Naming the Category: What We Call the Thing That Doesn't Have a Name Yet

The fastest way to confuse someone about a new product is to use language from the last category.

When the iPad shipped, every reviewer reached for "tablet," and the reviews were correspondingly bad — because tablet was the name of a category that had failed for a decade. When Slack shipped, "chat app" was nearly fatal as a description, because chat apps were what teenagers used. When Stripe shipped, "payments API" was technically correct and emotionally wrong; the magnitude of the change was inside the word API, not the word payments.