It's all the rage, dontcha know? I mean, haven't you heard of Chicago (Win95) or Longhorn - I mean Vista?

Codenames are ostensibly to hide corporate secrets from casual listeners, but are really used as a marketing tool whereby an abstract set of code is anthropomorphised into something with a name, and hopefully build hype around it.

(My employer does the same thing, and all their names just make me roll my eyes ... version numbers are so much clearer - hearing names vs numbers makes it so much more difficult to figure out what timeframe they're talking about...)