Fool's Gold

Friday, February 02, 2007

The Cisco lawsuit against Apple over the trademark "iPhone" has gained quite some attention lately on many blogs and websites. I am somewhat surprised by the lack of attention for the similar news (in Dutch! I could not find any trustworthy site in English!) that Google has been forced to drop the name "Gmail" for its mail service in Europe.

A German guy, who already won a lawsuit in Germany against Google (that is why it has been named Google Mail for a couple of years already in Germany), has successfully appealed against Google using the name "Gmail" at the European court, the 'Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market' (OHIM). Unbelievable. Stupid.

Unbelievable from both sides, and stupid from both sides. You would expect from both Apple's and Google's marketeers that they would have done their homework. Apparently, they did not. Or maybe, in Apple's case, was it just a way to draw some extra attention to the product and was it a set-up by the marketing department as some have argued? (this does not sound very likely to me, I don't think Apple needed that for the iPhone).
And of course stupid from Cisco side and from that German guy's (his name is Daniel Gersch) side. Both have been offered some money to share or drop the trademark, both have refused, reportedly because they expected more out of it. Or could it be that also for Cisco and Gersch, the extra attention was more than welcome? I mean, I NEVER heard of the Cisco iPhone before the whole lawsuit thing. And I definately never heard of gmail.de which is hosted by Gersch. It is all about marketing, free publicity (even if it is not positive, it is still publicity!) and thereby we are dealing with fool's gold.

Categories: Google, Apple, iPhone, Cisco, lawsuit, gmail, marketing