Many companies use the Google Trademark Complaint Procedure to stop competitors bidding on a company name or product. As this becomes more common practice it may hurt Google’s revenue potential and therefore, valuation. I wonder whether this leads to the possibility of people trademarking terms and expressions specifically so that they can use them within Google ads? This seems to raise a general issue. Given that a trademark is awarded within a specific industry, but a search term is not aware of the context e.g. a search for ‘Windows’ could be for building materials or for software. What is to stop people registering trademarks outside of their common use in order to block keyword searches? In other words, given that ‘Windows’ is trademarked, why couldn’t you trademark ‘blog’ as a type of candy and block anyone advertising against it regardless of the context.

Microsoft owns the desktop. At one time it owned the command line, the C:\ prompt, and now it must own the command line that connects away from the desktop to the Internet. This is the core of what Microsoft is about, its unstated mission statement, and this was why Microsoft had to react quickly to the threat posed by Netscape. Google owns the command line to the Internet and Microsoft cannot afford to concede that to them. That is why they may indeed have explored buying Google. Even if the reports of this are not true, as is probably the case, the rumor itself signals a warning shot that Google are on Microsoft’s turf and so perhaps lowers the price that they could buy them for post IPO. Google is set to battle two giants, Microsoft and Yahoo. Google have the brand, Microsoft the ability to put search directly into…