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C'mon baby light my wire

SAN FRANCISCO, May 29, 2002. Apple has pulled-off a branding coup, getting the 1394 Trade Association to adopt its FireWire trademark for the high-speed IEEE 1394 connection standard.

Apple developed IEEE 1394, but was the only company calling it FireWire. Sony branded the same connection "iLink" in all its devices that use the port, and all other companies just called it "IEEE 1394," a glorious belch of tech mumbo-jumbo. What a relief that an incredibly geeky name will be replaced in most instances by a cool, evocative name.

The universal adoption of the name "FireWire" should give Apple's high-speed port a leg up on Intel's rival connection standard, USB, a boring acronym for the even more boring "Universal Serial Bus." Somewhere, as you read this, jittery Intel executives are probably pounding the mahogany and yelling, "We need a name like 'FireWire'!"

But alas, it can never be. Fear based marketing guidelines dictate that Intel would never allow anything snappier than "Intel" into the corporate name pool, for fear of eclipsing the family jewel.