You are right, google is everyday coming with new innovative useful products for free. I don’t know what google will do in future, i think he will be capable to make all IBM, Microsoft etc to shut their labs. Google is much bigger than what we can imagine.

What does this mean for the company – they are the market leader, but their competiton also gets refered to as this in common use. (This isn’t a perfect example, more an example of a brand becoming the generic noun)

Now search on the other hand is different. Unlike my sticking plaster example (which just sounds dumb as a word), or “inline skates” for rollerblades, to “search” has become a very generic term that is comfortable to use – in fact many people now if you say “search” just presume it’s online and not in a phone book or something! In this situation where the generic term is also “comfortably” in use, most people I believe when they say i’ll google you really do mean google.

Overall I think it’s a positive thing for the brand, but I definately do understand why they are wary of it – in some ways it could be seen as an amazing asset to have at the “brand building” stage, and then a then a thorn in the side at the “brand protecting” stage google are at now.

interesting write you have posted here. but unfortunately you have only looked into this issue in one direction and didn’t try to understand why Google have to protect their name.

i believe neither Google nor their top management has a problem when the consumers use their name instead of the “VERB” search. but the moment it legally becomes a “VERB” then that gives it’s competitors the rights to use the”VERB” for their benefit and Google(the company) will not be able to protect their corporate identity. if i was heading Yahoo search my next campaign would be “Google it better on Yahoo search”. similar elements could destroy the Google company.

If an instruction to ‘Google it’ or ‘Xerox it’ means ‘to do a search on Google’ or ‘make a photocopy on a Xerox photocopier’, that’s not so bad. But pretty soon this verbal usage tends to drift to mean any kind of ‘search’ on any kind of search engine, just like Xerox began to mean ‘make a photocopy’ on any kind of copier.

it’s okay for a brand to be a generic term or a “COMMON NOUN”, as Kleenex replacing tissue is okay as long as other companies does not get the authority to use “Kleenex” for their product. you can see that Kleenex is keeping quiet for now but the moment a new company uses “XYZ Kleenex” as their brand name instead of “XYZ Tissue” even Kleenex will want to protect what is theirs.

“The map is not the territory.” but a map is what defines on what is yours on the territory. Google is a brand in the search engine territory. it’s okay for Google to own the territory provided no one else enters the territory. but as long as Google is not the sole player in the search engine territory Google has to protect whats it’s including their brand name, and as ling as “Google” is what represents a company it is a trademark (The map)

(Trademark :any name, symbol, figure, letter, word, or mark adopted and used by a manufacturer or merchant in order to designate his or her goods and to distinguish them from those manufactured or sold by others. A trademark is a proprietary term that is usually registered with the Patent and Trademark Office to assure its exclusive use by its owner. …….. do look it up sometime and then decide if Google is a trademark or not.)

looking forward for a reply from you.

regards
unni

Anyway, enough thinking about this… I’m off skidooing : )