atw: Re: BlackBerry devices? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Howard.Silcock@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Thank you for explaining this point. I suppose all this must be obvious to the lawyers or whoever make up these rules, but it certainly doesn't make much sense to me. Just how is using a term adjectivally or as a noun going to affect whether other people will then use it generically? 



Here's how it works. Say you are Kimberly-Clark
and you make Kleenex tissues. Your product is so
popular that everyone starts buying them and just
refers to them as "Kleenex." Eventually, competitors
notice how popular your product is and they make
some too. However, because everyone is used to
referring to tissues as "Kleenex," they refer to
all the other brands that way too. "Get me a box
of Kleenex at Cole's" then doesn't necessarily
mean "Get me a box of Kleenex tissues that says
Kleenex on the label" but "Get me a box of tissues."
No one's paying any attention to what's on the label.

Another danger: you ask for a Kleenex and someone
hands you a tissue to blow your nose and doesn't
bother pointing out that it's an inferior brand.
The tissue shreds and you think "I'm never buying
Kleenex tissues again."

That's why, for example, Coke and Pepsi are very
insistent with their vendors that if someone asks
for one or the other, the customer has to be told
what they're getting: "I'm sorry but we only have
Pepsi, not Coke."

>
In answer to Jonathan's point - about asking RIM - I thought I'd already explained that I tried to do just that and got no response. 



I'm surprised. Most companies, especially
technology companies, are usually vigilant
about this stuff. Nothing on their web site,
either.
One further question on this. Does this 'rule' mean that, for example, I shouldn't write 'Word allows you to store information in document propeties' (which certainly is the style that Microsoft itself uses in its documentation), but instead write 'The Microsoft Word ® word processing software allows you to ...'? 



Jonathan's already answered this issue but indeed,
if the product name is trademarked, you should
include a noun after it. You could leave it at
"software" or "program," though -- you don't have
to be that descriptive :->

-- Janice, who for a while there, had to include
the word "printer" after a printer called "NeWSprinter"
in documentation for just this reason...

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