A neutral name is fine if you can own it (and I don't mean in the trademark sense here). eg. Amazon... or Zappos. Neither of these names are cool on their own, they simply mean what they mean because the company behind them worked hard to establish the brand as a symbol of quality (of customer service, mostly).
OTOH, there are names that aren't really neutral and those can hurt you no matter how good your product/service is. Nick's examples of Fukime and MunchOnMe (1) are perfectly representative of this, IMO. Those two names give me a bad impression of the company to begin with, so they are starting off in a deep hole instead of at sea level when trying to get me to use them.
huh. MunchOnMe seems like a reasonable name for a groupon clone (which looks like what it is?) I guess I'm missing how that is bad or offensive.
I mean, Fukime sounds like a handle on a cosplay form. Not really what I'd go for, but being Japanese is a thing and that's okay. The real problem is that a google search confirms it - the first hit I got (safesearch off) is the deviantart page of... some cosplayer. oh man. On the first page, I found references to the cloud platform, but not their home page. This is a serious, serious problem, if you ask me, /much/ more serious than a vague resemblance to a curse word in the name.
On the other hand, I'm told I'm horrible at picking names so maybe I'm exhibiting bad taste here.
OTOH, there are names that aren't really neutral and those can hurt you no matter how good your product/service is. Nick's examples of Fukime and MunchOnMe (1) are perfectly representative of this, IMO. Those two names give me a bad impression of the company to begin with, so they are starting off in a deep hole instead of at sea level when trying to get me to use them.
(1. FWIW, I made the same connection back when Fukime was doing their launch post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2848436 )