Is it just me, or does it seem a little odd that there was no doubt about what the Pfizer-Pharmacia merged company would be called? Recall that Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy threw two well-established brand names out the window to become Novartis. And Aventis had no choice when it formed; it was such a mouthful that you'd have needed to shrink the letterheads to keep 'em within the margins. GlaxoSmithKline stayed with a modified agglutinative name (note the disappearance of "Beecham" along the way, not to mention "Burroughs-Wellcome.")

Oh well. When Pfizer boarded and captured Warner-Lambert, the joke was that the new company would take the "er" from "Warner" and keep the "Pfiz" from "Pfizer." Maybe the P will be from Pharmacia this time.<