The word WiFi. What does it mean? Where’s it from?
Despite mass confusion since the beginning, it’s not actually short for “Wireless Fidelity”. It’s just a play on the well-known word Hi-Fi, which itself was a mashup of “High Fidelity”. High or low fidelity indicated distortion levels in sound systems, way back when. Obviously higher was better. People wanted their sound to arrive less distorted. It was shortened down to HiFi, and slapped onto stickers on the front of everything it could be applied to. Which of course led to its becoming the default word for a sound system in general. “Put that on the HiFi for me.” “I dig the jazzy beats coming from your HiFi, cool cat.” Okay, maybe not that last one so much.
The word WiFi is just a catchy and cute way to say “wireless network” (and all its geeked-out variations) that doesn’t clunk around like most of the other tech terms that otherwise have to get used to discuss the internet’s meat and bones. It has no earthly reason to contain “fidelity” as the concept of fidelity doesn’t really apply, except to lend trust. The people who marketed early wireless technology want a way to simplify the idea of what they were selling to the internet cafes and hotels of the world. The idea of continually referring to it as an “IEEE 802.11B ” just doesn’t ring well and probably made their customers eyes glaze over… I know it would have to me at the time. And I was a techie.
Anyway, they wanted something catchy, easy to recognize and that they’re potential customers would immediately understand and want. In other words…
It’s branding.
That’s right, the word WiFi is just branding, and it’s brilliant. You – and everyone else – swallowed this WiFi brand up into our daily lives without thought. But if you’re like me, you have been dealing with people saying that it’s short for Wireless Fidelity for the last decade. Well now you can prove them wrong: Here’s the straight dope on the source of the word WiFi from as close to the source as the interwebs allow when it happened more than a decade ago… A blog post from 2005.
These people did exactly the right thing. They knew they had a great product that people could hypothetically benefit from, but they invested the time and energy into their brand, and how to make it something that people would really instantly understand and want. The mistakes of their process (which you can hear about in the article I linked to) were not enough to kill that brand. It was such a workable brand that it literally became THE gold standard for the entire industry. Like “bandaid” or “Q-tip”, the word is now the only word imaginable for that product.
No matter how much people need your product, branding correctly from the start is a really smart move.
Now if you can retain ownership of that brand when it becomes a synonym for an entire branch of technologies, all the better. I would argue that they did NOT do that, whether intentionally or not. Perhaps they went the way of the dodo with the original bubble burst, who knows.
But, do you associate any one company with this symbol?
Neither do I.
I associate it instead with an entire amazing array of tools that allow us to easily access the internet when we’re out and about. In a warm fuzzy kind of way.
It’s a good brand.
(Thanks to my friend Charlie at How To Be A Dad for reminding me to rant about this.)