Working out Website Names - Trademarks - The Difference between Palm and Microsoft
By Chris De Herrera , Copyright 2001
Revised 9/14/2001

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Trademarks... and Enforcement... A story about PalmGuru...

Recently, it came to my attention that Palm is enforcing their trademark for Palm on website owners.  As an example, see the letter below for PalmGuru:

I totally disagree with Palm's approach to resolving their licensing.  They are forcing their core base of support on the web to decide to pay Palm for the pleasure of using their name or converting. Doesn't Palm realize that the website owners are fans of their product?  Also, these website owners are small so how can they afford to fight Palm?  Should they fight Palm?  At this point I doubt any of them will fight to hold on to their domain names.  So they will move to new domain names to keep going. Clearly, Palm's decisions will continue their erosion in the marketplace since people will not be able to find these sites anymore when the look in the search engines.  
(Editors Note:  After PalmGuru contacted Palm multiple times about resolving their domain name issue, Palm backed off and offered them the ability to continue to use PalmGuru.com or PalmOSGuru.com.  So far they have chosen to switch to PocketAnywhere.com effective on October 5, 2001 due to the way Palm handled this situation.)

Another Story about Microsoft and Trademarks...

I actually had this situation occur for pocketpcfaq.com with Microsoft and their trademark over Windows CE.. Instead of a letter, I received a phone call from Derek Brown at Microsoft.  We worked out a contract to allow me to continue to use pocketpcfaq.com as a licensee of Windows CE from Microsoft. The price - FREE! I did have to add language at the bottom of each page with license information for Microsoft but that was a small price to pay to keep things the same. So you (an individual) can work things out with one of the largest companies in the world even with issues as large as trademarks. 

Conclusion

Palm apparently does not value it's resources the same way as Microsoft. Palm's approach to resolving trademark disputes leaves website owners little choice - they just move to other domain names.  With this move, they re-think their loyalty to Palm and consider the alternatives.  Clearly Microsoft's approach to licensing is more appropriate for us small website owners.  We do not have the money to fight you.  We are here to help promote platforms and features and want to do it without threats like this.  When all the Palm websites go, I will pounce on anyone that says that Microsoft made deliberate moves to kill them. Clearly Palm has done this to themselves.

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