Blitz Lives

The Blitz­Mail client is on its deathbed, but the Blitz moniker will live on.

Col­lege staff mem­bers in­volved in the Mi­crosoft pro­ject sent out a sur­vey to the Dart­mouth com­mu­nity on Mon­day with the top five choices for the new soft­ware suite’s name. Re­flect­ing stu­dent sen­ti­ments about Blitz­Mail, ad­min­is­tra­tors de­cided to em­pha­size sug­ges­tions that in­cor­po­rated “Blitz” into the name.

“There was a very strong stu­dent pref­er­ence for keep­ing ‘Blitz’ in the name, whereas it was prob­a­bly less so with fac­ulty and staff,” pro­ject man­ager Susan Za­slaw told The Dart­mouth. “What we saw from staff and fac­ulty were more non-Blitz­Mail names.”

Par­tic­i­pants of the sur­vey can choose be­tween “Big­Blitz,” “Blitz,” “Blitz2.0,” “Bitz2G” and “Dart­Blitz.” As of Wednes­day, 1,500 peo­ple had voted on the Sur­vey­Mon­key site, ac­cord­ing to Za­slaw.

Within a span of three days, the Mi­crosoft On­line Tran­si­tion Team nar­rowed down a pool of 69 sug­ges­tions to 10 top choices. These in­cluded name sug­ges­tions that did not in­cor­po­rate “Blitz,” in­clud­ing “Dart­Con­nect” and “VoxBox,” for ex­am­ple. Se­nior col­lege ad­min­is­tra­tors nar­rowed the top 10 list to five, giv­ing pref­er­ence to names that in­cor­po­rated “Blitz” as well as sug­ges­tions that came from mul­ti­ple peo­ple. Names that were al­ready trade­marked were placed on the bot­tom of the list.

“One of the sug­ges­tions was ‘Buzz,’” Za­slaw said. “Which is kind of cute, but there’s Google Buzz, there’s Buzz.​com — so we ruled that out right away be­cause we felt it would be chal­leng­ing to try to use that with­out caus­ing con­fu­sion.”

The vot­ing pe­riod will end Fri­day, and re­sults will be an­nounced one week later.