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Microsoft Gets XBox Name
chewy_fruit_loop writes "The humorous situation Microsoft found itself in a few months ago regarding the X-Box name already belonging to someone, has been settled.
The BBC are reporting it here ,and XBox Technologies have this press release.
I wonder how much that cost Microsoft ;-)" Apparently The corporation formerly known as XBox is located like a half hour from here. Congrats guys! I expect to see you in shiny ferarris sometime soon.
Same thing happened when Ford spun off Visteon, and didn't check first to see if the name was taken. The little guy (a consulting firm in Florida, I believe) had to take it in the shorts. Same thing with X-Box. Don't these people know how to use Google? (FP, btw!)
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel. -
... of registering the names Office2002 and Windows 2002 yet?
...
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I would have held out just for spite against M$. Well until they started flashing a lot of money. :-)
Not only did they probably make off with a hefty payment, but after looking at their company, I can't determine what the heck XBoxTechnologies actually does, so if they were headed for FuckedCompany.com, they could use the publicity of their name to actuall do something since their page lists squat other than some broad description of nothing.
Surprisingly no one is in an uproar type of posting mood claiming MS is bullying someone, so we all win here by not having to read the redundancies.
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At one point, it was to work hard, earn a fair amount of money, and then retire.
Then it was to join a rising tech company, work for a little bit, sell your shares after the IPO, and retire.
Now, it's to trademark a name that someone with big pockets, and lawyers who can't do research, will pay you gobs of money for, and retire.
I had been losing sleep over it for days. However, I'm more worried about Microsoft getting control of all the .NET domain names.
Working for a start-up way back when (May-ish 1998), we decided that "XBox" would be the perfect name for our product (NDAs live on post-mortem, yadda yadda yadda). So I do the whois, find out they're registered, port scan them (is that legal anymore?) and find out there's not a single service up and running on their webserver.
I get in touch with the domain contacts and ask them if they'd be willing to part with the domain, seeing as how they're not doing anything with it.
To paraphrase, the response I got back was, "We have many exciting business opportunities planned for the near future for xbox.com, but we would be willing to part with the name for $10,000." Long story short, maybe that extra Sun box instead of that domain name wasn't the most prudent business move we could have made; thankfully, I had nothing to do with the business end, so I'm not losing any sleep over it. As for their claims, it looks like it took them a year and a half to get a single press release out; on Internet time where OpenBSD gets scolded for taking 6 f'n days to get a patch out, is that near future?
At any rate, I'm glad to see that domain squatting's bad, except when it happens to Microsoft and open source is good, except when Microsoft uses it, etc., etc.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Hopefully they were smart enough to ask for some percentage of the sales... That could help them out if the blow the big initial payout.
Something like 1/2% would get them $2.5/box, not bad to have a nice steady income like that..
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It would never happen. Just because Microsoft buys companies to benefit themselves mean little, if there was a company I would be worried about it would be something more like GeneralElectric.gov who has their hands in so much shit it isn't even funny. Business is business and MS is no different from other companies who purchase others, look at CitiGroup, why not make an uproar about them?
Posts like this may little sense.
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how many people got fired over the whole xbox technologies thing?? Isn't there supposed to be a process when a name is picked? You go through trademarks, domain names, other incorportated entities in your target market...
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
But this is slashdot, and we don't like to think about business, except Sony and Nintendo.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
Sorry, but selling out is not attractive to a man of principle...
;)
No, but it'll probably get them lots of sex. Hmm.. tough call
In other news, all employees of Xbox Technologies were found dead this morning. It seems that during a all-hands strategy meeting was held in a conference room which had a gas leak. Detectives are still puzzeled how the sales people who were teleconfrencing were also killed by the gas leak.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Money can buy you everything....
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
It comes down to the quality of sex.
information is immaterial
Man, I hope M$ decide to call the next major product they release in the UK the Club-Foot : )
As part of the settlement, Microsoft will have all trademark rights to "Xbox," which is the name of Microsoft's new video game console system, and XBOX Technologies has agreed, in due course, to change its corporate name.
... this company (XBoxTechnologies) is publicly traded on Nasdaq as "XBOX". To change the name seems like it'll take quite some doing .. I guess MS musta' paid them all a very pretty penny.
...
e =Stock&symbol=XBOX
Interesting
Here's the link to see the price of their stock
http://quotes.nasdaq.com/Quote.dll?page=multi&mod
Instead of standing rock solid and getting no cash, how about calling up Sony and asking them how much they'd pay for the trademark....
Now that would've been cool.
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cheers,
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this man of principle is one boring arsehole then ;)
It's kind of obvious. They waited until MS can't back off on the X-Box name. So much time has been spent on the design (or so they say, the controller testing thing) that reinventing it to match a new name (and hence the removal of the big X from the actual machine, and changing of the controllers) would kill the release date.
These guys have also probably been planning this for a long time, considering the X-Box/ rumors of it and its name have been around for much longer then a few months.
However I can't fault them because considering they don't make- or do- anything, and without this nice bundle of cash they'd be closing up shop soon.
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The links about it are still available online -- Slashdot played it's role in events.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
X-X-Box
Names Microsoft could have used:
Nintega 2600
Sonendo Games Station
Segtari ZX2
Supreme Extreme Intergalactic Game Playin' Machine! With Hip Graphics, Cool WiMP Sound, New Attitude Controllers!
Edsel
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Name Last Change Volume
XBOX US$0.17 -US$0.05 32,4000
The funny thing about this was that had they not caved in to Microsoft, M$ would have been hosed big time!
They should call themselves the TPFKAXBOX. The programmers formally known as the X-Box. :-)
| - Adam Sane
Adam Sane sanity is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
You can still download the original Sprynet (Non-MS) Internet Explorer at the Evolt.org browser archive, here
I recall that MS also had to settle with Synet (not Sprynet) on the name Interner Explorer. The original company went under, but was kept alive long enough by lawyers for some sort of settlement from MS. That story you can read about here, with added info here.
Then, these are the people who insist that "BookShelf" is not a generic term.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
as much as i would have been amused by seeing the little guy screw over the dreams of the big guy, such a tactic would only have cost the little guy. the people who owned the name xbox probably made a good bit of scratch off this deal, and something tells me that they made more by selling the rights to the name then they would have made by using the name. microsoft stood to lose nothing other than the equivalent pocket change thrown at marketing people. remember nintendo and their 'ultra 64'? and how until just a few months before it's release it was called 'ultra 64', until somebody realized they had rights to that name and called them on it? nintendo then changed the name to 'nintendo 64' and years later most people don't remember the 'ultra 64' thing at all. xbox (the company) did the right thing, and they're probably all going on vacation right now because of it :)
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
M$ audited them for licenses and they didn't have enough, just like every company in the world that usese M$. So they made them a deal they couldn't refuse :)
Getting cash from MS just to change the name of thier company just fits in to thier plan. I love how you guys berate MS no matter what they do but when another evil corporation comes into view you think they are all good stuff. Blah.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Microsoft has a difficult time hiring good marketing talent, apparently.
X is a name you use when you mean, "I don't know what." It is a symbol for the unknown. It's use as the name of a product causes the reader momentary confusion, not something you want in a trademark.
Besides, X-Box sounds like it is X-rated. There will be people who will think it is a porno appliance.
Bush's education improvements were
Note that Xbox is a public company; their financial reports will undoubedly have a line-item indicating how much money they made from the sale of this trademark.
From the looks of things, they really needed the dough... they've only got $22k in the bank. Their stockholders didn't really apprciate this, however, seeing as their stock is down 13% today..
http://biz.yahoo.com/p/x/xbox.ob.html
Joel Hodgeson, the creator of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, made a revolving stage setup called an "X-Box" in 1997. A group of comedians performed a single show that was aired on Comedy Central and HBO. Here's the link : Joel and Jim Hodgeson's X Box
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Even more dumb than the Apple Records suit are the conditions under which it was settled: Apple was not allowed, for a long time, to do anything on Macs that related to music. Apple's own lawyers maintained that to be safe they couldn't even use notes from musical instruments as the system "beep" options.
Some guy at Apple, fed up with this, put some kind of musical "toot" in the OS as a beep option. The sound file was named "Sosumi." So... sue... me... get it...?
With iTunes and all, I guess the terms of the Apple Records settlement are long dead. If Apple didn't have to avoid music technology for so long I wonder where they would have taken it by now?
I hope M$ decide to call the next major product they release in the UK the Club-Foot
Didn't you steal it from Mr. Bean?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
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"bringing innovative technologies"
sounds like they're going to work for Microsoft
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This is the quite of quick buck progress that makes me proud to have George W. as president and a congress that is acutioned off bienially. Take that, you euro-posers!
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Hopefully X-Box Technologies doesn't make an operating system called QDOS :)
A woman I met here told me the same story. She bought a computer, signed up for AOL, and immediately began getting about 30 porno messages a day.
So, the first thing she did every day was delete everything pornographic. To her, it was obvious that everything from Hotmail was x-rated spam, so she deleted it without reading it. She learned of her mistake when a friend called her and asked why she never responded to his e-mail.
I suggest that Microsoft should go all the way and call its new product HotBox . That way Microsoft could get back the 29 cents it spent for the name X-Box.
Bush's education improvements were