Companies really suck at marketing

Apparently Adobe sent a letter to freshAIRapps, a website showing off cool AIR applications, claiming that using AIR in their URL/name is an infringement on their trademark. It technically is, but what are they thinking? It's infringing in a way that convinces more people to use Adobe AIR. Trademarks are to prevent people stealing your customers, not to prevent people getting you more customers.

This is the same Adobe that used to get mad at people that used 'photoshop' as a verb, because trademarks are not verbs. This was mocked and generally ignored, of course, but this was even more insane. What company gets mad that their product is so ubiquitous people are using its name as a synonym for the function it provides? Google certainly doesn't mind that people say "Google it" instead of "Search for it". (EDIT: As a commenter pointed out, apparently Google does mind, so now I'm totally confused.) It's the goal of every marketing department to achieve exactly this, you can't buy that level of market presence, and instead of being thrilled Adobe tried to shut it down, and now they're attacking people that use their trademark to try and get them more customers.

Companies have a bad habit of attacking the people that get them the most customers, until finally those people get pissed off and stop getting them customers. Adobe isn't the only company at fault, of course. A hacker named Daniel_K used to make Linux drivers for Creative sound cards, because Creative was at first too lazy and then too inept to do it themselves. When they finally did get Linux drivers out, the drivers were horribly broken and absolutely nobody used them. Daniel_K's drivers, on the other hand, were excellent. So Creative had two choices:

1. Realize that there's a guy out on the Internet that, absolutely for free, is doing what Creative is unable to and writing high quality Linux drivers. Reason that they should either hire this guy, or at the very least ignore him and let him carry on. Further reason that since there is no money in drivers, as they're offered for free, the only thing this guy is doing is giving Linux users a chance to buy Creative's highly expensive sound cards. Conclude that as tech people are the people most likely to buy high quality computer add-ons, alienating this group is a pretty poor decision.


2. Furiously demand that Daniel_K stop distributing his drivers. Hope that users instead switch to downloading the official free drivers, which don't work and nobody will ever use. Hope that somehow this leads to an increase in profits, as opposed to a bunch of pissed off users returning cards if they can and at the very least vowing to never use Creative products again, not least of which because (as Linux users) they no longer can

This may seem like a simple decision for some people, who assume that companies like making money, but as any seasoned marketing agent from Adobe or Creative will tell you, #2 is the way to go. Are these companies just completely unhinged?