Falling in Love with “iPad”

A few days ago, a former senior Apple engineer told me the name “iPad” was widely disliked at first within the company. Go figure. At any rate, the irony isn’t lost on me:  Flash back a year and a half or so to a conversation I’m having with the senior marketer at HP tasked with introducing HP’s new tablet, based on a design and OS acquired from Palm: He informs me (contrary to our findings) that “pad” is now the default term for a tablet computer and that he is going to call the device “Touchpad” because, you know, it costs so much to build a new brand from scratch and, therefore, he is “drafting off Apple.”