One Feature, Twelve Names: The Vocabulary Arms Race Inside Modern Software
Photo: Microsoft Corporation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Consider a modest fact of modern work life: a container where a team's documents, conversations, and tasks live together. Notion calls it a workspace. Slack calls it a workspace too, but also a channel. Asana calls it a project. Monday.com calls it a board. Airtable calls it a base. ClickUp calls it a Space, with a capital S and its own onboarding tour. The feature underneath is functionally the same everywhere — a bucket for organizing work — yet each vendor speaks as though it has invented fire.
This is not accidental. In a market where products have converged to a striking degree, language has become the last reliable differentiator. And the results are increasingly absurd.
The Glossary Nobody Asked For
Spend a month evaluating project management tools and you will compile, without trying, an unofficial cross-industry dictionary. The list of items a team completes? Depending on the vendor, those are tasks, to-dos, cards, items, records, actions, tickets, or — in one memorable rebrand — "work items." The individual responsible? An assignee, an owner, an owner-field, or a member. The view where everything is displayed? A dashboard, a home, a cockpit, an overview, or a command center.
Artificial intelligence has poured gasoline on the trend. Every vendor now has an AI assistant, and each one needed a name that could not be confused with a competitor's. There are Copilots, Companions, Mates, Genies, and at least one "AI teammate" that behaves, functionally, like every other AI teammate. Under the hood, they are all variations on the same large language models, wrapped in different adjectives.
Why Converged Products Reach for Invented Words
The economics explain the behavior. When dozens of products offer roughly the same capabilities at roughly the same price, buyers cannot differentiate on features — the spec sheets read like translations of one another. So vendors differentiate on identity, and identity in software is largely a vocabulary decision.
Abstract naming also serves a defensive purpose. A company that calls its organizing layer a "canvas" can later stuff almost anything into that canvas — documents, diagrams, automations, AI agents — without the name becoming a lie. Concrete names box you in. "Task manager" cannot grow into a knowledge base. "Canvas" can absorb nearly anything, which is precisely the point.
There is a subtler motive as well: lock-in through fluency. Once a team becomes fluent in a product's private language — its Spaces, Bases, and Hubs — switching tools means becoming a beginner again in the new tool's dialect. Vocabulary is a switching cost disguised as branding.
The Buyer's Tax
The cost of this arms race lands on customers. Every migration between tools requires translating one vendor's vocabulary into another's. Every procurement decision requires a mental mapping exercise: their "Hub" is our "Workspace," their "records" are our "rows," their "AI Companion" is, functionally, a chat box over our data.
Training departments feel it most. Onboarding documentation written for one tool is nearly useless for its direct competitor, not because the features differ but because the words do. US companies collectively spend billions on software training annually, and a meaningful slice of that goes toward teaching people to say "Base" when they mean "spreadsheet with opinions."
Differentiation or Obfuscation?
To be fair, not all invented language is cynical. Some of it genuinely reframes how people think about work. Calling something a "canvas" rather than a "document" invites a different mental model, and occasionally that model matters. Notion's decision to blur the boundary between documents and databases was a naming decision as much as an engineering one, and it worked.
The problem is proportion. When every vendor in a category renames the same ten features, vocabulary stops signaling anything and starts merely distinguishing — the way two nearly identical cereals distinguish themselves by mascot. Buyers learn to discount the language entirely, which is the worst outcome for vendors who spent millions on it.
A Modest Proposal for Plain Speech
What would help is a return to shared vocabulary for shared functionality. Vendors could reserve invented names for genuinely novel capabilities and use common terms for table stakes. A task is a task. A dashboard is a dashboard. If your product's organizing layer truly behaves unlike anyone else's, name it — and be prepared to demonstrate the difference.
Until then, buyers should approach feature-name comparisons the way they approach pharmaceutical marketing: read past the brand name and find the generic. The industry's most durable products will not be the ones with the most inventive dictionaries, but the ones whose actual behavior makes the vocabulary irrelevant. In software, as in any language, clarity is a feature. Pretending otherwise is just renaming the problem.
