Companies are very touchy about their names, and DEC for years has tried to persuade the world to call it Digital, despite the fact that it prefixes most of its product names with DEC – and the campaign misfired disastrously a few years back when the organiser of the London Marathon himself called one of that year’s main sponsors Digital Computers in the Observer, and now Hewlett-Packard Co is fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of the company’s co-founder, David Packard and is objecting to the corporate name being abbreviated to Hewlett – it wants to be called by its full name or simply HP, but we fear it is facing an uphill battle: since to most British people, HP means a brand of brown sauce, that is clearly unacceptable; Reuters routinely tags its items on the company Hewlett, and Hewlett is the abbreviation almost universally used on Wall Street – but if all else fails, there’s always Hewp.
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