Another clueless government agency
I have railed before about how the US Patent and Trademark Office has allowed numerous really stupid technology patents and here comes another example. Dell is trademarking “cloud computing”. The Wall Street Journal notes:
“Cloud computing” is the buzz-word du jour in the tech world. Its practitioners include Amazon.com, Google, H-P and as of this week AT&T. All of these companies seem to use the phrase differently, but it may not be up to them to decide on the meaning: Dell is in the process of trademarking the term.
The term “cloud” has been used to describe the Internet for almost as long as the collection of networks has existed. “Cloud computing” has been in regular use since 2001, according to our search of news stories using the service Factiva, and technology vendors generally apply the term to various forms of computing that involves the Web.
Given the previous use of the term, why didn’t the US Patent and Trademark Office just laugh when Dell submitted its application? I have no idea what goes on in the minds(?) of bureaucrats but here is some reaction:
We couldn’t get any company involved with cloud computing to tell us what they thought of Dell’s trademark on the record. But people who insisted on anonymity called the trademark absurd and a joke. And considering that Dell isn’t at the top of most people’s lists of cloud-computing innovators, they also thought it was odd that Dell was the one trademarking the term.
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