Code Name: Geekfun

Some 15 centuries after the fall of Rome, Microsoft Corp. engineers are toiling to resurrect Janus -- the ancient gatekeeper to heaven.

Microsoft adopted the deity as an internal code name for a system that controls digital music and video stashed on computers and portable players.

When Janus makes its debut today, though, the program will bear a less evocative name: Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10.

The transformation is typical for technology products that enjoy colorful, if often geeky, monikers while in development, only to appear on store shelves under the most mundane names imaginable.

IBM Corp.’s Shark evolved into TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Servers. Apple Computer Inc.’s Killer Rabbit was renamed AppleShare 3.0. And Microsoft’s Snowball became merely Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

It’s the reverse in most other industries, where pedestrian code names get replaced by catchy brands. Inside General Motors Corp., for instance, the forthcoming Pontiac Solstice roadster was just project GMX020.

But the technology industry’s culture is famously less buttoned-down than that of Detroit or Wall Street. Suffusing that culture is the belief among programmers and engineers that they’re working on the Next Big Thing -- projects that change the world, not just deliver a more absorbent diaper or crunchier breakfast cereal.

And although marketing departments will ultimately replace most of the colorful monikers with new versions of familiar, easy-to-sell brands, the importance of code names in the development of digital products is hard to overstate.

The financial stakes are huge. A new software program or chip design can take years to bring to market and devour millions -- or even billions -- in capital before it generates a dime of revenue. All the while, competitors are racing to build something smarter and faster that will make existing technology obsolete, giving rise to a state of chronic paranoia.

Faced with that sort of intrigue, few geeks turn down the chance to bestow a secretive pet name on a project before company executives weigh in with potential trademark violations and focus-group feedback.

“A product manager can be defined as someone who has all of the responsibility and none of the power. It’s a thankless job,” said former Apple Computer technology evangelist Guy Kawasaki, the author of several business books. “One thing the product manager can do is give the code name to the product. Typically, he comes up with a clever name in the middle of the night, and hopefully management doesn’t find out until it’s ingrained.”

In the early years at Apple, the right name helped fire up engineers faced with the tedious prospect of spending years writing millions of lines of computer code.

“You needed a cool name to put on a T-shirt, and you needed a T-shirt to give to people,” said former Apple engineer Erich Ringewald. “It was part of getting people excited enough to work 70 hours a week.”

The first job of a code name is, of course, to keep a project secret -- a tradition that business borrowed from the military.

Even the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials was deemed too revealing for the effort to develop the first atomic bomb, a campaign that came to be known instead as the Manhattan Project.

Similarly, Intel Corp. adopted a new naming system after the maker of the Pentium, Pentium II and Pentium III computer chips realized that the internal designations P, P2 and P3 left little to the imagination of rivals.

The Pentium IV chip was known before its commercial launch as Willamette, one of the first dubbed under a system that uses names of places. Intel has called other chips and chip sets Banias, Merced and Grantsdale -- names of, respectively, an Israeli spring, a California river and a Montana town.

But the system isn’t flawless. Even though the names are intended for internal consumption, they frequently leak out. When they do, trademark owners and even individuals protective of their good names can take offense.

Intel’s upcoming 64-bit chip was named Tanglewood until lawyers for the Boston Symphony Orchestra pointed out that Tanglewood isn’t a town. It’s a private estate the orchestra uses for summer concerts. And it’s trademarked. The chip, rechristened Tukwila after a verifiable town south of Seattle, is expected to ship sometime after 2005.

Intel’s face-off with the symphony was milder than many spats over code names.

In 1993, Apple managers who were unsure whether the Power MacIntosh 7100 would ever make it to market named it Sagan, after the popular but speculative astronomer Carl Sagan. When the human Sagan got wind of the mock tribute, he asked Apple to drop the name.

So Apple renamed the machine BHA, which Sagan correctly surmised was short for Butt-Head Astronomer.

Sagan sued for libel and lost.

But after Apple attorneys settled other aspects of the case, the engineers promptly changed the code name a final time -- to LAW, short for Lawyers Are Wimps.

After that, “the lawyers became involved and started having guidelines, saying the term has to be so generic that you don’t have a possibility of getting into trouble for it,” said a former marketing executive at Apple, which declined to discuss its process. “It was a lot more fun before.”

Apple also took evasive action after the Sagan episode. It switched code names mid-project and assigned different terms for the same work, leaving a trail in case the company needed to trace new leaks.

Some veterans said the subterfuge succeeded mainly in confusing Apple’s own staff.

“They’d say, ‘We’re briefing people on Columbia,’ and you’d panic and say, ‘Wait, I don’t know about that one,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, Columbia is Snoopy,’ ” said the former marketer. “You almost needed a decoder ring to keep track.”

With the rise of the Internet, it’s harder than ever for companies to keep projects secret. So a few companies are trying to take advantage of that fact, using code names as marketing devices to build buzz among business partners and the early adopters who lead geek culture.

IBM, annoyed at a business columnist who called its costly mainframe computers “dinosaurs,” fired back last year by naming its z990 mainframe T-Rex. In the same vein, chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., perennially second to Intel, code-named its first 64-bit chip for mid-size computers SledgeHammer, hinting that it intended to pound its much bigger rival with the product.

Before SledgeHammer was ready to ship, AMD changed its name to Opteron.

Apple has gone even further, adopting quasi-code names entirely driven by marketing. The company’s latest operating system, Mac OS X version 10.3, was originally code-named Pinot. Apple replaced that name with the more dramatic Panther and even slapped that tag on the software packaging.

Several other code names have won second lives as product titles, including Apple’s Newton held-hand device and Pippin, its failed game console.

And at least one has made it onto the stock exchange: The first big project a young Larry Ellison developed for the CIA was code-named Oracle, which Ellison and his co-founders recycled when they created Oracle Corp.

As more code names leak out, some companies recruit specialists such as Lexicon Branding Inc. of Sausalito, Calif., to devote the same attention to internal names as other companies give to retail packaging.

“Clients began to see there was a benefit to establishing an internal sense of order, so you’re not presenting to the board and saying, ‘We’ve got Phoenix, we’ve got Micro-killer and we’ve got Darth Vader,’ ” said Lexicon founder David Placek. “It doesn’t give a sense of organization.”

Microsoft is still without a centralized system, and that’s led to some embarrassments.

At a time when the company was under fire for its aggressive business practices, Microsoft faced a barrage of criticism for naming a set of Internet functions HailStorm. The company promptly relabeled the product suite .NET My Services.

In the company’s early days, there were many such testosterone-fueled handles.

As the traditionally male ranks of engineers grew to include more women, names began to soften to include “furry animals, flowers and other touchy-feely kinds of names,” said former Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg. “It’s hard to get people fired up for a code name like Chrysanthemum.”

Before it hit store shelves, Windows XP was known inside Microsoft as Whistler, after a ski mountain in British Columbia. The next version is code-named Longhorn, after the Longhorn Saloon, in the saddle between Whistler and neighboring Blackcomb mountain.

At an Apple conference last year, Chief Executive Steve Jobs took glee in goring Microsoft on the horns of its own naming scheme. As he touted the advances in Panther, Jobs showed a video clip of a stalking black panther while wondering aloud what the competition was up to.

Then he cut to footage of a Longhorn bull standing in a field, staring at the camera.

The crowd howled.

Jobs himself was the subject of considerable industry ridicule 21 years ago after Apple brought out a $10,000 computer named Lisa, for Jobs’ oldest daughter.

The machine flopped, and none of Jobs’ three other children have had computers named for them.

Even the gods have their frailties.

Janus originally was code-named Mercury, the Roman messenger to the immortals.

Microsoft, though, proved not to be as fleet of foot as the wing-shoed Mercury. Products using the software were supposed to be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2003. But Microsoft couldn’t get the job done in time.

Microsoft dropped Mercury, disbanded the team and started over with Janus, also known as the god of new beginnings.