Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Branding through MS Word?

Have you ever noticed that Microsoft Word tells you every time you have misspelled one of their brand names? For instance, if I type powerpoint into a Microsoft Word document, it puts the squiggly red line below that indicates a misspelling. When I ask it for suggestions, it always recommends PowerPoint, which is the branded typographical spelling of PPT.

I have always found that strange.

I started goofing around and realized that Microsoft Word also helps to brand Google as a proper noun. Everyone knows that a google is also a number (1 with 100 zeros behind it) so why does it show as Google the proper noun in my editor? I mean, it says I've misspelled it if I leave it lower case.

Ironically, Microsoft does not know its branding for the MSN content network online. If I type "msn" into Word, the program doesn't flag it as misspelled at all.

Any ideas?

Anyone else see this going on?

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