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Excel Registered as Trademark, 19 Years Late
unassimilatible writes "In a snafu even better than forgetting to renew the Hotmail.com domain, it seems that Microsoft was a little late in registering 'Excel' as a trademark - 19 years late, to be exact. While MS claims it is protected by the common law of trademark, it may have abandoned the right to enforce the mark, as Savvysoft has been using the mark openly and conspicuously with TurboExcel for some time. TurboExcel, of course, runs on Linux, and MS just sent Savvysoft a cease-and-desist letter to stop using the mark. Apparently, 'Word' and 'Office' are also not registered marks of MS, but being generic terms, MS might have a lot more trouble trying to claim them as marks, as happened in the Lindows kerfuffle."
I start shipping my specially branded "Excel toilet paper" next week.
why is it different when it comes to trademarking??
The government determines this using a complicated formula which involves how frequently the word is used in the language, how many points it's worth in Scrabble, the would-be trademark holder's political contribution budget, and whether or not George W. Bush is able to pronounce the word correctly.
Sadly, this is the way language is. People soon start using proper nouns as nouns, as is the case with Hoover, Biro.
The one that really irritates me is when people take a 'powerpoint' in to a meeting. IT'S A PRESENTATION! The bizarre thing in the last company I worked for is that they were never referred to as presentations, always as powerpoints, even though the presentation software was OpenOffice Impress!
Still, at least we don't 'send an outlook'...
Microsoft has been doing that for 19 years.
What about Access?
I used to sit at a help desk. One morning someone called and said they were having a problem with Microsoft Excess.
My answer? "Don't we all?"
PS - It did turn out to be an Excel question.
(By the way, they still make the Excel -- but they renamed it "Accent" in 1995)
<cheapshot>Because they didn't want the name associated with crashes?
</cheapshot>Rich.
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