‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups

Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by mchaver on Friday September 11, 2015 @04:20AM (#10202550)

In colloquial North American English "Legos" is pretty common. The effort to get people to not use the form "Legos" seems to originate from branding. The Lego company does not want "Lego" to refer to all brick toys, much the way that Kleenex does not want "kleenex" to mean any paper tissue. Anyway, pushing for "proper usage" is an uphill battle ;)

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Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by jameshart on Friday September 11, 2015 @11:10AM (#10204089)

To British ears, it just sounds wrong. It sets off our grammar sensors, not our trademark infringement sensors. It's absolutely not a complaint about genericisation of the Lego brand.

"I need more legos to finish off this house" sounds, to a Brit, like someone saying "I need more sands to finish off this sandcastle," or "I need more ices to finish this ice sculpture". Lego is kind of like a substance in our language. Pluralizing it is just wrong.

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Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by a_e_k on Friday September 11, 2015 @06:00PM (#10206409)

Or "I'm going to take a maths course"? :-)

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Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by jameshart on Friday September 11, 2015 @10:35PM (#10207032)

We just worry that out of all of mathematics, Americans seem to only want to study one singular math.

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Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by tokai on Friday September 11, 2015 @04:26AM (#10202581)

"The Lego company does not want "Lego" to refer to all brick toys, much the way that Kleenex does not want "kleenex" to mean any paper tissue."

I do not believe this at all. Being the default word for its category is the truest sign of the penetration of a brand.

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Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by snaily on Friday September 11, 2015 @04:38AM (#10202619)

Even so, a company will want to avoid losing the trademark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark#Avoiding_gen... (Lego is one of the examples as a success story for this approach)

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Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by rbobby on Friday September 11, 2015 @07:50AM (#10203131)

Lego the company was fiercely protective of their IP. They had a patent they regularly enforced. Once the patent expired they took MegaBlocks to court trying to claim the shape of their bricks was trademarked (they lost this... but took it all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court).

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Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by mseebach on Friday September 11, 2015 @08:00AM (#10203153)

It's also a sign that you're becoming a commodity which is bad for business. You can Xerox your document on a Canon, but you can't Google something on Bing.

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Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by mchaver on Friday September 11, 2015 @10:42AM (#10203909)

Here is a specific example of them requesting customers to help protect the brand by not calling them "legos".

http://english.stackexchange.com/a/47223

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Re:‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling... by ArekDymalski on Friday September 11, 2015 @06:12AM (#10202885)

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/google-doesnt-want-people-u...

Companies seem to think different about this.

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