Premium Basic

Filed under: Oxymorons
1 Comment

When you want your service to sound great, you might be tempted to label it with a superlative, like, say, "Premium."

But if you want to distinguish two levels of service, you might be tempted to label one as, say, "Basic," and the other as, say, "Plus."

Both of those impulses are pretty reasonable. The problem comes when you try to combine them:

[...] Adobe Systems June 15 moved Acrobat.com out of public beta with two premium paid subscription services for businesses.

[...]

To wit, the company unveiled Premium Basic and Premium Plus services.

—eweek article, 15 June 2009

I'm hoping that the Premium Basic service will become so popular that they'll have to split it into two tiers, say Premium Basic Pro and Premium Basic Home.

Or perhaps Premium Basic Gold and Premium Basic Silver.

One Response to “Premium Basic”

  1. jacob

    That’s pretty funny, but to be fair to Adobe, the “Premium” part appears to be meant to distinguish paid subscribers from people using the free services.

    Presumably they might want to encourage people to buy paid subscriptions by giving the free version an insulting name.

    “Welcome to the Freeloading Schlub version of Acrobat.com. Upgrade to the Premium version?”

    reply

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