This guy is completely mistaken. It did at least occur to him that the two most successful web startups to date, Google and Yahoo, both did what he says startups shouldn't. He replies to that by saying that you can only get away with a goofy name if people love what you build.
If he had followed that line of reasoning one step further, it might also have occurred to him that, conversely, if you make something users hate, it won't matter that you have a good name.
In other words, what matters is what you build, not what you call it. Names just don't matter much. Which means he's wrong, since the thesis of this article is that they do.
Startups choosing random names are in fact pursuing a near optimal strategy: just choose something reasonably short and catchy, and spend your time working on the product, because that's what matters.
Pogue isn't arguing that names are life and death for a startup, he's just pointing out the obvious: Given two sites that do reasonably similar things, the one with the "catchy" name is going to be remembered.
I think there is a tendency here to conflate short with catchy. In my opinion, there's nothing catchy at all about any of these: Etelos. Iyogi. Oyogi. Qoop. Ooma. Some of it may be a function of personal taste, but I think there's plenty of room for improvement.
No. If you read the article, he's complaining about names that are merely catchy-- which is exactly what Dr. Seuss words are: interesting sounding, but "meaningless" and "silly."
His claim that names matter for a startup is implicit in choosing to write a whole article about how the names startups currently choose aren't good enough.
I did read the article, and what he's really complaining about is words that are "meaningless" and "silly", and still are not "catchy" (oxford: instantly appealing and memorable). He's most concerned about the fact that the names are not memorable.
There is obviously an implied claim that startup names matter to a degree, but I think he makes it clear he doesn't think it's priority number one. Not to mention, it wasn't a whole article, it was a blog post. He writes for the Times, and he certainly didn't choose to make this the topic of one of his printed articles. He certainly isn't the first, nor will he be the last, to complain in his blog that web startup names these days kind of suck. I'm not naive enough to think David Pogue's blog is anything like mine or most, but it's useful to gain some perspective.
If he had followed that line of reasoning one step further, it might also have occurred to him that, conversely, if you make something users hate, it won't matter that you have a good name.
In other words, what matters is what you build, not what you call it. Names just don't matter much. Which means he's wrong, since the thesis of this article is that they do.
Startups choosing random names are in fact pursuing a near optimal strategy: just choose something reasonably short and catchy, and spend your time working on the product, because that's what matters.