Dell Tries to Steal the “Cloud” of Computing

For those of you not familiar with the term “cloud computing” basically refers to the internet (or cloud) as a device that handles our information processing.  Think about how you access your gmail or yahoo mail accounts or all those social networks or blogs you participate in.  Generally people refer to the availability and the service of all these tools as just being a part of the “cloud,” thus the “cloud” is doing the computing for us.  You don’t have to be an expert to get or calculate information online, you access to all the resources and information in the world.  Generally speaking nobody owns the cloud and we are plugged into it.

Enter Dell who recently tried to trademark this term to refer to their “Cloud Computing Solutions.”  According to an article written by Zdnet:

“The USPTO has declared that the phrase “cloud computing” is a “generic” term used to describe a broad type of computing and therefore cannot be trademarked.”

According to Dell the trademark was just meant to protect their own specific services and was not mean to steal “cloud computing” with the definition mentioned above.  Still, it is a bit ironic that any company would want to trademark a term that refers to something that is owned and used collectively, this take away from the definition of the “cloud” and I’m glad the trademark won’t go through.  Sure Dell mentioned that they wanted to trademark the term for their own services but come on, surely Dell of all companies knows what cloud computing is.

You can read more about the Dell “cloud computing” trademark story at The Register or on Sam Johnston’s blog.

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