That case is different. Virgin started with music records and was already a huge brand by they time they launched the airline. They launched tons of products and all of them were called Virgin (mobile, cola etc).
May be a better question would be "Who would'a thunk you could name a record label 'Virgin' and get it off the ground?"
A bad name is better than wasting energy bikeshedding over available names. And in my opinion, for a product that solves messy problems "YourPerfectRainbowPony" isn't better. They're not selling to the marketing department.
But managers still need to get approval from executives to purchase it. And who wants to go into a budget meeting pitching for "CockroachDB by Cockroach Labs"? They desperately need a name in there that will be palatable with executives outside of the Silicon Valley venture bubble.
In my first job in AEC, my manager bought Zeos computers for our new CAD stations because he liked the way it sounded. The big glossy adds in all the computer magazines represented successful marketing. After listening to tech support tell my supervisor to "reset the BIOS" after two hours on the phone over a dodgy graphics card, I realized it would have been better if Zeos had spent some of that money on competent support personnel...it was another several hours before the hard disk settings and everything else that used to live in BIOS in those days was restored and the video card always was a little dodgy.
Anyway, my manager also liked to write his letters in Lotus123. Which is a round about way of pointing out that if management isn't going to evaluate technical decisions using technical criteria then there's no escaping the fact that pointy hair is as pointy hair does. If you're pitching the name, not the solution the name isn't the problem.
