Have you heard of items like kerosene, Aspirin and cellophane? do you know what they have in common? they're all trademarked names that fell to genericide. Apparently, as much as businesses hope to become successful, there's such a thing as too much success. I was reading about intellectual property recently (today 😂) because I remembered that a lawyer told me that Google has to spend a lot of money yearly to ensure that they protect their trademark name, I didn't believe it at the time till I looked it up.
A RELATABLE EXPLANATION
To better summarize things, Trademarks are what protect a name from being used by anyone asides from the entity that owns the trademark. There are five types of trademarks; generic, descriptive, suggestive, arbitrary and fanciful. The more removed a business name is from what it does, the more protected the trademark, as such generic trademarks are the least protected and fanciful trademarks are the most protected. a popular example of a generic trademark (that can't really be protected) is creating a bank and calling the bank "Money" 🤣. Nobody can protect that.
A descriptive trademark name will be creating a bank and calling the name of the bank "Bank". An arbitrary name would be something along the lines of "Dependable Bank" (don't give me that look 😏) while a fanciful trademark will be something along the lines of "Ellipses". How does this relate to tech? well if a tech company becomes so widely successful that the company name becomes the definition of the entire industry then the company name (even if it was fanciful) can be genericized and it means anyone can use the name.
THE CONSEQUENCE OF SUCCESS
Google has become more of a public word as people now say "Google it" rather than "look it up online". Google had to go to court over claims that the name "Google" should be genericized. While Google won the case, they have to do more to differentiate themselves from the search engine industry. What this means is that you're likely to see Google advertising where they term themselves as the world's largest search engine or the world's best search engine. The advert isn't just to promote their organization, it's to remind the world that Google is one of the brands in the search engine industry.
FINALLY...
By consistently encouraging content that does the above, Google can keep their trademark. I think in the next few years Zoom will have this problem too. Whoever said there's no such thing as too much success needs to do more research 😂. A lot of times we look at tech from just the technology side of things, we also need to acknowledge that the business and legal side of things is one of the ingredients for a successful business. Another thing that companies do is buy up domain names that look like the name of their business to ensure that the competition does not redirect traffic to their websites just because the customer made a mistake in typing the URL of the business (eg. gooogle.com will still take you to Google homepage).