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The Twelve Most Tarnished Brands In Tech
harrymcc writes "Polaroid, Netscape, CompuServe, Westinghouse, Heathkit — these were once among the most respected names in the technology business. They're still around, but what's happened to them is just plain sad. I took a look at the tragic fates of a dozen mighty brands that have, in one way or another, fallen on hard times."
Who trusts these bozos anymore?
Odd. They lost the HP way a long time ago.
I don't know whether it was the compaq acquisition or the carly regime that made HP soft,. Maybe the HP name hasn't fallen and it's not tarnished as much as some of the other names on the list, but the company behind the brand isn't what it used to be.
Let's be honest here; Napster brought nothing new to the table. They were just known on the same level that Balloon Boy's parents are known. Hadn't it been for being sued into oblivion they would hardly be a footnote in technology.
I also shiver to think that the writer still considers Commodore the same company as they one that died in the 90s. It's the same company by name only. It's not like it did a massive transformation into oblivion like Westinghouse or Polaroid.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Any such list that doesn't include Diebold is lacking. Once a well respected manufacturer of safes, vaults, and eventually ATM machines, they now are known for creating voting machines that can't count, and in some cases have shown evidence of maliciousness in subverting the democratic process. At worst they are guilty of treason, at best they are guilty of selling useless and harmful junk. At least Microsoft at their worst is entertaining (Bob, Clippy); Diebold is disgusting.
Qxe4
Junk products and won't honor extended warranties they sell.
3dfx?
Radio Shack probably should have been on there somewhere too...Way back when, they weren't too bad of a place to get some electronics stuff, back in the Heathkit days... Oh well...
It used to stand unambiguously for large-format filming (49 x 70 mm per frame), projected on large screens (around 53 x 72 ft). There were some variations, like the projection on a concave screen of OmniMAX (now IMAX Dome), but the general brand made sense. IMAX meant high-resolution film, projected on large screens.
But for presumably commercial reasons related to a deal with theatre chain AMC, a large portion of theatres currently advertising "IMAX" films are actually projecting "IMAX Digital", a not-very-closely-related digital projection format. Film v. digital in theory I don't care much about, but the entire brand of IMAX=big is dispensed with with IMAX Digital's much smaller 28x58-ft screens. The digital projectors (dual 2K resolution projectors) also don't seem to be of sufficient resolution to match the quality of a 49x70mm film projector. As a result, it's not clear IMAX means a lot as a brand anymore, since any given theatre might well have a mostly normal sized screen and a not particularly high-resolution projector.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Also Borland. Many programmer out there like me cut their teeth using Borland Pascal/C/C++.... then we went thru a brief optimism with Delphi... then the insane Inprise name change... then a long spiral into insignificance. RIP Borland.
No Novell? They used to own the LAN, and now they feed off MS scraps....
Napster doesn't belong on that list, because at its height, it was never a great or proud company--just an early one.
Packard-Bell has been a joke for so long that hardly anyone young enough to care remembers when they weren't.
Netscape doesn't really exist. They acknowledge that, but still put it on the list. Same for Netscape, and (sorta) Compuserve.
There are some others I would add to the list, though: Silicon Graphics and Atari deserve top honours. Also, hugely powerful and profitable though it may be, Electronic Arts almost defines "tarnished brand," considering their origins. Also, how about Radio Shack? Can you even get parts there anymore?
Now if we jump into the audio world, there are more than anyone can count. Advent, Sansui, Nakamichi, Hafler, Scott, etc..
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Digital Equipment Corp, DEC, digital These folks started making test equipment, rivaled IBM when the PDP and VAX systems roamed the data centers. Their customer support was a pleasure to deal with. The only time a DEC field service engineer ever told me they didn't have a part in town, he told me it was coming in on a 2:00 pm flight and he'd be at my door by 3:00. A series of management by accountants slowly dissolved the company into take over bait. Despite making quality products they faded away. The low bidder trumps all.
How about IBM. They should have died years ago, but can still rely on the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" fanboys. At least they still do some cutting edge R&D though, which is more than I can say for most tech companies.
Delphi still exists and is now at version D2010. It is still one of the quickest ways to write and deploy Win32 apps.
This is not a news site. This is a discussion site. And that's the way I like it.
There are still legions of 30+ year olds that think Sony means quality, as well as large number of PlayStation Fanboys that either don't know about Sony's anti-consume practices, or don't care. The good news is that they seem to be improving.
Might not quite be there yet, but it's well on its way.
From the abominable performance/security of the Flash player to the ever-increasing bloat of Photoshop, Adobe's users are pretty much fed up with the company.
At one point, it would have been heresy to criticize Photoshop. Now the design community is practically screaming for a replacement. (It's twice as bad if you're a mac user. Nobody's quite sure what prompted the Apple/Adobe divorce, but it's been ugly)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
SGI should be on that list. It was amazing to watch their death spiral in the mid-late 90s. That brand is way more tarnished than Napster (which didn't have much of a brand to tarnish).
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
surely SCO is the most tarnished?
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
WTF? Not that I hold /. as epitome of geek site, but are you seriously saying crap like engadget and apple-sucking gizmodo are better? I don't want to into details, but why don't you get the fuck off to those sites, like, NOW?
Would be Atari and Sega. Atari used to be the biggest video game company in the world, sold tens of millions 2600's and had billions in sales at the beginning of the 80's. I wonder how many current gamers would believe me if I told them that. (Since they're just a label now. As for Sega, they used to make systems and while they might have not been the most popular they're not the joke they are today. (I mean Sonic, how badly did they screw up Sonic? Of course sometimes they do something right by mistake but you know it'll only be a moment before they mess up something else.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Woz was a technical genius but it's Jobs's design and marketing vision that has enabled Apple to revolutionize electronics not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times: first with the Apple I and II, secondly with the Macintosh, thirdly with the iPod, and now with the iPhone.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I was involved with H-P in various capacities from 1994 through 1998, pre-Carly, and the high zoot engineers for whom the company was famous were nowhere in evidence. Absolutely nowhere. The company mission statement already said that H-P was a "shareholder driven" company, and the old-timers all lamented that The HP Way was long dead.
I'm not defending Fiorina, as she was in well over her head and everyone except the BOD knew it right from the start, I'm just saying that the company was broken before she got there.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
I just have an issue mostly with AT&T being on the list, but only for the justification. Their brand is instantly recognizable... as Evil. I don't know much of anyone who doesn't think their continued existence is anything but unconscionable. The author is quite wrong about Polaroid digital cameras, they do have a distinguishing mark: the mark of crap. Polaroid cameras have crap hardware and crap software, and are to be avoided at all costs. Packard-Bell, of course, is one of the most deserving names on that sucker... but who can argue with C= or SCO?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You don't even have to be formerly great. There is a company paying money to call itself CompUSA, fer chrissake.
rj
I remember when the options were AltaVista, Yahoo, and several other completely pointless search engines.
Repeat after me: they all sucked arse. You never searched just one portal to find what you were looking for, and often you could search all of them and not find the thing you were looking at a week ago.
The reason Google owns internet search? Because as soon as they came along, it was like night and fucking day. No longer did I have to diddle around with half a dozen search engine in the vain hope that one of them would not be so stuffed with crapware for those keywords that I might actually find what I was looking for.
Oh, and second reason I am well pleased to see AltaVista on this list: when working at an ISP migrating customers from one set of DNS servers to the new ones, I had the misfortune of answering a call from a customer whose response to my query as to what browser he used was "Oh, I don't use a browser, I use the AltaVista". I would like to claim that hilarity ensued, but that would be a big fat lie.