While I don't like the branding move at all, I think the concern that people will start calling them moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a is a little ridiculous. Is Sony's line of laptops Analog Wave One Zero? Is Verizon Verizoncheckmark? Is Johnson & Johnson Johnson ampersand Johnson? Is Comcast CComcast? No, because people aren't complete idiots. Those that are going to know/care about Mozilla will be able to tell it's a little web reference nestled inside the logo and that it still reads "Mozilla".
BTW, for context, I think that conversation took place in Singapore. "Challenger" is the name of a chain of computer megastores here. "Simi" is local slang for "What's up."
Change languages and you're in a whole other world.
Have an Argentine (for example) pronounce Yosemite National Park for you.
Or for that matter, ask an English speaker to pronounce Habanero (there's no ñ) or someone from the East Coast to say Oregon or Puyallup.
While those are words and names, examples abound in marketing.
But to continue my example, Argentines already pronounce Mozilla differently than an English speaker, or other Spanish speakers for that matter! So this should be nothing new.
As an Argentina (born and living in AR), I can assure you we pronounce Mozilla almost identically. The Z might sound softer (like it does in "song"), but that's it.
The people from the above examples are just holding laptops upside down, there's no language involved there.
The difference is that Verizon-Checkmark is clearly an invalid interpretation - the checkmark is obviously decorative.
Mozilla's new logo was chosen specifically due to the double meaning, the similarity between the symbols :// and the glyphs "ill".
The ambiguity is what makes it "clever", and it's kind of an in-joke that most non-tech people, who've never heard of "Mozilla" as such, won't immediately register. They'll read the characters literally and say "moz://a? Is that a new computer thing?"
I don't think that's an idiotic response at all.
This is a bad generic logo merely because it doesn't clearly communicate their company's identity in a unique and obvious way, which is the sole function of a logo in the first place. I could see this rendering appearing at some hacker events or on t-shirts, but IMO it makes no sense to use it as a generic logo.
I don't even want to think about the nightmare of accidentally rendering the string "moz://a" in a typeface that the lawyers consider too similar to that used in the logo.
Sure, people will almost definitely not call them "moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a", but I could easily see a lot of people shortening the whole thing to just Moz. The :// in a url acts as a separator, so the important bits are whatever come before and after it. All there is after it is an "a" which isn't very informative, so my eyes are drawn to "moz" instead. Which isn't ideal because a company named Moz already exists and has no connection to Mozilla whatsoever.
Maybe less technical people who aren't used to seeing full urls won't have the same reaction, but in that case you've still got a problem because they probably won't already know who Mozilla is and it's kind of a leap to go from Moz://a to Mozilla without already knowing the name.
I am definitely old school, but if this (IMHO senseless) idea of reading "://" as "ill" would go on, a few sites might be read "the wrong way", as an example ;) silly combinator:
I was unaware that it spelled out Mozilla until a news article explained it for me. Reading : as "i" is incredibly unnatural to me, and I still don't read it as Mozilla. I see it and parse it as "the company in charge of Firefox."
If asked to pronounce it, without news articles telling me to say "Mozilla", I'd be 100% uncertain of what to say.
Oftentimes when reading something with a lot of symbols in it, I just remove the symbols and pronounce it as if the name were a sentence. Quick example: writing emacs lisp, I see 'global-set-key' and think "Global set key", as if someone were reading it out. Thus the new name isn't moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a, which would be ridiculous, but 'Mozza', which is much more plausible but equally detrimental, eg the logo is still being misinterpreted.
Reading that article from Brand New someone posted further down, I found myself wondering briefly what "Dressed to K" meant... Maybe I just have "a complete lack of imagination or willingness to adapt" [0], but somehow I think it's not entirely my fault.
> I think the concern that people will start calling them moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a is a little ridiculous
Honestly, I'd be happier if someone called it "moz-colon-forward-slash-forwardslash-a" instead of calling it "moz-colon-backslash-backslash-a". I've seen so many people mix up slash (forward slash) and backslash!
Seems like you conflate idiocy with pre-existing exposure to a brand's proper spelling.
While I see the value of this sentiment, the brands you mentioned have branding efforts that so far overspend mozilla's that the comparison is barely relevant.
Also, typing www.mo://a.org in a browser presents a serious problem.
I read "mozza", then I "got" the web reference, and immediately disliked it. I don't really understand how moz://a is better than Mozilla, but I don't categorically oppose it either.
New branding is fine but the choice here is a bit more debatable than the examples you point out, where each of the brand names are spelled 100% with the alphabet. In OP, 3 characters in 7 are not letters.
Edit: Maybe Mozilla could have suggested an addition to UTF-8 and used that new stylized character "://"?
My mother still calls it Fox Fire and Newegg, "Egghead", although I think it's mostly to annoy me. It doesn't though, but I let her think it does because it's funny.
> Is Sony's line of laptops Analog Wave One Zero? Is Verizon Verizoncheckmark? Is Johnson & Johnson Johnson ampersand Johnson? Is Comcast CComcast?
I think that a problem with all these examples is that, with the exception of "Johnson & Johnson" (where people do read '&' as it is commonly read, as 'and' rather than the name of the symbol), the decoration isn't, in fact, part of the name, so that people who ignore it correctly understand the name; whereas the decoration in moz://a is part of the name, and is not read as it would be in other contexts ('colon slash slash', back when people read full URLs aloud, slowly and awkwardly—remember those days?).
Who cares... Mozilla gets more and more irrelevant by the day. Since its clear the leadership is completely ineffective but someone manages to not be replaced, its pretty obvious Mozilla will continue its downward path.
