The History of 'App' and the Demise of the Programmer
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 24th Jun 2011 22:46 UTC
In the News 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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RE[3]: This is a red herring
by Alfman on Tue 28th Jun 2011 17:29 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: This is a red herring"
Alfman
Member since:
2011-01-28

"But have you EVER seen an app store before?"

I think your a little too close to apple to see the big picture, let's try something else:

Have you ever seen a wig store before?
If wigs were to come in vogue again, it would be ridiculous to grant exclusive rights to the generic term "wig store" such that all the merchants who want to sell wigs would be unable to use the most obvious term to describe their store.

They'd have to play stupid games to try and avoid the generic terms which customers would most likely try to look them up under. No entity should be entitled to use generic terms exclusively.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[5]: This is a red herring
by Alfman on Tue 28th Jun 2011 19:48 in reply to "RE[4]: This is a red herring"
Alfman Member since:
2011-01-28

Very good, I wasn't implying that none existed.

I did a search myself for "wig store" prior to posting and, like you, I found some results for wig stores going by other proper names.

Holywood Wigs IS-A wig store.
Outfitter Wig IS-A wig store.
The Wig Company IS-A wig store.
Alfman Wigs IS-A wig store.

If a single player were to become dominant and then claim exclusive rights to the generic term "wig store", then it causes a great deal of damage to other wig stores and only causes more customer confusion.

The point is they should all be allowed to call themselves wig stores generically since that actually describes what they sell. They should all come up in generic searches for "wig store".

Edited 2011-06-28 19:51 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2