I agree. None of those names are bad and nothing informative about the article.
I agree.
The world can't function with
only brand names that match specific products and services in the way that the article appears to trumpet in it's initial paragraph. So to say that the name choices of the big boys listed in the (Apple, Amazon etc.) article are questionable choices for names is really quite
naïve.
Whilst it's nice for the person that owns the defacto generic name, there is only one .com for something. Names like Fly.com and Fiber.com that describe exactly the product or services that they provide, the systems and legal structures that are in place
(trademark registration being the one that stands out in my mind) explicitly forbid the registration of brand names like "Fly" and "Fiber" for Flights and Fiber as they are descriptive of the services that they want to trade. To allow it would be crippling for others because they couldn't use those generic terms anymore in trade. As the owner, you'd be stuck with having to register "Fly.com" and "Fiber.com" as your brand name (trademark), so your brand is tied to the domain, which might be fine now, but what happens if things change, domains fall out of favour or people stop caring for .com? You're left with no legal protection on the name "Fly" of "Fiber".
If you have the name Fly.com and you were to offer Hotels, that's a completely different story. From a branding perspective it's great because it doesn't describe the service that you provide and it allows you to stand out using your brand name. If people get to know "Fly hotels", then people are going to be able to find you easily on any platform, but typing "fly" into Google expecting to find Fly.com isn't likely to get you very far unless the owner has worked hard on SEO and the brand has gained notoriety amongst the general public, it would be like a needle in a haystack of other people that offer the same service under the term 'Fly'.
Of course there are plenty of examples where there have been fantastic successes, like Hotels.com. They are known as Hotels.com for a reason and that's great, but they might struggle to move with the times if things changed drastically. Further to this, they couldn't choose to start offering other products in the way that Amazon could do without it being weird. A name like 'Amazon' is a truly generic, it doesn't describe their goods and services, it is memorable, it can be registered as a trademark and the name allows them to offer any goods or services that they choose as their brand evolves. The same goes for Apple, Purple, Uber, Bird, Lime etc. I personally believe that this is the point.
I would conclude that the rules haven't changed like this article purports, it has always been this way. Trademark rules have long supported names that don't relate to the products that are provided, brandable single dictionary word names have always been desirable as brand names and generic single word .coms have always been in demand since there has been demand for domains... it's just that there are a lot of them being used now.
Whether they are
good names or not is entirely debatable
, but the fact that they are arbitrary names I think it could be argued that this is entirely the point.