Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 24th Jun 2011 22:46 UTC
As we reported earlier this week, Apple is busy sending out cease and desist letters to small, defenceless projects to defend its trademark application (it doesn't actually own the trademark yet) for 'app store'. This has prompted many a discussion over the trademarkability of such a generic term, and over the origins of the abbreviation 'app'. Who came up with it? How old is it? To my surprise - the abbreviation is much older than you'd think, and in a way, it illustrates quite well the demise of the programmer. What? Read on.
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Member since:
2007-11-29
It is not the same.
There have been tons of shopping malls around (and book stores, computer shops, food stores, etc to all those other commentors), so it's obvious you can't take the term as a trademark for shopping malls.
But have you EVER seen an app store before?
There was never an "app store", no one ever used the term "app store", so one can definitely invent the name "App Store" and use it for his newly created "app store". Those were "download portals" before, or whatever you called them, but certainly not "app stores".