ipad与小天才

苹果和唯冠的ipad商标之争还是没结果，也确实很难猜测最后的结局。也许这是个不该发生的故事，如果当年苹果买唯冠的ipad商标时能多付点钱的话。不管结局如何，感觉苹果在这件事情上都是赚了小便宜最后吃了大亏，属于聪明反被聪明误的那种。不过买商标确实也是件不容易的事，我们的小天才宝贝电脑用的“小天才…

Source: http://nteswjq.blog.163.com/blog/static/12699812012211546909/

The iPad and Xiaotiancai

> By Duan Yongping · his NetEase blog (nteswjq.blog.163.com, now closed; read from web archives) · 2012-03-01 · [Original link](http://nteswjq.blog.163.com/blog/static/12699812012211546909/) ([archived](https://web.archive.org/web/20120304151558/http://nteswjq.blog.163.com:80/blog/static/12699812012211546909/))

The fight between Apple and Proview over the iPad trademark still has no result, and it really is hard to guess how it will end.

Maybe this is a story that shouldn't have happened, if only Apple had paid a bit more back when it bought the iPad trademark from Proview.

Whatever the outcome, I feel that in this matter Apple grabbed a small bargain and ended up taking a big loss, the kind of case where cleverness backfires.

But buying a trademark really isn't easy. The "Xiaotiancai" (Little Genius) trademark used by our Xiaotiancai children's computer was bought.

In the early 1990s, "Xiaotiancai" was a resounding brand in game consoles, with very good product quality and reputation; to my mind it was once the only brand that had a chance to compete with "Subor." Later, for whatever reason, "Xiaotiancai" slowly disappeared from the market.

In fact the three characters of "Xiaotiancai" are much better balanced than the three of "Xiaobawang" (Subor), mainly because "ba" has too many strokes, so however you design the three characters of "Xiaobawang" they never look very good.

In the early days of starting BBK, we found the owner of the "Xiaotiancai" trademark and offered to buy it (by then they no longer had products on the market). We went as high as 3 million yuan and were flatly turned down.

One day ten years later (around 2007 or 2008?), it suddenly occurred to me that maybe we should try again, because coming up with a good trademark name is really very hard, and three-character trademarks in particular have basically all been registered.

Being able to buy a good trademark name at a not-too-expensive price is definitely worth it.

So, with enormous effort, we finally found the owner of the "Xiaotiancai" trademark. This time, though, we had learned from last time and had an intermediary company do the buying.

The other side's asking price was 300,000 yuan straight off, and he kept stressing that his brand was very valuable: ten years earlier BBK had offered 3 million to buy it.

Naturally the process went very smoothly. Everything went through the legal procedures, and about half a year later the brand belonged to our company.

Actually we had still planned to buy it for 3 million at the time. Even if the then owner of "Xiaotiancai" found us today, we could still make up the difference to him, because we really don't want to take advantage of him.

But I hear we couldn't find him again later. I hope he's lucky enough to see this post, ha.