Will ‘iPad’ Become a Generic Brand Name? Let’s Hope Not

I remember when, not so long ago, my parents as well as the parents of friends referred to video games as “that Nintendo.” “It’s time to turn off that Nintendo,” or “If you don’t stop getting up in the middle of night to play it, we’ll take that Nintendo away.” This continued on well after I’d left behind my Nintendo Entertainment System for an Intel 386 computer, eventually pulling in alternative game consoles (the Super Nintendo among them, of course) like the Sega Dreamcast and 3DO, up and through today’s PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii. For some people, “Nintendo” was — and for all I know, still is — synonymous with playing video games. You weren’t “playing Sonic the Hedgehog or Flashback on your Sega Genesis,” you were simply “playing Nintendo.” I always took it as a sign of how much success and respect Nintendo had back in the day, before video games went mainstream enough for people to know better (these days it’s virtually unheard of, certainly among actual gamers, not to identify systems in their own right). People who didn’t play games needed a generic term to describe them, and since “video games” required saying two words, “Nintendo” presumably won out according to some maxim of efficient phonetics. Now, according to the Associated Press, we’re on the verge of seeing the term “iPad” become synonymous with “tablet computer.” There’s no evidence for that offered in the story, of course, just a bunch of “what ifs” involving an analyst’s assertion and a few area experts discussing what it might mean were it to happen. Look at aspirin! Heroin! Escalator! The term “zipper”! For posterity’s sake, it’s worth remembering that Apple popularized but hardly invented the tablet. While I grant the company its due for turning the tablet into a consumer staple, tablet computers have been a part of my life since the late 1990s, when I started looking at them as a computer engineer for deployment in industrial applications, where they were then and continue now to be used in massive numbers. And that’s just my practical experience: Conceptually speaking, for those who picked up a sci-fi novel in the mid-1980s by Orson Scott Card called Ender’s Game, a surprisingly fleshed-out sense of how tablet computers would work — called “desks” in the book, but functionally all but identical to today’s tablets — the idea of “tablet computing” is at least 25 years old. I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the iPad (especially iOS — I’m an iPhone owner), but I’d like to think we’re discerning enough, as consumers, to keep calling tablets tablets. I know plenty who strongly prefer their Android tablets, and several more looking forward to what’s on the horizon from Microsoft via Windows 8. I’d also like to think that our level of engagement with the technology we use has a lot to do with what we call things. The people who referred to video games as “Nintendo” generally didn’t play video games, while gamers today wouldn’t think of calling their Xbox 360 or PS3 a “Nintendo.” And though it’s true that we’re much more likely to say “let me Google that” than “let me Bing it” or “Yahoo it,” Google’s over 14-year-old search tool has around 65% of the search engine market, compared with slightly more than 15% for Yahoo and slightly less than 15% for Bing. The comparably fledgling iPad, by contrast — launched barely two years ago — has dropped from 68% global tablet share in 2010 to 58% now, while Android-based tablets are up in the most recent quarter from 29% to 39%. And all accounts are that the market’s headed for more of a 50-50 split between iOS and Android, not the sort of ratios Google’s search engine maintains against rivals Yahoo and Bing. It may be true, as Cornell University linguistics professor Michael Weiss says, that “[there's] nothing that can be done to prevent [a shift to generic terminology] once it starts happening,” but I’d like to think the majority of people buying tablets at this point, whatever their tastes and preferences, are engaged enough not to mistake the iPad for the Eee Pad Transformer Prime, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 or Kindle Fire, and not to mean any of those by referring to them generically using Apple’s brand name.