23 boardroom meetings, 79 stand-up meetings, 12 fist fights and a drunken pub brawl (between our content writers) later….and we still can’t have the answer to a very simple question, a question questioning our very fundamentals – Is FusionCharts singular or plural?
Six years ago (yeah we turned six this October – read about our birthday here ), when our founder named the product “FusionCharts”, the content writer in him probably did not realize the enormity of the ‘s’ at the end of ‘FusionChart’. He was all of 17 then – he thought that since we had 6 chart types to start with, it had to be charts. And if you wanna know about the ‘Fusion’ part of things, it was because the charting engine was a concoction of various technologies – ActionScript, XML and other server-side technologies.
Six years down the line, when we are boasting about FusionCharts, we don’t know whether to boast “FusionCharts is the best” or “FusionCharts are the best”. One of them sounds gramatically right, the other one somehow just sounds right. And it gets worse because we have users from diverse nationalities speaking their own diverse versions of English. So, while one user says “FusionCharts has all the functionality I required”, another one says “FusionCharts have helped my clients understand their data better”. And our content writers fight again.
Another very fundamental question arises now – Why is that we stumbled upon this after 6 years of existence? Well, here’s why – we were coming up with a new ad for FusionCharts wherein we couldn’t decide whether the punchline should be “FusionCharts brings out the real rock star in you” or “FusionCharts bring out the real rock star in you”.
In the rest of the text, almost every “FusionCharts is” was alternated with “FusionCharts are” to keep all the content-writers happy. But they still couldn’t have their peace. We were running out of first-aid kits. So dear reader, please help us during these times of grave crisis and help us clear the air, once and for all.
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It is a "Collective Proper Noun" for His sake! I guess we should approach Mr. Martti Ahtisaari for a peaceful solution.
What say?
Refer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martti_Ahtisaari
As a product/suite name "FusionCharts" is singular. There is nothing wrong in "FusionCharts is a leading flash based charting product ..." usage.
Usage such as "Various charts within FusionCharts are done very well to allow ..." should obviously use plural.
How is this different from usage of company names "Texas Instruments" or "General Motors"? We don't say "Texas Instruments are ..."!!, we say, "Texas Instruments is a great company ..." etc.
Your content writers have too much time to argue! :-)
singular.
Singular, as in the first post.
In this particular case, you can solve it by just dropping the whole "bring out the real rock star in you" line altogether. I would be very happy if I never saw another cheesy advertisement comparing programmers to rock stars.
Like Chris Rock said of rap music, you're only making it harder for your existing customers to defend your product.
Definitely singular.
Singularly PLural :D