Dell cannot register "cloud computing" as a trademark because the term is a generic one describing services offered by many companies, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has said in an initial ruling.

In denying Dell's application, the USPTO included dozens of news stories and other material supporting its contention that cloud computing is a widely-used term of art for the technology industry.

The term refers to computing services that are delivered to users over the Internet, often from a remote data center. It has been applied to many types of services, including storage services like Amazon's S3, online antispam services and hosted applications, such as Salesforce.com's CRM service.

If Dell were allowed to trademark the term, it could send dozens of other vendors scrambling to find an alternative buzzword to describe their services and avoid messy lawsuits. IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Yahoo and Google all have employed the term "cloud computing" to promote their services.

The USPTO described its decision as "non-final." Dell has six months to file a response or the USPTO will abandon the application.

Proponents of cloud services say they can help users cut costs because they don't have to invest in buying and managing their own hardware and software. But the model also means subscribers can be left stranded when a service has problems. Amazon's S3 suffered an outage last month which temporarily affected Twitter, which uses S3 to host images such as user avatars.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.