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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."
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.
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.
I agree with you that the article is confusing "innovative" with "influential".
The IBM PC wasn't innovative in the sense that it wasn't the first personal computer. It was, however the first computer widely accepted in business/corporate environments. It was no doubt more influential than any other computer of its time.
The Palm Pilot was popular, influential and, quite frankly, a great product. The Netwon, which was far more innovative was expensive and had terrible handwriting recognition.
AppleWorks was definitely innovative for its time -- and it was good for home users. For business applications, it really sucked compared to WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, etc. Office was a far better piece of software and more influential.
BTW: It's great to see support for banning MGM! We need more people like you to fight the battle.
There was very little innovation in the original PC. It was the result of a 12 month project and had to be designed around off-the-shelf parts and a cpu that was easy to implement, rather than one that would perform. Hence the Intel 80XX rather than the Motorola 68000. Development time for the 68000 would have taken too long.
The PC was IBM's third try at a desktop computer. The failure of the first two was responsible for the short time allowed for the development of the third.
64K, no floppies, no color... lame.