Quote - Usually when your trademarked product name is put to common usage to describe things or even altered into a verb form, believe it or not - that's a good thing. It tends to mean that you're at the top of your game for some reason, and therefore fairly common. And this familiarity is what makes the name ubiquitous in terms of usage.

I agree that it tends to mean that you're at the top, but I disagree that it's usually a good thing. Just ask the people who used to work at the companies who made the products mentioned earlier. Once those companies lost sales to competitors and once people forgot that the words they were using were brand names, those companies were on the way to extinction and later ceased to exist.

Just imagine. Let's say I need to make a correction on a term paper, and having seen people use a bottle of white fluid on something like this and calling it "Wite-Out" I think, I need some white-out. I ask you to buy me some, and you (thinking of white-out as a generic term) get me, oh, maybe PaperMate correction fluid or PaperMate LiquidPaper. Who loses out in a situation like this? Wite-Out®, the company that makes Wite-Out® brand correction fluid. They lose a sale. They lose brand recognition. They slowly lose their means of existing.

Heck, people have been using "white-out" as a generic for correction fluid for so long, I'll bet most people didn't even know that Wite-Out® was a brand name.

And that, to Wite-Out, is NOT a good thing.