Are you a verb yet?

I galvanised my thoughts this morning with a brief article on bbc news about Google's recent success. The latest figures show that the behemoth search engine reached an astonishing net profit of £1.64 billion in the third quarter. Eric Schmidt, chief executive for Google, reportedly said "The worst of the recession is clearly behind us." It's a wonder he could speak with his tongue wedged so firmly in his cheek.

Of course the billions in the bank are one clear indication that Google is doing rather well these days and far far ahead of its competitors. Or as one senior anaylst delicately put it, Google's success has left "...Yahoo withering on the vine..." one imagines that the chief exec of Yahoo may well disagree with Schmidt's sentiments on the recession.

But one thing that always strikes me as a clear marker of success, the one thing that says "That's right guys, we've got it firmly in the bag." is when you reach verb status.

By 'verb status' I mean when someone can use your name as a verb without being in danger of confusing anyone or sounding pretentious. For example, if you've ever referred to hoovering, or in this scenario, 'googling' someone. How wonderful to be so powerful that you deserve a place in the English language.

But it's worth considering that when a business reaches this ultimate arena of success, is when the real work needs to start. Being known well enough to become a verb is a great sign of status, but it's also when you risk simply merging into the collective unconscious. To continue with the hoover example, you may refer to the act of hoovering, but nowadays it's the Dyson that's the 'must have' vacuuming machine. Dyson may not quite be verbified, but there're very few people who wouldn't know what you meant if you talked about using the Dyson, or getting the dyson out. Or at least you'd hope so! I might use the word hoover, but it wouldn't make me buy one.

Such is my ignorance of hoover that I had to do a quick web search just to check that they're still trading (I was tempted to say 'google search' but let's face, they don't need my help). It turns out you can buy all sorts of hoover applicances that are entirely unrelated to dust - something that my lovely thumb indexed Oxford dictionary could not tell me. You see what I'm saying?

Well, just in case you don't, the thinking is this. We all want to reach a certain stage in business and we all have different ways of measuring success. To me the real accolade is verbification, but I'm sure that when the powers that be at Google discuss success over skinny lattes in the boardroom they won't be saying "Yes I know we made our 5oth billion yesterday, but are we a verb yet?". And when we reach that stage of success, whatever it may be, that's when we really need to start proving ourselves and continue to show that yes, indeed, we are the best.