Where does the name COG come from?
Part of the Additional Pages Index
When I approached my Dad (you can read about the history of COG here) with the idea of creating a simple e-commerce company we immediately started throwing names about. Now, there's something about the males in our family, we're all mechanically and logically minded and as such the meeting spot was amidst a dismantled motorbike (a heavily tuned Honda VTR1000 Firestorm), and we almost immediately took a huge tangent...
The whole machine works, and each part is well thought out...
Yep, we were back onto discussing the mechanics of engines and motorbikes, however we kept the conversation in the theme of e-commerce. No I'm not great for remembering a conversation from a year ago either, so I'm going to make this part up. Mostly.
...you're saying that the rider is like the consumer? Yeah, when I'm riding I want ultimate control over the machine, but require that the bike "just work" and not kill me! Hmm, so that would make the bike our job and we're the mechanics, but if you wanted to you should be free tune it and customise it! Yeah, but don't forget that a bike is always bike, you'd never tune it up into a car or a bus! That's just madness! Agreed, tweaking and modding the bike really does make it act like you want, but it would be daft to lose sight of the goal, to enjoy the ride!
That's probably a little more objective than it really was, but hey, this particularly article is more of a story!
Not everyone loves motorbikes
We continued to discuss a lot of what you see today, and decided that the best way to describe the machine was with a far simpler analogy. So "metaphorically speaking" we whittled the idea down into a simple gearing system. The whole concept of buying online (the consumer, website, merchant, shop owner, everything) can be though of as a well oiled machine, and in some cases, not so well oiled. And our solution would have to become part of the machine rather than to try and replace it as so many others have tried and failed.
What is the most fundamental piece of the machine?
A cog! Something that its integral, irreplaceable and utterly simple. We all know what a cog does, it moves energy from one place to another, it's part of the system and it helps everything work together nicely! A perfect analogy for what I wanted to create with the e-commerce company. And so the COG name was born!
There was another name. Briefly
As embarrassing as it is, for about 1 minute I'd settled for my favourite tool name... The Ratchet! The rat shit? Yeah point made.
