Do you transliterate service names?

Question

Is it usual to use Latin or Cyrillic letters to spell the names of companies, online services etc.? For example, do you say разговаривать по Зуму or по Zoom? If the answer depends on the individual case, is there a rule of thumb how to predict what is common?

In either case, are company names subject to declension?

Answer 1

Is it usual to use Latin or Cyrillic letters to spell the names of companies, online services etc.?

In colloquial writing, people do use Cyrillic and decline the words if the transliteration is obvious and makes a good Russian-sounding word:

• Тебя что, в гугле забанили?
• Ребят, сегодня опять игра в зуме, вопросы будут в стиле "Что? Где? Когда?"
• А кто в курсе, как обойти запрет на скриншот в андроиде?

Less obvious abbreviations and compound words like G-Suite, MySQL, OpenVPN etc. are more often written in Latin and not declined, though you can still come across colloquialisms like мускул (for MySQL) or капча (for CAPTCHA) every now and then.

In more formal writing, company and service names are usually not declined and not transliterated.

Usually, you use analytic constructs like компания Google or операционная система Linux the first time you're mentioning them, to assign the right gender to the word, and then just use them in their original form in the rest of your text:

• Google настроила автоматическое удаление истории местоположений и поиска в части своих сервисов для новых пользователей, сообщается в блоге компании.
• Технические характеристики новых умных очков, которые будет производить франко-итальянская Luxottica, не разглашаются
• По словам Таненбаума, модернизированная MINIX может потребоваться там, где обычно используют "усеченные" варианты популярных "клонов" ОС UNIX

Answer 2

If Stack Overflow на русском is a representative sample:

• the site name itself isn't transliterated
• product/company names aren't transliterated, e.g.
  • Microsoft Word, Google Android
  • an example for Zoom - it's not a popular subject
• almost all programming languages and libraries are in Latin script

The official site for Microsoft also uses Latin names:

(the last menu option means 'Support', it's not a product name)

Obvious exceptions are companies of Russian origin, e.g. Яндекс (Yandex). Also, I have seen Facebook being transliterated as "Фейсбук" but I'm not sure how common that is.