Wednesday 12 August 2009

Microsoft's imaginary infringing trademarks

I dreamed something last night that is untrue, but it still made me mad when I woke up. I was looking at some marketing material for Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7, and saw that they had new components in the file system. They had named these new components "Fireworx" and "Firebrand" (presumably relating to display and watermarking). The only motivation I could think of for choosing these names was to create some confusion with the Mozilla Firefox name, undermining their growing market share and making it easier for people to just stick with Internet Explorer.

It made me mad because I could only presume the motivation behind the names, but I was pretty sure that was it and I could do nothing about it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I also had a horrible feeling that it would work.
PPS - I imagine a trademark like that would be hard to fight.

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