Success Quote by Meg Whitman

To have your name slip into everyday grammar is the corporate equivalent of folk immortality. Whitman’s line isn’t really admiring clever marketing so much as pointing to a ruthless benchmark: the moment a company stops being a product and becomes an instinct. “Google it,” “Venmo me,” “Uber there” aren’t just habits; they’re shortcuts that compress choice, research, and even competition into a single syllable. The verb is a power grab disguised as convenience.

Whitman, a CEO who helped steer eBay from scrappy marketplace to mainstream infrastructure, is speaking from a late-90s/2000s worldview where the biggest win wasn’t a good quarter, it was cultural default status. In that era, tech brands weren’t content to sell tools; they wanted to own categories. The remark captures the holy grail of network effects: once language does your marketing, users recruit other users automatically. A verb implies repeatability and ease. It says, “This is the standard way people do this now.”

There’s a sly subtext, too: verb-ification flatters the company while quietly erasing everyone else. If you “Google,” rival search engines become a footnote. If you “Xerox,” the machine brand becomes the act. It’s also precarious. Lawyers know that turning into a verb can slide into genericide, where dominance weakens the trademark. Whitman frames it as “remarkable,” but she’s really describing a rare, brittle form of cultural capture: when a business briefly convinces the public that its identity and the action itself are the same thing.