Brands are always in a flux. Amazon the river and the forests and the people have a stronger brand now than the mythical Gods. But Amazon the company has not overtaken all the above.
Would be an interesting poll, broken down by region, but speaking for myself if you say 'Amazon' to me without context, I'll immediately think of the company.
Similarly 'twitter' in older literature throws me off for a second. I'd bet it's plummetted in usage in recent years.
It's just about familiarity - I use some part of Amazon the company almost every day, but have no ties to _the_ Amazon, nor see it as frequently in news items.
How about if you think of it in terms of the bond that such branding rests on. Surely, if my tribe, home, and history is tied to the name Amazon, then that beats (for some definition of "beats") one's relationship with an online retail place?
I am not arguing for any side, but I do acknowledge that the Amazonian community's right to the name rests on a very good argument.
>Surely, if my tribe, home, and history is tied to the name Amazon, then that beats (for some definition of "beats") one's relationship with an online retail place?
Which goes back to crazygringo's point:
>Because if it were for locals, it would be .amazonia and .amazonas. (Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)
> I am not arguing for any side, but I do acknowledge that the Amazonian community's right to the name rests on a very good argument.
I'm also not arguing for any side, but I don't think your "bond" argument is particularly convincing. Namely, it strikes me as too vague in the general case and thus too hard to adjucate. The things you use to nail it down (tribe, home, history) are specific to this case, but don't generalize well. Even if you were able to address those problems, it doesn't compell me to think that these people deserve the English name for the geography in question (perhaps especially if those people don't really identify with the geography in question, but rather as nations who happen to live in that geography?).
In any case, it's a puzzling and interesting question.
Oh, I absolutely don't mean to comment on who 'deserves' (for some definition that includes 'is allowed to pay for the privilege of') it - that's a judgement I'm glad not to have to make - I was responding purely to the point about 'brand' strength.
Again, it's familiarity, and that's just me personally. I do like apples, but other than using a Mac for work I don't have any Apple gear. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that someone else first pictured iPhones etc.
> But Amazon the company has not overtaken all the above.
That might be true, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion. I think it's entirely possible that depending on how you measure it, Amazon the company has overtaken all the above.
Edit: And to be slightly less waffling, I think it's entirely possible it's overtaken them in some of the most obvious ways to measure, such as (global) public consciousness and word association.
I wonder how things will look in 50 years? Amazon (the company) may look unstoppable at the moment, but huge companies do come and go; in a generation or two, perhaps they'll still be dominating the scene, or perhaps they'll be a forgotten also-ran.
I'm pretty sure the Amazon (river/basin) will still be there, and will still be one of the earth's great geographical features; I hope even the Amazon rainforest will still be noteworthy on a world scale.
In 50 years, the Amazon river/basin could have been geographically swallowed by a new political entity and renamed. Sure, that's much less likely than Amazon the company being defunct (I hope, that seems more likely to be harbinger of world disrupting changes), but I think it's also more likely than Greek mythological scholors deciding to change millennia old characters and concepts.
I'm sure we can choose a specific metric to make the Amazon geographic area win, just as we can for any of the others in this comparison, but picking the metric to match the outcome we want doesn't seem the right way to go either.
I can definitely see cases for all of them, and I don't know the right metric by which to judge. That does make this an interesting case IMO, as the likelihood of the losers to be upset is high (except maybe Greek mythology, since I don't think they have a strong lobby on their side).
But that's not happening. There isn't "a people" who want .amazon, there's an intergovernmental organization that supposedly wants to use the TLD for tourism purposes.
Why exactly is Amazon.com less relevant than the Amazon tourist industry? They don't want .amazon for "the people", they want it for the tourism industry which also consists of faceless corporations.
I did not even know there was an Amazon people (I knew there were tribes that lived in the Amazon rainforest, but I did not know they were "Amazon" [Amazons? Amazonians?]). Anyway, the more salient point, I think, is that Amazon the company is not named after the tourism business (to the best of my knowledge) contrary to the claim upthread.
There weren't. The Greeks had a legend about a tribe of warrior-women who lived in the forest and were known as the "Amazons", and when the Spanish first found what we now know as the Amazon forest the natives tried to fight them off.
The spanish conquistadores were so impressed by the fact that the indigenous women fought together with the men that they started calling the place the "forest of the Amazons", after the old Greek myth. The name stuck. But there was never an actual tribe called the "Amazons".
I believe Amazon's brand origin can be traced back to a stupid bit of wordplay like... "Books are made from paper, paper comes from trees, we want to sell all the books so we're naming ourselves after all the trees - hence, The Amazon"
