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Best Brands, Innovative Products
conq writes "BusinessWeek just came out with its best global brands list. The list is quite similar to last year's with Coke topping it. The brand with the highest growth year over year: Google. The comment: 'Its recent inclusion as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary confirms what competitors feared: Google means search to an army of Web users.'" I thought this tied in nicely to tappytibbins' story. They write "eWEEK.com has posted a feature with their picks of the 25 most innovative PC products of the last 25 years. Their #1 pick is a bit uninspired: The IBM PC. Down at #8 is the Mac. And is Apache really more of an innovation than Linux?" From that article: "15 - Palm Pilot: With an almost Zen-like minimalism of both software and hardware complexity, the Palm Pilot was no more than users needed?and exactly what many wanted."
Number 1, Coca-Cola had better watch their back for Number 2, Microsoft!
With Microsoft's flair for chumming up to other businesses, just before "innovating" their own brands right into that market, one must be cautious.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
where is Microsoft on that list?
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
I am very surprised to see Google mentioned as a company with a strong brand. While they are the market leader in search, their brand value is minimal with respect to the myriad of other services that they have launched. Yahoo seems to have a much stronger brand as indicated by its ability to establish top 5 contenders in markets as disperate as online dating, business/finance, e-mail, etc. under the Yahoo brand. While Google has a strong reputation in search, its ability to attract people to other services under the Google brand has been lackluster at best.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Yeah, clearly nothing ever came of that.
Inquiering minds want to know...
Any such list that excludes the Creative Labs 3DO blaster can not be taken seriously
The "linksys 802.11" router is more important than windows 95... among other things.
What is their metric? How are they measuring this? Best is a subjective term, you know.
/., where everybody has their own opinion on best stuff?
What if I think that Linux is more influental than Apache. Am I now wrong because Buisness Weekly says otherwise? I thought these were opinions. You know, use what you think is best, which is influenced by the job at hand...
If these just are opinions (or even surveys of opinions), do we need them? And, better yet, do we need them on
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I found the rankings of car brands quite interesting. Surprisingly, Toyota came out at the top. I would have thought that Honda and Toyota would share the same place as both are Japanese car manufactures and both make excellent cars.
Toyota = 7
Mercedes = 10
BMW = 15
Honda = 19
Ford = 30
Volkswagen = 56
Audi = 74
Hyundai = 75
Porsche = 80
Nissan = 90
Lexus = 92
The IBM PC, innovative? Back in the day, it was just one among several lines of personal computers. Not the first, not the best, it just happened to become extremely popular. The first true personal computer was the Apple II, and that should have had the top spot instead! (The 2nd place should have been a draw between Mac and Lisa - and maybe the Amiga, or that in the 3rd place).
Other bad picks:
- the Palm Pilot... no mention of Apple Newton or Atari Portfolio.
- Windows 95... back then jokingly called "Macintosh 89".
- Microsoft Office... Appleworks for the Apple II, anyone?
Circumcision is child abuse.
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My drink is coming out of holes in the can other than the one for drinking
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MS Cola went up my nose when I was laughing, and it hurts
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I purchased a 12 pack, can my kids drink some of the soda?
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When will CMC be available
Crystal Microsoft Cola is scheduled to be part of the Vista launch event.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
From the article, regarding Cisco:
"Cisco's decision to lead with its Linksys brand for consumers hasn't made the company a household name yet, but it's helping."
I don't understand why Cisco doesn't push their name harder in the consumer market. They bought Linksys some time ago... so why don't the Linksys boxes say "...by Cisco!" on them somewhere? Just to gather geek cachet?
Informed insight welcome.
- Apache: a Free server for a networking protocol (HTTP) introduced in the early 1990s.
- Linux: a Free operating system modeled after an OS introduced in the early 1970s.
Yeah, in the context of the last 25 years, I think one of those is more of an innovation than the other.http://alternatives.rzero.com/
innovative |?in??v?tiv| adjective (of a product, idea, etc.) featuring new methods; advanced and original
Broadly speaking, NONE of these items are actually innovative, almost every one of them is an item that built on the idea's of it's predecessors. Successful, yes, innovative, no, sorry. A good example, the IBM PC, successful only because IBM didn't defend it's IP, innovative?, name something about the IBM PC that wasn't found in an earlier computer/operating system.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
From the article:
"With a brand that said 'business machine' and an open architecture that invited third-party innovation, the IBM PC transformed the IT industry."
It seems we forget that when the PC was first introduced it was closed and proprietary. It wasn't until Compaq clean-room reverse-engineered the BIOS that the PC revolution really got started. If IBM had had their way the PC would have been locked down and controlled by IBM forever. Remember they used to call clones "IBM compatible." After Compaq started the cloning revolution, and Microsoft moved to make IBM-specific aspects of DOS irrelevant, not long after that IBM started to become less and less relevant. They no longer directed where the platform was going. By the i386, one could no longer talk about IBM-compatible. IBM tried to start over with a proprietary system (careful not to let cloning happen this time) withe Microchannel Architecure. Fortunately the market said, we'll stick with ISA, VESA-Local and PCI (even if MCA was superior at the time). Had IBM been successful in keeping the PC proprietary, I don't know what computers we would be using today. Maybe DEC alphas or Sparcstations. Or maybe we'd be paying $10000 a pop to IBM.
BTW - Microsoft is listed as the second best brand, right behind Coca-Cola.
It doesn't matter if you like Coke or not, it doesn't matter if you like Microsoft or not, their "brand" is out there.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Head on is so great, that they have taken it upon themselves to not only educate the masses about their product (Apply directly to the forehead!), but also discouraging couch potatoes by the incessent repeating of their usage instructions. That's like two services in one!
...first of all, the list looks like it was created by the intern in Powerpoint using Google Image Search, and then quickly converted to JPGs. Why the hell would you lay this out as a slideshow? It instantly means you can't easily copy and paste the text.
How about the list itself? It's like they chose some of the things randomly -- example; VMware is a great piece of software, but is it really more essential to the workplace than Windows and Microsoft Office, two programs end-users make heavy use of daily? And why list Linux in general, then Red Hat? That seems somewhat disingenuous. Plus, they missed a few pretty big ones, like the Internet, ethernet, CD-ROMs, VoIP and mice. Looks like the intern had a pretty busy week, coming up with this list all by himself.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
That's just crappy journalism, when you've got nothing else to write about put together a top 10 list of something. It's not even December or January... IOS seems particularly funny to me for some reason, I guess it's the shit if you've never used it but if you've done any amount of network device setup just about everyone else has something better. You don't get a CCNP because networking is that hard, it's that shitty IOS and CatOS that you have to learn, you deserve some sort of reward or punishment for learning it.
PDF? What they mean is Postscript.
Some of us may joke about it, but NASCAR is becoming a huge brand in the US, particularly in the red states. Some fans will buy pretty much anything with the NASCAR logo (clothing, groceries, etc.) which is basically what brand strength is all about.
Yes, Apache is more innovative than Linux: Linux is just a bog-standard UNIX-imitatory OS kernel (although admittedly an open-source one with the best features), while httpd is an innovatively modular and also innovatively free web server which has been probably the second most-used open-source product. And one mustn't forget non-httpd Apache projects, such as Forrest (a CMS) which is quite cool, certainly innovative in ways.
Can't let this PC list go without DOOM.
Amusing to me: While over the last year Sony has gone from "kind of widely disliked" to "the most loathed corporation of any kind on the entire planet" on Slashdot, according to BusinessWeek's list of brands Sony is the 28th "strongest" brand in the whole world, and in fact is 9% "stronger" than it was a year ago.
And so once again we see that the way Slashdot sees the world and the way the rest of the world sees the world are sometimes at quite unusual odds...
I know the brand has taken it on the chin for the last....uh....decade, but it's got to be worth at least as much as Heinz or Wrigley? I'd imagine we may see a resurgence in the next decade.
The Aspirin trademark may not be valuable to Bayer, but only because Bayer no longer owns it (at least in many countries.) Bayer's ownership was overturned by the courts because of a failure to defend it. You can bet Bayer executives still curse their predecessors for their stupidity in losing control over that name.
Companies are under no obligation to keep their trademarks. Plenty of companies give up on brands that aren't worth what it costs to advertise them. They spend billions to build and maintain the ones that are. Xerox is still Xerox and Kimberly-Clark still sells Kleenex because those brands are worth a fortune. If the weren't,the parent companies would waste no time rebranding themselves.
A widely-recognized trademark turns your competitors' products into advertisements for your own. The trick is protecting the use of the name so that your competitors can't use it to sell their products.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
XNS, which nobody uses anymore, is an "innovative PC product", but TCP/IP, which everybody uses and which predates XNS, isn't even mentioned? WTF?!?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And is Apache really more of an innovation than Linux?
...sure, mod me down. Still, that doesn't prove me wrong.
You must be kidding, right? With Apache market share being 63% and Linux being what? Like 3%? Even if we're talking just about servers, it's got less then 30%. With Apache leading the web server innovation and Linux just trying to replicate more advanced OSes in OSS context (if we're talking about desktops)...
"Nobody I know ever says that they "Yahooed it".
Sure I do.
"What happened to the red car man?"
"I freaken yahood it into a freaken wall".
I took a look at the list of brands in TFA. Q-riste, I'd only want about 7 of them in my house. What a bynch of crapola.
Need Mercedes parts ?
It was overpriced and underpowered. It had the IBM name, but at the time it was so completely blah compared to home computers of the time. But then again the author may be thinking of the PC in general, and not the system that started it all.
On Apache vs. Linux: Remember, Linux was just a rewrite of UNIX. Nothing amazing there.
I can't believe HeadOn hasn't made it to the list. I mean, with a commercial this innovative, how can you not be a top brand?
Almost useless, overstuffed with features, with no battery life, sporting a screen that can't easily be read outdoors, with the wrong form factor, over weight, in OS hell.
.. and make a thin, minimalist PDA with a beautiful, high contrast, maybe B&W, display. The market will do the rest, just like it did when US Robotics released their own. ..or, you can wait until the next generation ipod does it for you. The nano is damn close.
Where is what I should have? A super thin version of the beloved palmpilot I got in 1997! The Palm V had the form factor right smack on. The screen technology is what palm should have spent the money on; not uninspired "me too" features.
Why, oh why, does my $70 Gameboy SP look great outside and in, and my $400 palm can barely stay charged through a day of use? I recently went back to my palm V, because at least, it did what I wanted.
Hey, Palm Executives and Product Developers:
PULL YOUR HEADS OUT OF
..don't panic
I might be missing something, but the submitter seems to be the one who inserted the idea that this was a list of the top 25 most INNOVATIVE products. The actual list seems to be based on how influential they are. Based on that, it makes more sense (although I think that I might argue that even on a list of influence, the Macintosh probably should be a fair bit higher than it is, and you might even argue then that Smalltalk and the Xerox Alto should be on there if you want to get into what products were the most influential on where computing is today).
Actually I'm pretty certain that Bayer lost the trademark to both "Aspirin" and "Heroin" (two of their major ones) after World War I, as part of the assets that were seized by the Allies and sold as war reparations.
Wikipedia indicates that the rights to the "Aspirin" name were purchased from the U.S. Government by one Sterling Drug, and it was they who lost the trademark in 1921 because it had become too genericized -- not Bayer.
In short, Bayer lost their trademark because they were on the wrong side of a war, it was Sterling that lost it to genericization here in the US. The story might be different in other countries, if they didn't play along with the seizure of the brand from Bayer in the first place.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Mom, I told you to TiVo Crank Yankers!"
But TiVo is in financial trouble.
Even before the iPod, Sony didn't make a large fraction of the "Walkmans" sold in the US anymore.
Very few demoliton saws sold are actually Sawzalls, or circular saws actual Skil saws.
I don't know why people keep drawing a connection here. A shorthand gets adopted, and that shorthand might be a companies' trademark. But I dunno if there is a real strong link there.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95