Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Arafat the Monster.  From the Boston Globe. 

How short the memory is… News.com has published a story saying that Microsoft has finally filed for trademark registration on Excel, 19 years late.  The author tries to make it into a story about big bad Microsoft bullying little Savvysoft, but really it’s a much more sophisticated strategy than that.

If you think back to Windows, the company unsuccessfully tried to gain a trademark for the term windows several times during the 1980s.  It was not until 1994 that the US PTO accepted their argument (US trademark registration #1959130 if you want to see the actual filing) that in the public’s eyes the term Windows, as applied to computer software, meant Microsoft. In common law, when a term "becomes associated in the mind of the public with the particular good or service," a trademark exists.

Up until that point in 1994, whenever we spoke about Windows, or wrote about Windows, we had to use the official handle — Microsoft® Windowstm.  After that point, we could simply say — Windows®.  Windows was just Windows, and anyone who tried to use Windows in their product name, without kissing the ring, could be held to account.  Many companies received cease-and-desist letters as a result.

It’s a very clever, and long term trademark strategy. Not only does the use of a common English term  have more power than a coined name might, it also has the power to infect anyone who uses a synonym.  And think for a moment about the audacity of claiming a commonly used word from the English language as your own.   It’s the ultimate "domain name" squat.

Excel is obviously next.  Then… Office? Word? 

Over on Telepocalypse, Martin muses about the Death of Branding.  I believe an accurate summary of his much longer post would be "features are trumping brand", and "branding a commodity is not a viable strategy." 

People often mistake brand for the image a company wants to portray in the market.  In reality, brand is the image that the public has of the company, which might be very different from what the marketeers think.  I recommend everyone interested in this topic go read Al Ries’ excellent 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.  The relevant pieces for the purposes of this discussion are:

• Brand is built via conversations in the market.  Ries recommends PR as a strategy, for instance, but the book is old, and he could just as easily be talking about blogs, user groups, and any of a host of other 1:1 marketing techniques that we all know and love.
• Brand is defended using advertising and other expensive promotional elements.  You take the conversations you’ve had during the brand building stage, and reflect them back to the larger market using a larger megaphone. 

The vulnerability of all branding strategies is that the market changes, that the conversation the brand was built on is no longer relevant, and the minions in the marketing department who are in charge of brand management miss the change.

What Martin and others are seeing at the moment is the failure of the incumbents to understand that the market has shifted.  The monopoly they so jealously defend (dial-tone) is now a commodity. A better question might be more introspective – did they have strong brands, or just a monopoly? Are the VoIP raiders, like Vonage, about to be the first communications companies to truly build meaningful brands with their customers, or are they just like the incumbents?