> “I loved this fun little book as much as my kids, and hoped to use the name someday for the perfect company that embodied the same values of creativity, exploration, happiness, and trust. And the name works perfectly with a product that connects us visually to one another and that always works so fast and seamlessly.“
The reference to "Zoom City" is from an article published in 2020. It seems like a remarkably fitting ret-conning of what is probably a very boring branding decision.
Are there any actual recent examples of this? The major examples I've always heard are solidly in the 20th century. It's not like Google has had any problem holding their trademark.
Kleenex and Xerox were both (somewhat) recently in danger of loosing theirs. They both pulled pretty big campaigns to un-verb their trademarks. Google still has a bunch of other products that people are familiar with, so they are in less danger of loosing theirs right now, but give it some time (like 50 years, not 10) and it may happen, especially if they get broken up for being a monopoly. (Which has been mentioned)
I'm usually a big proponent of longer-term corporate thinking, but deciding your name around problems you might have five decades after becoming a household name is a little much.
BlueJeans is one of those absolutely catastrophically stupid branding decisions. There's just........ no justification. It's confusing at best, and abbreviated as BJ at worst.
Added context: Zoom delivered a step change in video conferencing quality for the many, vs the few, and in a lot of ways did seem to force others to be better.
During the pandemic many people used zoom more than their cell phones.
I immediately agreed with this, but at the same time it’s not “fast” is it? It’s higher quality or more reliably, something like that. But emotionally I agree it does feel “faster”.
