Google Abandons the Gmail Name In Germany 187
praps writes "A three-year trademark conflict has ended with Google withdrawing its use of the Gmail brand in Germany. On Friday, a plain-text message appeared, beginning 'We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany ... Bummer.' Despite the climbdown, Google Germany's spokesman said on Monday that the action was being taken 'even though we believe we're not legally obliged to do so.'" We discussed the tussle in Germany when Google first lost in court a year ago.
Re:"Bummer" (Score:3, Interesting)
"Oh, look at poor Google. It's like a wayward schoolchild who lost his iPod."
"Poor Google's users" is what you'd be thinking if you had actually put some thought into it.
Re:Surprising? (Score:3, Interesting)
When Mozilla renamed Phoenix to Firebird, I started having serious trouble googling for information on Firebird The Database Server - almost any usable information at all. You see, things like news, web pages of its users and so on. (At that time, I was learning Firebird in order to write a school project on top of it, and as a newbie, I simply used Google first to get some pointers.) Most of the things I was able to google were "OMFG the new super cute Firebird browser!". Oh, this, and the flamewsrs between Mozilla fanbois ("The branding of Mozilla Firebird won't hurt you at all, as we are no RDBMS!") and the Firebird community.
But truly relevant search results? Googling for "firebird server" did not help at all for obvious reasons and "firebird database server" helped just a little (the interesting pages that the search found were the ones I already had bookmarked). And the ratio of user communities of the respective products (somewhere between 10:1 and 100:1? I dont know...) worsened things even further. Only after the the browser's rebranding to Firefox did the search results become usable again.
Re:FFS (Score:4, Interesting)
They call it GoogleMail in the UK too, and have done for some time, because they lost a more-or-less identical trademark case here too. If I go to gmail.com I'm redirected to a site where all the branding reads 'Google Mail'.