Jack Dorsey’s Square is changing its name to Block

Author: uptown

Score: 24

Comments: 21

Date: 2021-12-01 21:59:33

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sschueller wrote at 2021-12-01 22:17:04:

I don't like large companies using basic words for their business. They take complete control of all trademarks and screw anyone who has anything similar.

You want to call your band "new kids on the block" or your game "blocks"? Sorry there is a trademark on block and it's "too similar" to what we do. You don't agree? Go ahead sue us, oh BTW we have more money than you...

voakbasda wrote at 2021-12-01 23:10:14:

They absolutely should never be granted trademarks on such common words in the first place. The intellectual property system has become another example of regulatory capture, ready to be abused by those with deepest pockets.

stubish wrote at 2021-12-01 22:29:39:

Brave for a payment processor to choose a name meaning to hinder or impede.

aaronbrethorst wrote at 2021-12-01 22:03:14:

I hope employees start getting called 'blockheads'.

https://observer.com/2012/01/square-employees-are-called-squ...

stubish wrote at 2021-12-01 22:32:20:

Likely, if their systems cause blockages or they keep blocking payments.

FormerBandmate wrote at 2021-12-01 22:29:09:

Why the hell would he copy Meta? That didn't work out particularly well for Facebook, got bad PR and Square is a much better corporate brand than Facebook. Who asked for this?

Nasrudith wrote at 2021-12-02 00:13:14:

Outside of HN I have never heard anybody reference Square. Compare to Facebook which is hard to not hear about as their rivals angrily spam incoherent hit pieces. That may be his advantage however - while everyone called and still calls Twitter trash from just its restrictive character limit there isn't such a personal hatred to Dorsey. Unlike Zuckerberg he doesn't have a sizable deranged "secretly an evil android or robot" brigade repeating a variant of the "stab in the back" myth.

kwu777 wrote at 2021-12-01 22:03:01:

what's up with all the renaming? Sounds like a nightmare for the codebase & services or do the eng team just keep the old name internally?

hn_throwaway_99 wrote at 2021-12-01 22:28:07:

Programmers rarely change codebase names when corporate names change - it has a huge cost for almost no benefit. That's why so many of Apple's Objective-C class names start with NS - which is for NextStep, the company Apple acquired in the mid 90s.

baybal2 wrote at 2021-12-02 00:12:38:

I would say I find a patter of meaningless name changes much more prevalent in "enterprise software" circles.

willcipriano wrote at 2021-12-01 22:34:55:

Find and replace wouldn't be that bad with 'Square' I feel like, I don't think you use the word 'Square' too often while programming, if the company was named ';' or 'def' then id just find another job.

iso8859-1 wrote at 2021-12-01 23:07:09:

You use square all the time if doing linear algebra or geometry. ;)

brockwhittaker wrote at 2021-12-01 22:47:01:

it's never as easy as find-and-replace :)

smnrchrds wrote at 2021-12-02 00:23:48:

It seems like Square has an office in Montréal. They should rename that office to "Block Québécois".

tasogare wrote at 2021-12-02 01:08:13:

Better spell it as bloc to manage local susceptibilities.

crawsome wrote at 2021-12-01 23:12:42:

Let's just trademark dodecahedron

logotype wrote at 2021-12-01 22:40:57:

https://block.com

That domain must have been expensive…

reducesuffering wrote at 2021-12-01 23:29:17:

Hilarious that they're using squarespace for that instead of their own product, Weebly.

wgj wrote at 2021-12-01 23:36:02:

They needed something with a default favicon that already looks like a block.

4wsn wrote at 2021-12-02 05:35:48:

I had never heard of Weebly before but I assumed you had made a typo because surely nobody would call their product "Weebly". I was wrong.

vldo wrote at 2021-12-01 22:23:21:

hoping they'll merge with google as alphabet block