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A comment on ‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups. Parent comment

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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