You’re reading Signal vs. Noise, a publication about the web by 37signals since 1999.

Lawyer overload.

They missed Blackberry App World TM.

They missed quite a few.

I can understand using those symbols next to your own product names, sort of, but I’ve always wondered what the rationale is, even among lawyers, for identifying other people’s marks. Is it supposed to protect you from a trademark infringement claim?

The fine print is even worse—and almost as lengthy as the original message. The only part that seems necessary is the CC attribution, and that could be reduced to about 5 words.

Ben, the CC attribution is bogus too—“portions of” this notice of downtime “are reproduced from work created and shared by Google”? Really? All I see is the use of the word “Android”... by that logic this comment needs a CC attribution too.

Funny – the body of the communication only mentions “browser” but they included a “Windows” trademark footnote. I guess they assume IE truly owns the market. :)

I encountered the same thing on Microsoft’s campus. The ink the marketing department uses to make trademark symbols could feed a small country (assuming they ate ink). I cracked their product naming code though: http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2012/06/06/how-microsoft-names-products/

Does anyone feel valued when they read an opener which states, “Dear valued client”?

I thought this was going to be a riff on “we’re improving things by breaking them”.

@chad: People writing and approving these things I assume. And committees. (“In every park, in every city, you’ll find no statue, of a committee.”)

I actually asked a company (that you definately have heard of) to not refer to me as “dear valued customer” in future. They did. For one email. Then it was back to sicophantic fakery.

Never buying from them again.

Did not see any “end date” for the outage of those services. What a lame company, lame bank, more evidence of the same lame a* sh* that almost collapsed our entire economy. They need someone in to take charge and have an opinion and do what’s right and agile for their users. Sorry for the rant David

LOL !!

The only business where if you go bankrupt you get to try again.