Thursday January 13, 2005

The iWork Name

In a comment to my last post Geoff asked a very good question about the iWork name and the fact that Apple just announced their iWork product. Here is an email my boss just sent out that explains.

“By now, you may have heard about the pending launch of Apple's new “iWork Productivity Suite”. In order to avoid confusion around the use of the term “iWork”, I'd like to provide you with some background, and let you know where we at Sun stand today.

1) We understand that this month Apple may, in fact, have trademarked the term “iWork” as the name of a new office productivity suite.

2) We explored trademarking “iWork” several times within the last 5 years, but found that the term had already been trademarked. We also learned that the cost to purchase the trademark would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, in addition to significant annual cost to maintain it. Therefore, we decided not to pursue that option.

3) Upon advice from Sun's attorneys, however, we determined that we could continue to use “iWork” for our internal program.

4) 18 months ago we began to develop a new name to describe our planned external sales solution, which is based on our internal iWork program offering. We are in the final stage, working with Corp. Marketing, of finalizing the name of our external offering.

5) We intend to continue to use the term “iWork” in reference to our internal program. When talking to customers and the press, we must continue to emphasize that “iWork is Sun's internal work infrastructure program ”.”