June 2000 The Name Game By Peter Horner Blame it on the propeller heads. According to Level 3 Communications CEO James Crowe, the name "Level 3" refers to a networking protocol stack or layered set of specifications that starts down at the wire level and works its way up to the applications. "It's an idealistic system that's rarely used anymore, but it has symbolic value," Crow says. "The first three layers — the protocol layers — are the layers that our business operates at, so we thought, well, we'll call it 'Layer 3.' That sounded lousy so we changed it to 'Level 3.' "I probably should have told you it's just like Haagen-Dazs it doesn't mean anything. But the embarrassing truth is our engineers and I'm one of them — came up with the name and we soon had enough brand equity in it that we couldn't change." Return to the main article Something to Crowe About Table of Contents OR/MS Today Home Page OR/MS Today copyright © 2000 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com Web Site © Copyright 1999, 2000 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.