be more.
At least Sony has some historical reason for this…
Clears throat
I like pizza pie and I like pepperoni! But what I love is My First Sony!
marketers are dumb sheeps.
I think it’s more “marketers know that people are dumb sheeps”
Nah… They think they know. Denning-Kruger syndrom is flying high in these spheres.
I can confirm this to at least some degree. Part of my job involves marketing and this unfortunately requires at least some minimum peripheral contact with professional marketing people.
They’re idiots, at least on the creative side. They live in a bubble of their own making and are among the worst people on Earth for predicting how regular people think, interact with products or websites, or make decisions.
However, they also get piles and piles of cash shoveled in their direction by executive types who are also idiots, in the vain hope of an ROI that is legendarily fuzzy and also extremely easy to fudge. Thus, the machine churns on.
Yeah. They are parasites. There are so many functions like that, that must circle jerk with other useless functions, so they can justify each other existence.
Give the user a sense of control
While covering up the fact that you more than likely don’t even own the product, you simply paid full price for license to use it that they can revoke at any time.
Yay modern corporate garbage!
