An Open Letter. I'm writing this open letter to respond to the emails we received yesterday in response to Google's announcement of a name-change in the UK. Some of your emails expressed concern, some were evidently penned in ignorance of the full facts, and others were simply, well, ignorant. No doubt the senders of this last category of email will not trouble themselves to read on.
It is perfectly excusable for you not to be aware of the salient facts; however, it is not excusable for Google. So I am taking this opportunity to lay out the facts, address the concerns that you collectively expressed, and at the same time to puncture some of the myths established by Google. I'm not going to be able to answer further emails, so if you think that this one might be useful to friends and colleagues, please feel free to pass it on.
First, about us. We are not, as some of you have assumed, a "big guy" or a "huge, faceless financial corporation", and it is hardly credible that some of you think we are "bullying" Google. We have no desire to disrupt your use of Google's service, but we do have a duty to shareholders to protect the company's assets. We are defending those rights, in the same way as Google very aggressively defends its own trade marks around the world - upon which, if you were a shareholder of either company, you would insist. I founded this firm in 1996, we are a very small research firm providing an excellent service to our clients around the world and working very, very hard to drive the company towards break-even and onwards to profitability. We have grown around 60% per year for the last two years and are looking forward to eventually getting a return on the investment of our money, lives and efforts. We launched our G-mail service in Spring 2002, two years before Google announced its own, and although our marketing efforts have produced results more slowly than we had hoped, G-mail remains at the core of our growth strategy. As a public company, we have responsibilities to our shareholders to protect our assets.
About our G-Mail(tm) web-based email. Our analysts write research reports on companies, and publish real-time analysis of global currency movements. We have a web-based tool called Pronet, which graphically displays and analyses currency and stock price movements, and our analysts annotate directly onto the graphic - we call this "Graphiti", which is short for "Graphics with Integrated Text Intelligence". Our currency research has been rated in the global top-5 produced by independent firms for five consecutive years. Our clients, who subscribe to Pronet, are able to capture Graphiti, and send it onwards to their own clients in an email. This is G-mail: it is the primary tool at our disposal for propagation of our services to new prospective clients around the world. Google said yesterday that
"a Pronet user can click on to send a report to someone else who also has Pronet software... We do not believe their product is a web based email service".
This is completely incorrect and we are surprised, given the time and effort that we have put into explaining what we do, that Google still apparently don't know.
About Google's statement that IIIR acted "unusually": Google said yesterday that
"In usual circumstances, when a trademark owner who cares about and wants to protect the rights of their mark approaches the user of the mark with a claim, they take a fairly standard number of actions: they seek to prevent further use (often through a cease and desist or an injunction) and determine ways to reduce consumer confusion. IIIR did not take any of these standard courses - they did not ask us to stop using the name until almost a year after first contacting us and never went to court to ask for an injunction - they just asked us for money".
The problem is, Google ignored us until the damage was done. To quote the concluding lines of our letter of 1 June 2004: "It would obviously have been open to us to have our solicitors despatch a formal cease and desist letter to you in relation to the services that you are proposing to provide. However, I am aware that your company is well known for adopting and promoting ethical business practices, and we would therefore very much prefer to resolve this matter on an amicable basis rather than to have to resort to litigation..." Perhaps next time we will take Google's advice and get immediately on the phone to our lawyers.
About Google's statement that our claim is "tenuous". We launched our service two years ahead of Google's own, and commercial exploitation of a trade mark is absolutely central to gaining rights to that mark. Sure, we didn't register the trade mark before we launched our product - but neither did Google before it launched its own. Our excuse is that we are small, and lack resources sometimes to do things the way we would like. The facts are that both our product launch and our trademark registrations precede those of Google. Google cannot substantiate its statement that our claim is tenuous.
About our different audiences, and confusion between products. The problem is that our audience is a sub-set of Google's. From frequent experience, when I see a new client now, the opening questions concern how we are related to Google, given our big and bold "G-Mail" button. When I explain that we aren't, there is a residual taste that somehow, we are improperly using Google's intellectual property. In our business, we cannot afford any suggestion of impropriety.
About Google's statement that we are "very focused on a monetary settlement". When Google announced Gmail in April 2004, we did two things. First, we wrote politely to Sergey and Larry to point out that a web-based service by the same name already existed, so another choice of name would be a good idea; and second, we took the steps necessary to protect our trade mark assets. Public shareholders would have expected no less of us. It is just as well we did, because our polite letter was ignored, as were the next couple of attempts at dialogue. By the time our lawyers got involved and we managed to get some attention, the very effective Google marketing machine had already established Gmail, in the eyes or the world, as its own brand. It is very hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube, and Google invited us to suggest a number to settle the issue and acquire our trade mark rights.
