About IBM, acronyms and going overboard

Whenever we come out with a new product, I don’t know who decides on naming conventions, but things can get ugly. Well, not as much as what IT Jungle recently wrote on our product (they love the product, they just don’t dig the name) in their IBM Weaves Together HATS and WebFacing Tools article:

As we reported last fall, there were plenty of rumors running around that indicated that Big Blue might do this, so the announcement is not exactly a surprise. But the details of how this integration has been accomplished with the new WebSphere Development Studio Client WebFacing Development Tool with HATS Technology, or WDHT, are clever and not exactly what people might have been expecting.

Before I get into that, I feel the need to vent a little about product naming conventions. Yes, Virginia, WDHT is actually a nested acronym, and yes, IBM’s calling it WDHT violates the rules of acronym making. Technically, the product should be called WDSC[WFDTW(HATS)T] or something like that. Here’s my question: What would be wrong with calling the whole thing i5/WEB, making it clear that it was a middleware layer that rode on top of i5/OS?

What would be wrong? Well, for starters, it’s way too simple. But I’m glad IT pubications are keeping us honest on our acronym making rules…