Tuesday, August 14, 2018

possessives - ACME technology or ACME's technology

EDIT 2: The nuance difference may be subtle, maybe even subliminal to most people, but still important to me. I don't think there's one right answer to this question (but maybe there is), as any answer is subjective, so I'm interested in any opinion from anyone.



Let's assume we have a company ACME that has some technology used in some product. To your ears, what would be the difference between saying





  • "The benefit of using ACME technology to accelerate the development of [...]"



and




  • "The benefit of using ACME's technology to accelerate the development of [...]"?




The former sounds to me as if the technology was developed by ACME, regardless of who owns it. The latter makes it sound like ACME owns the technology (patents etc.), but didn't make it themselves. At the same time, saying "our technology" should be analogous to the second variant (assuming you work for ACME), but it doesn't feel quite the same.



EDIT: I ran a few searches on Ngram, substituting ACME for various well-known industry names, and the two forms seem to run hand in hand, occurring with about the same frequency. I still don't think the two are entirely interchangeable.

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