[beckler]

Acronyms are the worst.

I guess people do it to sound cool or something, but I once maintained a legacy project that had an acronym for a name. Not a single person working at the entire company knew what the acronym originally meant, and of course, it was never documented.

[taeric]

Acronyms are no different from words, in this regard. How many people remember/know why your storage is called a drive? A computer used to be a person. Why is the company Stripe named that?

Then there are backronyms and names that used to be acronyms, but technically aren't anymore.

[colinrand]

Analyst firms (ie Gartner) are a big driver of this too. Couple that with the start up / VC model which needs to create new 'categories' to demonstrate differentiation, and you have a total mess.

[unethical_ban]

I work for a vendor that sells a CNAPP. I've worked with this product before and it's been around for several years.

Until last week, I had never heard or read the term CNAPP.

"CNAPP is a term first coined by Gartner in 2021 to describe an all-in-one platform that unifies security and compliance capabilities to prevent, detect, and respond to cloud security threats. A CNAPP integrates multiple cloud security solutions that have been traditionally siloed in a single user interface, making it easier for organizations to protect their entire cloud application footprint."

Thanks, Gartner. What a racket they have as a self-ordained arbiter of market segments.

[gold7777]

15 years ago some interns where I now work created a spreadsheet and named it an acronym of their first names. That project has since developed into a fairly important system with a front end and database. They kept the name the same, of course.

[colechristensen]

A long time ago I worked on a defense program called "XMS 3000", hilariously, it was explained to me that this literally did not mean anything. They needed a name and somebody came up with this to sound cool.