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."

Comments

Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Who trusts these bozos anymore?

Re:Microsoft

[nsayer]

Who ever did?

Re:Microsoft

[Runaway1956]

I was wondering why Microsoft didn't make the list. Tarnished? You bet! Of course, TFA is a subjective piece from start to finish. It's all about how the author perceives things to be.

HP didn't make the list?

[Ihlosi]

Odd. They lost the HP way a long time ago.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[hairyfeet]

Hell yes! If anybody deserved to be on the list it was Compaq. Did everybody just forget the "fun" that was Compaq RAM? For those kiddies too young to remember. Compaq, in an epic attack of douchebag behavior, decided they needed to "lock" in customers so that they would come to them and ONLY them for RAM, which of course they bent you over and treated you like the latest bimbo in a Seymore Butts movie when you came to purchase it.

You see, they had the boards rigged so they would run just a little bit undervolted or overvolted on the RAM, so if you tried to put in "normal" RAM it would cause weird errors, throw BSODs, or just fry. Fun, huh? And woe be unto you if you were a PC repairman at the time, because Compaq RAM often wouldn't work in...other Compaqs! That's right, because some ram ran under and some ran over you couldn't even use Compaq RAM in another Compaq unless it was rigged the same way! Gee, isn't that nice of them?

And that of course don't count the substandard parts, or building boards with only PCI slots when everyone else had AGP (hell I wouldn't be surprised in this age of PCIe that Compaq still sold models with only PCI) or shitty caps, lousy sound chips that sounded like a speaker at a drive-in, etc. At the shop I was working at at the time we had a mound of PCs that were scrap, and guess what a good 7 out of 10 were? Compaq. The other three were usually little old ladies that were foolish enough to have bought a Packard Smell.

So yeah Compaq should have been in the top 5 at least. A truly craptastic brand of PC that deserves to be right up there with Packard Smells and IBM Deathstars on any "giant can o' suck" PC list.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[schon]

Compaq never had a good brand reputation to lose. They've made junk computers since day one.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know anything about Compaq besides what they see in department stores.

Compaq's business products (Deskpro line) were top-of-the-line. They were elegantly-engineered tanks that ran pretty much forever. Opening one up revealed a thing of beauty - being able to swap out expansion cards and hard drives without need of a screwdriver even to open the case, without being flimsy.

The Presario was junk, but do you judge all Fords based solely on the Pinto, all Chevys based solely on the Vega? Compaq made rock-solid business desktops and servers.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Gerald]

My memory of Deskpros is that they drew blood every time I opened one up. Sure, you could open the case "without need of a screwdriver" but it meant turning metal thumbscrews that were shaped suspiciously like, and were as sharp as, bits for a wood router. The insides were all razor-sharp, stamped metal patiently waiting to get near your wrist or a finger.

The overall impression was that Compaq hated their customers and wanted them to suffer.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[dissy]

Compaq never had a good brand reputation to lose. They've made junk computers since day one. HP at least used to have a reputation as the best maker of printers - they still make good printers, but now I mostly think of them as the makers of the worst computers.

You do realize of course that the very computer you are using to bash Compaq would not be in existence if it wasn't for Compaq, right?

Nor would the computer of the person that modded you insightful :P

They were the ones that clean room reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS that every computer from the 80s until just a couple years ago makes use of. Even the past couple years, MOST "PC compatible" systems sold today still contain that IBM PC BIOS.

Compaq created and sold the first 100% IBM PC compatible computers, and that was one of the driving forces that turned the PC hobby into the PC industry it is today.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Locke2005]

They lost sight of "the HP way" about the same time they put Carly in charge. Note to HP buying up other companies to convert yourself to a service company and compete with IBM is just a waste of money if you can't get those new divisions to stop fighting with each other and actually work together towards a common goal.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[PopeRatzo]

"The overall impression was that Compaq hated their customers and wanted them to suffer."
Yeah, but the quality was excellent!

remember DEC had some x86 systems that were similar. Great quality, but proprietary as hell and tough to work on the hardware. Faster than other desktops of the same category.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[haruchai]

If you care to nominate HP, I'll second the motion. We've come to despise them for both their services and
their products. And, they have a couple of account managers who can only be described as oily. Unfortunately,
they're assigned to our account and we can't seem to get rid of them.

And I've never heard the word "can't" used so often by techheads - considering that Hewlett and Packard essentially
founded the original garage startup. They must both be rolling in their graves.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[metlin]

My thoughts exactly. I remember opening Compaqs to explore what was inside, and getting really bad cuts from the sharp things everywhere.

On another note, what about Hughes?

Under Howard Hughes, the company was doing fantastic. They did some great stuff, and came up with some pretty awesome inventions.

And then, Howard went batshit crazy, and the company went downhill. Hughes still does some pretty cool stuff, but it's nothing like that it used to be.

Another company, of course, is Bell Labs.

Through nothing short of government greed and interference, the fantastic company that gave us transistors, lasers, information theory, radio astronomy, Unix and C was broken up, and eventually destroyed everything that they stood for.

Today, AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, and baby-Bells are nothing short of a joke.

There is no innovation to speak of, nothing approaching the scale of Bell Labs in any case. It was a sad, sad day.

Personally, I feel that had Hughes and Bell Labs survived today, we may have had more technological advances than we do today.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Bunny Guy]

I have to disagree - The Deskpro line and their servers were junk too. There was a brief shining moment when they rose to acceptable, but it was all to short, and *expensive*!

I had to support our customers that *insisted* on using these systems in a 24/7 environment. What lowered the score for me was that *everything* was custom! Even the bloody Power Supply was "Custom" compaq only. Oh No, off the shelf ram wouldn't do, won't work - gotta have Compaqs special buffering, or voltage, etc... The geometry of the motherboards wasn't even standard!

And of course, none of our globally distributed customers wanted to keep a cold spare on site... Enough, they were non-compatible C**P.

Re:HP didn't make the list?

[Dun Malg]

And then, Howard went batshit crazy, and the company went downhill. Hughes still does some pretty cool stuff, but it's nothing like that it used to be.

Hughes doesn't do anything anymore. Hughes no longer exists. My father worked for Hughes Aircraft from college graduation to retirement. The decline of Hughes Aircraft Co. had little to do with Howard going nuts. Hughes was still going full bore in the defense industry when HH died in '76. They continued to succeed until 1985, when the seeds of their destruction were sown. That's when the Feds ruled that Hughes Medical Institute, a non-profit research foundation which was essentially the "heir" to the HH fortune and owned Hughes Aircraft, had to divest themselves of the hugely profitable subsidiary to keep its non-profit status. That's when General Motors bought them and merged them with Delco Electronics to form the GM-Hughes Electronics division. At this point, Hughes was making everything from radar systems, to missiles, to satellites, to communications systems.

At any rate, GM being run by a bunch of fools and clowns, it was inevitable that the party would end. The collapse of the Soviet Union hit the defense industry pretty hard, and GM acquired General Dynamics' missile division and rolled it into Hughes. The inevitable decline was delayed by the fact that Hughes launched a profitable commercial business in '94, a satellite television business called "DirecTV"--- perhaps you've heard of it. None of this helped in the long run, though. GM was no better at operating a business sensibly then than it is now. Eventually the realized they were out of their league, and sold off the Hughes Aircraft portion of Hughes Electronics to Raytheo. The DirecTV division was sold to Rupert Murdoch. The Hughes Space and Communications division was sold to Boeing.

My father worked the last 3 years of his career as a Raytheon employee because of this. Raytheon is a company run by shitbag assholes. For decades Hughes was forced by the DoD to "second source" critical components from Raytheon. My father had years worth of stories about how the shit they'd manufacture was sloppy and not made to specs, and how it caused them interminable problems with Raytheon parts failing. When they acquired Hughes, they basically turned it into "more Raytheon". Employees were treated like shit, benefits cut to nothing, and retirees who were previously allowed to buy health insurance as part of the Hughes group plan were told to "suck it". Perhaps the world was no longer a place where a company like Hughes could exist. Perhaps only "McRaytheon" type companies can make money nowadays. All I know is that Raytheon tolerates a lot more incompetence than Hughes did, and as a result of them buying Hughes, they are now the only manufacturer of missiles in the US, and it's all done to "Raytheon qwality". Just as well, I guess. Not much air combat anymore.

So no, it really was GM that put Hughes on the chopping block, and Raytheon that finally swung the axe. The problem may have started with HH not having a will, but a bunch of Oldsmobile salesmen in $200 suits are what really killed them.

HP

[joeflies]

When you say HP, the first words that comes to mind is innovation and great engineering. However you look at the past 10 years and HP has done surprisingly little in innovation or great engineering, and has not been creating market changing technology. They've gotten stuck building pcs and selling printer ink because that's the safe way to make money.

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.

Re:HP

[tibman]

The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.

Re:HP

[Itninja]

Have you seen their recent blade server technology? While their support is awful, the hardware itself (namely the C-class blades) is pretty impressive.

Re:HP

[TheRealFixer]

I think most people would blame Carly Fiorina. She effectively took HP out of the hands of the engineers who made the company great, and put it squarely into the hands the shareholders who were concerned only with short-term stock price during the dotcom bubble. She spurred a massive shift in culture that killed off the innovation that they were famous for, obliterated morale throughout the company, and generally made it an undesirable place to work. The Compaq acquisition was just one aspect of her failure.

Re:HP

[MightyMartian]

I liked the HP server line, and when I was shopping around last spring for a new server, even got a couple of quotes, but at the end of the day, they just weren't willing to price match Dell. I felt bad, because, support-wise, Dell has gone to shit, too. I also got quotes on some low-end HP workstations (22 workstations) to upgrade some old Dells, and the only way I could get them to compare to similar Vostros was to dump DVD burning and buy smaller LCD monitors. It's like they didn't give a fuck at all. The reseller, a guy who I like a great deal and would have loved to give the purchase to, literally apologized for HP not playing ball.

Re:HP

[japhering]

I think most people would blame Carly Fiorina. She effectively took HP out of the hands of the engineers who made the company great, and put it squarely into the hands the shareholders who were concerned only with short-term stock price during the dotcom bubble. She spurred a massive shift in culture that killed off the innovation that they were famous for, obliterated morale throughout the company, and generally made it an undesirable place to work. The Compaq acquisition was just one aspect of her failure.

sarcasm on

Isn't that the function of Great CEOs... first drive the company into the ground will getting multi-million dollar bonus for cost reductions and stock value, then sell it to some hedge fund at a profit of 2 or 3x the share price for all share holders, which always includes the hedge fund paying the execs to exercise their options on 10s of millions of shares, thus increasing, yet again, shareholder value. Ah..the bright side of capitalism

sarcasm off

Seriously, so many at the Executive level haven't got a clue about what their company does and to make up for it simply rely on what the bean counters are telling them.

Re:HP

[GPLDAN]

Two Words: Carly Fiornia


I hope she becomes Gov of California. She'll probably try and merge with Hawaii and then half the state will fall into the ocean.

Re:HP

[darkpixel2k]

The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.

What? I thought customers and admins *loved* their 2 MB printer drivers to come bundled with the .NET framework and constant reminders to buy ink when levels dropped below 75%...

Re:HP

[WaywardGeek]

She wasn't the only one. I joined HP in 1988, and the job was horible. Donuts on Friday disapeared the week I arrived. the "HP Way" was being scuttled. I could only take it a year and a half, and then I moved on to more intresting work. The problem was that David Packard had retired from the board and no longer guided the company. It got so bad, he came out of retirement a couple years later to put HP back on track. When he passed away, there was no way to replace him. Stockholders always lean towards the likes of Carly Florina, for the reasons already described - short-term profits. It takes an genius evangelist with nearly unlimited power to keep a company great. Take a look at what's happening at Microsoft since Bill stepped back, and how the stock market follows Steve Job's health.

Anyway, I veiw all those famous brands mentioned in TFA quite differently. What they have in common is that they have faded, but that's all. Heathkit is a brand spoken even today in awe of what they did for America. Polorooid revolutionized film based photography, and faded into obscurity when their strong leadership faded. Westinghouse faded through conglomeration. What do they make now? Coffee or nuclear reactors? Netscape killed themselves, through incredible stupid and evil strategy - make the Internet so complicated that only Microsoft and Netscape could offer functional browsers... someone should be shot.

I reject the idea that a company the dies with it's market has failed. Sun Microsystems is the most amazing workstation vendor in history. They gave the world technologies that will benefit the world for generations. Just because my cell phone has more power than a 1990-vintage workstation doesn't make Sun less great. These are brands to be celebrated for what they did in their industry, not to be morned when their industry passes into history.

Re:HP

[Phroggy]

The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.

What? I thought customers and admins *loved* their 2 MB printer drivers to come bundled with the .NET framework and constant reminders to buy ink when levels dropped below 75%...

Um, customers do love 2MB printer drivers; it's the 300MB printer drivers that are a bit tough to swallow.

Re:HP

[ChrisMaple]

Polaroid had one trick, instant-print film and cameras. As far as I can tell, it was never really very strong financially, stumbling to make the next advancement in its technology to rescue it from impending doom. Quality never met conventional processing, and additional copies meant weeks of delay. Cheap 1-hour processing weakened its market substantially, and digital cameras sealed its fate. I don't think any management could have saved Polaroid. Look at Kodak, which had a huge industrial base to work from and has heavily and desperately invested in digital technology: it is struggling to remain a viable corporation.

Re:HP

[Alan426]

Which is far better than huge, bloated printer drivers that constantly *need* updating (cough ... Canon!).

Re:HP

[Degrees]

It gets worse. Xerox wants a consulting division, so they are planning to buy Affiliated Computer Services. If Dell and HP can buy consulting companies, why shouldn't Xerox?

Problem is, ACS is in the bottom 25 of worst places to work. (Entry #21). The former head of ACS left due to a back-dating-stock-options scandal, and as a part of his golden parachute, the ACS Board gave him a $1 million per year salary allowance for security services. He needs $1 million per year in bodyguards, and the Board gave it to him. Oh yeah, they are a class act with the utmost integrity.

And Xerox wants to marry them.

In my opinion, if you have Xerox stock, sell it. Sell it now.

Re:Here's Another

[StreetStealth]

Or how about Hyades1. Once the recipient of such moderations as "+5. Insightful" and "+5, Informative" the brand is now associated with failing to RTFA.

Napster was respected when?

[east coast]

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.

Re:Napster was respected when?

[mcgrew]

Napster was important because it was the first P2P program. The post-lawsuit napster company wasn't important, but it brought file sharing to the masses and scared the record lables as badly as the VCR scared the movie industry.

Were you asleep then or something?

Re:Napster was respected when?

[Deadstick]

The original Commodore....

-Marketed a disk drive that had a hundred percent failure rate, couldn't be stacked because of overheating, and was the slowest floppy drive ever built.
-Marketed a computer that accessed that drive by sending BASIC statements, in ASCII, down a serial bus.
-Advertised that the drive was user-programmable and refused to release programming information for it.
-Marketed a computer whose ROM kernel routines didn't work, so programmers had to take up scarce RAM with their own routines to do stuff like moving the cursor.
-Couldn't even spell "kernel". They called it the "Kernal".

And they went downhill?

rj

This is the title

[DreamsAreOkToo]

Is it sad, or is it what the company deserved? How many other companies deserve this same fate but are being propped up because "They're too big to fail"?

Re:This is the title

[Nerdfest]

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.

Re:This is the title

[cheesybagel]

The IBM POWER 6 and POWER 7 processors are masterpieces on their own right. Expensive? Yes. But also remember that the top 3 shipping games consoles all use their processors (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii).

As you said they still do some nifty R&D as well. The folks they have in the 'consulting' business I have met so far are top notch as well.

Their consumer products... what consumer products? They sold all those divisions off so they could keep margins up.

Diebold?

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:Diebold?

[Volante3192]

They're only known for making crappy voting machines on this site.

If some news outlet actually did a hard hitting expose on them, maybe, MAYBE, they'd fall from grace.

Re:Diebold?

[phantomfive]

You are right, most people don't know about Diebold, but then, on the other hand, there is a reason they changed the name of their voting machine division.

Re:Diebold?

[Chris Mattern]

At worst they are guilty of treason,

Jeez, we went around this particular block on the last Diebold story. Treason is strictly (and narrowly) defined in the constitution itself and no act Diebold has been accused of even comes close to matching that definition. You have to either be making war on the US or giving aid and comfort to those who are.

Old modems

[Junior J. Junior III]

3Com/USRobotics should be on this list.

Re:Old modems

[Xiaran]

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.

Re:Old modems

[Anonymous Coward]

Delphi still exists and is now at version D2010. It is still one of the quickest ways to write and deploy Win32 apps.

Re:Old modems

[drinkypoo]

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?

Radio Shack

[mdsolar]

Junk products and won't honor extended warranties they sell.

Re:Radio Shack

[MightyMartian]

Tandy/Radio Shack is a really sad story. From the late '70s and into the mid-80s they produced a helluva lot of computers, including the Model 100, which was pretty much the first real notebook computer (compare it to the Osbornes, where you literally packed around a monster with a CRT screen). The first *nix machine I ever worked on was a Tandy 6000 with a Motorola 68000 chip, a Z80 I/O copressor, 1mb of RAM, two 20mb hard drives and a five port RS232 card. For the time, the machine kicked some serious ass, and we were using it into the mid-1990s for the multiuser accounting software, using dumb terminals. They, like Commodore, made bad decisions, like sticking with an 8bit CPU for the CoCo3 instead of moving into the 16bit world (except with their PC clones).

Last but not least, Radio Shack made some of the best beginners programming manuals out there. I learned BASIC on a 20k MC-10 (the CoCo cousin that ran a 6803 and had a chiclet keyboard), and even wrote a PacMan-like game using semigraphics mode.

Re:Radio Shack

[tautog]

Funny Radio Shack story - stopped into the local store a few years ago to pick up some random connectors, etc. Before offering to help me find what I needed, was offered a cell phone and then informed that they have to special order everything on my list. I asked them what they DO offer and was basically told cell phones and a few cables.

My response: "So you're essentially a more expensive and less useful version of Best Buy?".

The guy gave me a foul look and I turned on my heel and left.

For the record, I worked at Radio Shack for a year or so way back when. You were required to take and pass training courses (on basic electrical theory and how to identify and match components such as resistors, capactors, etc) and failure to do so meant termination.

I refuse to even enter their stores anymore.

Re:Radio Shack

[Thud457]

You know they've run out of ideas and swirling around the drain when they think it's a good idea to change the name they've been using for 50 years.

Now they want to be called "The Shack".

Re:Radio Shack

[kbielefe]

I have to agree, pretty sad. I still wander in once or twice a year. Last time I went in I told them I was looking for some solder wick. The salesman went and looked, then told me they didn't have any. I looked myself anyway, and sure enough he was looking straight at it, but it was labeled desoldering braid. I still remember as a kid when I could go in for something like an LED and they would recommend a current limiting resistor. Now, I go in for solder wick and they recommend a new cell phone to go with it, and they couldn't tell a transistor from a resistor if their life depended on it.

Re:Radio Shack

[YrWrstNtmr]

Funny Radio Shack story - stopped into the local store a few years ago to pick up some random connectors, etc. Before offering to help me find what I needed, was offered a cell phone and then informed that they have to special order everything on my list. I asked them what they DO offer and was basically told cell phones and a few cables.

Similar. A few years ago (03/04) I bought a gumstick size vid camera. It came with a 110v wallwart. Wanting to use it mobile/helmetcam, I set about to build a battery pack for it. Camcorder in the backpack, gumstick feeding into it.

At RadioShack, I showed the guy both ends..."I need to mate X + Y".
'We don't have anything like that'
"yes you do, this is RadioShack!"

He walked off looking confused. I rooted around in the bins for a few minutes, and found the connector I needed.

As I paid the $2.50, he asked me if I needed a new cellphone and associated plan. [facepalm]

Re:Radio Shack

[TheGratefulNet]

ever since they canceled the battery club card, things went downhill. fast.

Re:Radio Shack

[Boogaroo]

I'd give you that if it weren't for the ridiculous prices they have on the rest of the items in the store.

Last time I needed a mini-stereo to Video/Stereo RCA cable, they wanted $27.99. Granted, Best Buy wanted $29.99 and Circuit City only had the Monster branded one for $59.99...
BUT IT'S JUST A $3 CABLE!

I wanted it right away and would have paid maybe $10, but instead I went home and went on ebay and got it for $2.50 plus $3 shipping.

I'm perfectly willing to pay a markup, but not a 1000% markup.

Re:Radio Shack

[BeaverCleaver]

Australian/New Zealand readers can relate this to Dick Smith Electronics. Used to sell individual components, and always have at least one nerd on duty who at least knew what they were. Now they're just trying to emulate harvey norman and JB hifi selling TVs and stereos, but with a smaller selection, higher prices, and dumber staff. Component sales have also completely disappeared - at least Radio Shack can still sell a few overpriced resistors, which although expensive is a lot quicker than mail order.

Yes, I'm a former employee of Dick Smith Electronics. It's a damn shame what's happened to them, and seems to me an insane business move to move out of your niche into an already saturated market.

Re:Radio Shack

[AaronLawrence]

Fortunately, Jaycar is picking up the slack and taking all that business off them nicely. Dick Smith themselves don't seem to care and even once told me to go to Jaycar instead.

Where would 3d gaming be without...

[rjejr]

3dfx?

Re:Where would 3d gaming be without...

[jabelli]

#9 was great, I was sorry when they went bust like most of the others. I had a #9 in my old Dell, and was having some problem with either Windows or some game. #9 support told me it was a BIOS problem, and sent me a new BIOS for the video card. No, they didn't email me a flash update (I can't remember if I even had email yet at the time), they mailed me a big fat EPROM stuck in a piece of carbon anti-static foam inside a padded envelope at no charge. That's customer service.

Radio Shack?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Radio Shack?

[Dun Malg]

AIDS laxatives doesn't qualify because its name was co-opted for a disease, not volunteered.

1) It was Ayds
2) it was an appetite suppressant, not a laxative

IMAX seems to be slipping also

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[iluvcapra]

If we're going to get into the film brands, no conversation is complete without a mention of Lucasfilm THX. Originally conceived as a quality-control system for movie sound, and having very strict technical requirements in the theater; George fired the inventor in the 90s and now they just slap the plaque on any theater that can write the check for the $100,000 licensing fee, and the THX name is stuck on cellphones and car stereos. Puke.

And don't get me started on Dolby.

Re:IMAX seems to be slipping also

[tenton]

You don't know what you think you know.

Interlaced DVDs have nothing really to do with VHS. They're not upscaled VHS tapes by any stretch. The used to make some of the DVDs might be interlaced, but almost never are those masters VHS tapes (I say almost never because maybe there's an example of it happening at some point; I'm sure as hell not aware of it). At worst, Betacam tape (not the consumer BetaMax), more likely D2 tape. Well, these days, I'd like to hope it's DigiBeta or some other component format being sent.

The interlacing can come from multiple sources, it's usually from the editing process (via interlaced studio equipment). Sometimes these things were introduced by the Japanese company, sometimes they're introduced by the localization company.

And there's no point in making a BD with DVD level resolution on it; one can just make a DVD, which will play in a BD player (and not cutoff your market).

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[Anonymous Coward]

my very first computer (as an adult) was a Packard Bell I still get a misty when I think of it.

I've always been more of an Officer Jenny guy.

To be Fair...

[clinko]

How about Slashdot?

I know, we're the converted, but think about how Gizmodo and Engadget have changed how "Tech News" is reported.

Slashdot used to be the ONLY good place to get tech news. I remember telling someone "Slashdot is like the 'What's New' of Popular Mechanics, but free!"

I wouldn't even mention slashdot now. I'm not leaving, but I don't see any reason to convert others...

Re:To be Fair...

[dkleinsc]

I respectfully disagree, for several key reasons:
1. There are still some geek celebrities that pop in here from time to time. If we're talking Star Trek, it's not totally uncommon for CleverNickName to show up. Bruce Perens will not infrequently make an appearance on issues he knows about (or when the article is about something he did). And so forth.

2. There are still some comments that are insightful / interesting / informative that are modded as such. It ain't universal, but it's there. And plus, some of the funny comments really are funny.

3. There's a lot less spam-type articles. Roland and * * Beatles Beatles are both not showing up anymore. There's still the occasional slashvertisement, but they're less common than they used to be.

It's not, and hasn't been for a really long time, just about reporting technology news.

Re:To be Fair...

[selven]

This is not a news site. This is a discussion site. And that's the way I like it.

Re:To be Fair...

[E IS mC(Square)]

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?

Re:To be Fair...

[mindbrane]

I took a 4 year leave from /. (you're welcome) and came back (there's little you can do about it) after having taken a look at most of the prominent alternatives. There are two outstanding reasons I returned to Slashdot. First /. is a decent tech site that has a bias toward open source. I first came here in the late 90's to learn about Linux. Secondly the fine print still reads the same: All comments are owned by the poster. Slashdot remains a place where I can see the tech world through an Open Source lens, freely post my opinions and retain ownership and responsibility for said comments. And I appreciate /. such as it is.

No Novell?

[Salo2112]

No Novell? They used to own the LAN, and now they feed off MS scraps....

Re:AOL

[zach_the_lizard]

But coasters! We got lots of coasters (or aerodynamically challenged frisbees) out of the deal. Worth something.

I think they may have sent out floppies first, so at least you got a free floppy before.

Some substitutions

[swordgeek]

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..

Re:Some substitutions

[Dutch Gun]

Good call, I was going to mention Atari. They essentially brought the first generation of videogames to the mass market, and then plummeted into obscurity when the videogame market crashed in the 80s. Incidentally, if you ever see a game with "Atari" on the label, know that it has nothing to do with the original company in any way. The name was the only thing they sold.

I'll throw out another one related to gaming, although it certainly wouldn't belong in the top lists anywhere: Sierra On-line. They made a bunch of magnificent games, such as the King's Quest series - some of the earliest PC games I played. The stories from a long-time developer working there were pretty astounding (in a horrible way), so it was no big surprise to me when they finally closed shop.

Re:Some substitutions

[Nemyst]

Speaking of Sierra, how about Lucasarts? They went from the likes of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango to crappy Star Wars tie-ins...

As for EA, I'd argue it would've been a fit contender some years ago, but they've improved their image and products a lot in the last few years. I think that deserves some recognition.

There are a few mores that I feel could've made the list, namely IBM (they're still around and strong in certain areas, but they were KINGS of computing back then) or Xerox (again, they were great innovators and now are just one business in a sector). I'd also argue that ATT made another large mistake: Bell Labs. This place was a centre of innovation and ingenuity, but do you really hear about them often nowadays?

digital

[tengu1sd]

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.

Re:digital

[BitterOak]

Don't forget DEC also had one of the first 64 bit CPUs to be widely used. And their filesystem AdvFS did just about everything ZFS does approximately 12 years earlier!

And the first time I ever used a computer as a kid was playing Dungeon on a VAX. I was using a DECWriter hardcopy terminal and I kept the printouts for a very long time. Looked for them recently when cleaning the house, but alas, they seem to be gone.

I couldn't believe it when they were bought out by Compaq. I just couldn't believe it.

Easy to summarize.

[Xeno man]

I'd say about half of the companies on the list were failures due to lack of vision and avoidance on making changes. If they weren't so busy trying to squeeze every buck out of their old assets and actually invested in new tech, they would still be around as the giants they once were. Now that's not true for all of them Companies like Heathkit and Napster were victims of the times. Not all markets last forever.

Re:Sony?

[Nerdfest]

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.

Adobe

[moosesocks]

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)

Re:Adobe

[cheesybagel]

Nobody's quite sure what prompted the Apple/Adobe divorce

It's fairly simple. First, Apple made expensive hardware, with a crap OS that was like Windows 3.1 (albeit with a better interface), while Microsoft was selling Windows NT for low-cost workstations using the Pentium Pro processor.

Then Apple started selling Final Cut Pro. That was about the time Adobe decided they would not bother to make software that ran on a competitor vendor's hardware. I guess it did not help that Adobe had years of software written in C++, while Steve Jobs wanted everyone to program in Objective-C for Ma OS X, either. Apple later developed Objective-C++, but for quite a while they lost developer mindshare when they switched to MacOS X.

Silicon Graphics

[Rob Riggs]

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).

Re:Silicon Graphics

[Leebert]

Not just Silicon Graphics, but also Cray.

Alas, how the mighty have fallen.

Re:reverse effect?

[jmcbain]

Like any young kid, you are confusing DIVX (Digital Video Express self-destructing video discs) from Circuit City with "DivX :-)" the codec and codec company. They are completely unrelated. In fact, the "DivX ;-)" name has a winky emoticon to signify that it's mocking the DIVX name. I see a lot of you twenty-somethings online these days. Whenever an old-timer like me (and I'm in my 30s) says that DIVX sucked, you folks immediately spout "but but but DivX plays fine on my computer." Impressive.

Personal Anecdote

[BenEnglishAtHome]

I was on the phone with HP Premium Printer Support when the official announcement was made in their office that Carly was leaving.

All hell broke loose. People were screaming, crying, shouting for joy. It sounded like total pandemonium. It sounded like the celebrations of slaves suddenly freed from a cruel master.

It was nearly impossible to finish the call. Having worked under cruel/crazy/incompetent bosses before and known the joy of release when they move on, I couldn't help but be happy for them. HP may have never recovered but for at least a few minutes those poor folks had hope, God bless 'em.

Re:Personal Anecdote

[shadowbearer]

  Indeed! I had a couple support tickets open with HP at that time. In one of them the tech and I were exchanging an email two or three times every hour, trying to troubleshoot a group of networked printers; I saw the announcement in my news feed and mentioned it to the tech in my next email back, his response was along the lines of "Thank god the bitch is leaving, we're all celebrating after work!" I was transferred to another tier up a couple days later because that tech didn't have the expertise to solve the problem we were having, but the relieved and happy attitude was obvious in the calls and emails there, too.

  It seemed to me that after that there was a noticeable improvement in their tech support, especially on the phone. I hadn't been paying much attention to it at the time, but it was obvious afterward just how badly that woman screwed that company up.

  Slashdot's article was quite a fun read as well :)

  I still use HP printers exclusively at home, and recommend them to customers as well. They aren't perfect, but they are certainly among the best. My most reliable printer, a PSC 2350, has performed like a champ since I bought it new, despite having been dismantled and rebuilt a couple times to clean out enormous amounts of cat hair and assorted species of dust bunnies. Like another poster mentioned, I tend to use the raw drivers and my own apps, but I have a lot of customers who are happy with their software as well. (Hint: Don't update unless it's absolutely necessary for a bug fix).

    I've also found that overall their printers tend to be the ones that work the best with linux.

SB

 

SCO

[nattt]

surely SCO is the most tarnished?

Re:SCO

[couchslug]

The difference is that SCO was obviously turned into a weapon with no concern for its viability as anything else.

SCO didn't try to succeed on merit and fail, and is merely the corporate equivalent of an exploded land mine.

DEC at least died an honorable death

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Unlike the companies in the article, the DEC brand is not being pimped by a lousy shell company to licensors that are slapping it on discount pantyhose.

First P2P?

[Mike Rice]

Uh, Read RFC 1.

December 1969.

I'll agree that Napster immensely popularized the use of P2P tech... but it wasn't the first, not by a long shot.

No brand is as tarnished...

[twoallbeefpatties]

...as the GNAA. Those guys used to be everywhere.

2 from the gaming world

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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.)

Gutenberg

[Subm]

Well before HP printers, Gutenberg utterly dominated the printing market. For a time, virtually every printed book on the market was printed by Gutenberg.

Perhaps due to no effort whatsoever made to maintain the brand, it is associated almost exclusively with one book least popular among techies.

Now the name is associated with blatantly pirated versions of books. If its current incarnation ever eeks out a profit it will certainly be sued by the entire publishing industry.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[innocent_white_lamb]

Packard Bell is the only computer that I can honestly say I once used a hammer and cold chisel to fix.
 
A client wanted to install a CD drive in his PB and while the plastic case had an extra drive slot, the metal frame had a spot-welded plate covering the bay, for reasons unknown to me. The drive worked fine once it was installed, but I remember hoping the computer's owner didn't come in while I was beating that plate off. His reaction would probably not have been positive.

Re:reverse effect?

[jmcbain]

NO. I am mean that DIVX and DivX ;-) are completely unrelated. The latter is a separate company (based on a codec) and is actually making intentional mockery of the former. Go read the wikipedia articles that I included. Your example of Westinghouse is fallacious; at the very least, the name Westinghouse today is ostensibly related to the Westinghouse of old with the entire name kept intact and in good faith. To extend the DIVX and DivX ;-) situation to Westinghouse, it would be like the difference between an older brand Westinghouse and a new brand "W3st1nghaus L:0L". See what I did there? I put in some lolcode for you kids to understand.

Re:Apple!

[BitwizeGHC]

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.

Radio Shack

[HalAtWork]

Radio Shack went from a great resource for hobbyists to get their start, to a glorified alarm clock store.

Amiga status

[Orion Blastar]

In Europe they went crazy for the Amiga. Most Amiga users are upset at Microsoft and Apple for screwing them in the past and some dual-boot AmigaOS and Yellow Dog Linux or some other PowerPC version of Linux.

If Slashdot had bothered to cover the Amiga we'd know what went wrong and what they are currently doing.

AmigaOS 4.0 was written by Hyperion or some other company and there was licensing deals. AmigaOS 5.0 was supposed to outclass and outperform Windows Vista and Mac OSX. But due to lawsuits it never got released.

The best open source project to come out of the Amiga technology is Amiga Research OS which will work on Intel X86 systems and virtual machines and has a version that runs native inside of Linux. But it lacks proper third party hardware drivers for modern systems so I'd run it in VirtualBox or some other virtual machine like HaikuOS does. AROS is AmigaOS 3.1 based on the APIs and started out as a WINE product and became a full OS.

Amiga, Inc. sells some of the classic Amiga games for Windows and mobile devices under the Amiga Anywhere titles. Some day like the C64 they will port them to the WII, PS3, and XBox 360, etc.

In an attempt to open source and modernize the Amiga and AmigaOS technology they are taking a page from Apple and making an AmigaOS merge with Linux to create Anubis OS but it is not Amiga, Inc that is doing it but another group. While Mac OS X was based on NextStep (A MACH kernel *BSD Unix based OS) and the Classic MacOS series the Anubis OS claims to be Linux based with the Amiga GUI and ability to run Amiga software.

I hereby challenge Slashdot editors and readers to report on the Amiga projects as they mature and make progress. See if 2010 can be the year of the Amiga coverage at Slashdot and create an Amiga category if one doesn't already exist.

Re:Heathkit

[kokyuho]

I wondered if any other /.ers knew about Heathkit. My grandfather worked for Heathkit in the 20's and at one point, was offered a substantial share of the company which he turned down as it was just stock, not money. He knew Edward Heath and he helped build airplanes such as the "Baby Bullet"(http://www.airracinghistory.freeola.com/aircraft/Heath%20Baby%20Bullet.htm), perhaps Heath's most famous plane. His best friend was guy named Roger Lorenzen,(http://ww_heco.home.mindspring.com/wwheco2/hsp_sup2.html) who was perhaps one of the finest wooden propeller makers in the US. They both lived in Niles, Michigan, near Benton Harbor where Heathkit proper began. I have photos of him assembling Heath airplanes at their factory in Chicago.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[tenton]

Packaged Hell, as we used to call them. You too can own your own little hell; how they could cram so much pain into such a small package defied belief.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[petermgreen]

the metal frame had a spot-welded plate covering the bay, for reasons unknown to me.
The plates are there to keep RF noise from leaving the PC case and causing the machine to fail CE/FCC testing. Making them snap-out is much cheaper than clips or screws and there is little need to ever put them back (people rarely reduce the number of drives in a machine and if they do they generally don't want to put the machine through FCC/CE testing afterwards)

Usually they don't require a chisel to remove though, maybe thier welder was set up wrong.

Re:Packard Bell for the WIN!

[Somegeek]

You must be in Europe? Packard Bell stopped selling computers in the US around 2000 due to their horrible quality reputation in North America.

WANG computers

[hotdiggity]

WANG was a brand that stood out proudly in the face of stiff competition.

Unfortunately, after a long period of thrusting its way into new markets, it sadly shrivelled into a limp entity that was incapable of further market penetration.

Re:HP -- it sucked before Fiorina

[asackett]

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.

Re:Similarities

[Deadstick]

You don't even have to be formerly great. There is a company paying money to call itself CompUSA, fer chrissake.

rj

What is the common theme behind decline?

[beachdog]

I have been reading the posts trying to figure out why so many of these iconic technical-industrial organizations have slid.

Most of the posts associate the decline of organizations with a change of management. The management stories tell similar tales: where there is a replacement of management, the decline is expressed as selling off low performing assets and re-organizing to reduce costs.

Most of this discussion doesn't dwell on the massive de-industrialization of the USA. Around 1980, factories in the Far East were making electronic assemblies for less than the price of the American parts and American labor in a Heathkit kit.

But with the shift to tech manufacturing in the far East, did American corporations lose control of the products they made?

Here is a question; Have Apple and Hewlett-Packard done something different with their manufacturing organization? Do Apple and H-P own offshore factories in a way that enables them to prevent their proprietary products from being copied by others? Do these two companies retain a manufacturing control that prevents them from becoming a rented out brand like Bell & Howell?

I know from anecdote that the 80's era computer maker Morrow had great difficulty with it's computer mother board. The board was engineered in Silicon Valley and the Japanese board maker either sent no boards or way way too many. The result was first Morrow had trouble meeting demand, then it had too many boards as the market changed. Morrow went out of business around 1983 leaving behind a warehouse of unsold components that became one of Oakland's best computer surplus stores for several years afterward.

Robert Samuelson's The Great Inflation and It's Aftermath sort of tells the story of the decline of American manufacturing. The USA and Canada exited World War II with their manufacturing plants intact. By the end of the Regan Presidency, the de-industrialization of America was a sideshow mixed in with high interest rates and the second energy crisis.

Seriously, someone bury AltaVista somewhere

[BlortHorc]

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.

Oh dude....

[DG]

I personally owned 4 different Amigas - including installing Linux on an A3000. For a little while, I sold them. I belonged to CATS. I posted on comp.sys.amiga before the Big Split to all the subgroups. I jousted with -MB- and laughed my ass off at BLAZEMONGER! I even maintained the Amiga Netrek port for a year or so (not that I accomplished much with it)

I own an original copy of the Deathbed Vigil.

The Amiga is DEAD. Yes, there are still Amigas functioning and a tiny core of hobbyists who still get joy out of tinkering with them - and good on ya. But as a relevant component of modern computing... not a chance.

Seriously. Move on. Enjoy your retro-computing hobby, but it is really time to understand that the Amiga era is over.

DG

       

Re:Radio Shack: warning, whining ahead

[St.Creed]

You see failure. I see a business opportunity. Get together with that manager and drive Radio Shack out of town.