What's In A Name?

I remember New Coke. As a loyal Coke drinker, I went ahead and bought the stuff, but in my mind I knew that I didn't need "New Coke." I had already tried Pepsi. I would like to believe that it was my quiet discontent that brought the original formula back just seventy-nine days after the launch of New Coke. New Coke abruptly became Old Coke and faded into marketing infamy. Coke Classic could then drop its modifier and things could go back to the way things were before April 23, 1985. There are plenty of purists, myself included, who will argue that they can taste the difference between what was once the original formula, which included real sugar and the new version of the original formula which substitutes corn syrup, but I suspect that if Coke had simply changed its recipe and kept that same old red and white can, we would all be drinking New Coke today.
Then there was Qwikster. Last year, Netflix decided that an oddly spelled new version of their online video download service. The resulting confusion, along with the attendant price change was enough to send loyal customers flocking to those red kiosks outside grocery stores for their video needs. The two and a half months New Coke enjoyed seemed like an eternity compared to the flash in the pan that was Qwikster. It disappeared without a trace. Except for those increased rates for video downloads.
Perhaps these models were going through Osama bin Laden's mind as he pondered al-Qaeda's future. His organization faced some of the same market insecurities of these giants of their particular industries. When you want the worldwide leader in Islamic Extremism, who you gonna call? As bin Laden saw it, the problem was that the group's full name, al-Qaeda al-Jihad, for The Base of Holy War, had become short-handed as simply al-Qaeda. Lopping off the word "jihad," bin Laden wrote, allowed the West to "claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam." All that brainstorming came to an abrupt end a year ago when Navy Seals interrupted. We'll never know what won out: New al-Qaeda or al-Qwikster.