Background:

How do you pronounce this? Double how if you are Japanese?? We first got wind of this name before it was publicly announced, when employees of the new company were asking how they could work for a company whose name they could not even pronounce! Let alone understand the meaning. We couldn't even help them with the pronunciation - after all our years of dealing with languages. Wonder if they know Rene is common abbreviation for Irene in English? And SAS is the national airline of Scandinavia!

But more interesting, in a language and culture that has so much trouble pronouncing the letter "R" to start a name this way boggles the mind. The Japanese people have such problems with R's that the actual public brand diagram for this new company, starts with "Brand Oligin" (sic) ! We saw this becuase we were pokign around looking for the meaning or roots of the word, and are not surprised that someone took Renaissance and new and advanced systems and it came out like this. Why couldn't it have been Renaisys or something like that?

Of course, the lawyers probably like it, since it is so awkward and wierd no one else has used it anywhere. And if you want to know what technologies the name is intended to protect, just see the federal trademark application they have filed in the USA. Looks like they are trying to cover anything and everything Hitachi or Mitusbushi make, now or in the future. We have never seen an application claiming so much coverage at the outset, and will be watching to see if it is all granted.

Meanwhile, some graphics team has done a better job. But do you notice there is not one trademark claim on their whole www.renesas.com website. Not even one teeny little TM.....though we felt compelled to put one at top of this page when we first used the name. Very strange, and that is why we didn't score it higher on presentation. Longest trademark filing begets worst public usage. We even checked their print ads in Business Week and other places. Nary a TM to be found!

And for those of you who argue any name will do as long as it is legally clean, we hope they have big branding budgets. Hitachi and Mitsubishi are such very old mainstream Japanese names they probably have no idea how much time and effort it takes to launch a new unknown company name and image and brand....let alone one with a problem name. Didn't they learn from the struggles of Elpida?