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.

Comments

I would have loved to see them hold their ground

[Masem]

By all accounts, XBOX the company had every right to the XBOX name, and beyond tossing as much money as they could at XBOX, MS could do nothing about it legally. I would have loved to see XBOX hold rock solid against MS, and watch the antics as the MS engine rapidly tried to pull another name from it's magical hat, probably hurting both their PR value and market value as the next generation of consoles comes out this Christmas. But even I would be daunted by having probably millions pushed in my face just to change the company name.

win/win/win situation

[joq]

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.

The American Dream

[Violet Null]

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'm glad that was resolved...

[briggsb]

I had been losing sleep over it for days. However, I'm more worried about Microsoft getting control of all the .NET domain names.

Way to applaud XBox Tech for domain squatting.

[dave-fu]

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.

Re:Way to applaud XBox Tech for domain squatting.

[CaseStudy]

That's not domain squatting, unless you have more information than you're sharing. Buying a name nobody else is using as a trademark with the intent to use it isn't squatting, even if you later decide you want it.

Re:Way to applaud XBox Tech for domain squatting.

[Sabalon]

find out there's not a single service up and running on their webserver.

Yup...web is all them thar domains names are good for.

Terms

[A Commentor]

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..

spare me

[joq]

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.

Holding their ground

[laertes]

How many people here said that they should have held their ground, and not sold the name? I thought so. But consider this, if they have any shareholders, and they don't take a deal like his, then they'll probably be liable for a shareholder's suit.

But this is slashdot, and we don't like to think about business, except Sony and Nintendo.

Re:Ferraris

[Psiren]

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 ;)

Addendum

[3ryon]

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.

Re:Yep, Next MS will have to pay US Robotics for "

[Anonymous Coward]

According to an inside source, Microsoft is considering naming the next generation game box:

• Coca Cola
• TiVo
• Formica
• Linux
• Cowboy Neal

My mom was wrong

[cnkeller]

Money can buy you everything....

Favourite quote

[Dr_Cheeks]

"It was a very, very mutually satisfying agreement," said Robert Koolen for Knowledge Mechanics, a computer-based education company that is the main holder of XBOX Technologies. [my emphasis]

Man, I hope M$ decide to call the next major product they release in the UK the Club-Foot : )

Interesting...

[ryanw]

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.

Interesting ... 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.

Here's the link to see the price of their stock ...

http://quotes.nasdaq.com/Quote.dll?page=multi&mode =Stock&symbol=XBOX

Re:I would have loved to see them hold their groun

[miracle69]

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.

HI Mom!

What, you never seen the Simpsons?

[nakaduct]

Congrats guys! I expect to see you in shiny ferarris sometime soon.

Gates: OK boys, buy 'em out!
[wanton destruction ensues]
Xbox: What happen?
Gates: You don't think I got rich by writin' a lot of cheques, do ya?

cheers,
mike

Re:Funny

[babbage]

No no no, that's not it. Microsoft, wise multi billion dollar company that they are, forgot to pay their $35 fee to renew the hotmail.com domain name, thus disabling the service all at once on Christmas Eve, 1999. A guy named Michael Chaney realized what was going on, paid the fee, and went about his business. Microsoft sent him an unsolicited check for $500, but he refused it -- putting the check they sent him up for sale on eBay and promising to give whatever proceeds from the auction (and matching up to $2000) to a charity of the winning bidder's choice.

The links about it are still available online -- Slashdot played it's role in events.

• Slashdot reports that Hotmail is out of service, 24 Dec 1999
• Slashdot report on auction, 18 Jan 2000
• C|Net coverage of the auction, 18 Jan 2000

New company name?

[minyard]

X-X-Box

XBox name by itself

[ackthpt]

The pity is, it's such a lame name. It reminds my of that Simpson's episode where they tried to create a hip, cool, new attitude character for Itchy and Scratchy, according to all market research it should have been a success, but predictably flopped.

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

--
All your .sig are belong to us!

Name Change....

[i_m_sane]

They should call themselves the TPFKAXBOX. The programmers formally known as the X-Box.
| - Adam Sane :-)

MS did this before

[Alien54]

They had a similar problem with the product name 'Internet Explorer"

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

Re:I would have loved to see them hold their groun

[gtx]

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

Re:Ferraris

[malfunct]

Its funny that you worry about the XBox company selling out to MS when from the articals on the page XBox is a company thats all about asking other companies to sell out to them. XBox is an aquisitions company and you can only imagine how evil and cuthroat they are. Looks like thier purpose on life is to run around looking for floundering companies with potential and buy them up for rediculously cheap prices before they blow up and become something big.

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.

Those who have a clue don't name things X.

[Futurepower(tm)]

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.

Re:Those who have a clue don't name things X.

[selectspec]

Actually, X does have traditional meanings:

XML as in Extensible. Of course, I doubt the X-box is extensible.

X-Windows, standing for Cross Windows. Symbolizing cross compatibility and remote access. Of course, I doubt Microsoft had any of these ideas in mind when they came up with the X-box.

xinitd as in extended initd. A new version is often symbolized with x (such as PCI-X). Microsoft isn't releasing anything extended here.

Actually, the reason Microsoft is calling it the X-box, is because the box leverages the Direct-X API's developed on the windows PC operating systems. Direct-X gets its X because it is a hardware emulation layer and the name implies Direct-[any video/sound chipset].

We can probably find out how much $$ was involved

[HEbGb]

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

Re:OS9: Microware vs. Apple anyone?

[IronChef]

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?