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Best Brands, Innovative Products

Posted by Zonk on Fri Jul 28, 2006 06:31 PM
from the know-what-to-buy dept.
Businesses Software Hardware
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."
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  • Watch out Coca-Cola! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Friday July 28 2006, @06:32PM (#15802942) Homepage Journal

    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.

    New from Microsoft: Microsoft Cola Soft Drinks! Available in the following popular flavours (as determined by Microsoft's own R&D department.)

    • Vista Beta Cola (container sizes are all the same, but content may vary)
    • IE 7.0 Cola
    • Sushi Soda
    • Zune Soda (Every bit as good as Apple Soda!)
    • Latte Cola
    • XCola 360
    • Diet Wasabi Cola
    • Beer Soda
    • Lite Beer Soda
    • Steve's Chairy Cola (With a flavour so great it'll f___ing kill you!)
    • Cool Ranch Cola
    • Redmond Springs Mineral Water (Low Fat - Caffeine Free)

    Please check www.microsoftcola.com/support periodically for updates and patches to our famous beverages

    • MS Cola FAQ (Score:5, Funny)

      by servognome (738846) on Friday July 28 2006, @07:06PM (#15803078)
      Why doesn't my cola can open?
      MS cans are complex devices. While they are engineered to world class specifications and thoroughly tested, it cannot be guaranteed that it will function in all conditions. Please take the following steps before contacting customer service:
      Ensure you have the can oriented correctly
      Ensure you are lifing the tab - This is located at the top of the can
      Ensure sufficient force is being applied to lift the tab - Check finger for any breaks, muscle tears, or other abnormalities which may cause insufficient force to be applied

      Why must I agree to a EULA before opening my drink?
      EULAs are standard throughout the beverage industry. They are designed to clearly communicate your rights, as well as the rights and limitations of Microsoft, its partners, and subsidiaries.

      My drink is coming out of holes in the can other than the one for drinking
      This is a known issue. Please apply the latest security patches to address this issue

      MS Cola went up my nose when I was laughing, and it hurts
      Microsoft is not responsible and does not support such use of soda as outlined in the EULA. For information on development of undocumented soda use please navigate to the developer forum: microsoft.com/MCola/developer/forum.htm

      I purchased a 12 pack, can my kids drink some of the soda?
      Sharing is prohibited for the standard home edition of MS Cola. Multi-user packs are available for purchase as a seperate product.

      How can I beta test Crystal Microsoft Cola?

      Beta testing has not begun. You may subscribe to the CMC Newsletter for the latest information on this development product.

      When will CMC be available
      Crystal Microsoft Cola is scheduled to be part of the Vista launch event.
    • heh, MS hasn't dealt with any industry as hardball as the cola industry.
      They would be destroyed. Heh.
    • Great, except that Beer soda was already invented by Tim Buckley at Ctrl alt del productions (I'd post a link but I can't find the specific comic strip right now). Also, Beer Soda sounds like a really good idea.

    • Re:Watch out Coca-Cola! (Score:4, Funny)

      by gamer4Life (803857) on Friday July 28 2006, @10:47PM (#15803848)
      Microsoft is always playing catch up to Google:

      http://www.google.com/googlegulp/ [google.com]

  • But. . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by Slithe (894946) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:32PM (#15802943) Homepage Journal
    where is Microsoft on that list?

  • Google's Brand (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LaNMaN2000 (173615) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:37PM (#15802960) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Google's Brand (Score:5, Insightful)

      by loteck (533317) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:44PM (#15802991) Homepage
      Nobody I know ever says that they "Yahooed it".

      I think it's a pretty strong indication of brand value when the name of your company becomes a commonly used verb in the english language. [wikipedia.org]

      • Re:Google's Brand (Score:5, Informative)

        by ackthpt (218170) * on Friday July 28 2006, @06:50PM (#15803017) Homepage Journal

        Nobody I know ever says that they "Yahooed it".
        I think it's a pretty strong indication of brand value when the name of your company becomes a commonly used verb in the english language.[link to wikipedia/googling]

        Google (as a verb) is accepted in the Oxford On-line Dictionary [weblogsinc.com], too.

        Not sure Yahooligans caught on. I'm certain it was even frowned upon in some countries where Hooligan has a stronger negative connotation than it carries in the USA

        • I think it's a pretty strong indication of brand value when the name of your company becomes a commonly used verb in the english language.

          Actually common use decreases brand value. Once people stop associating the word with the product, the value is lost. For example, when somebody mentions aspirin, do you immediately think of is as the aspirin brand, or the generic term for acetylsalicylic acid?
          • Agreed. Another good example of brand devaluation through overuse is Kleenex. Now, whenever someone wants a facial tissue, they say, "Could you give me a Kleenex?" You don't hear people saying, "Hey, give me a facial tissue." The same thing has also happened to a lesser extent with Xerox.
          • 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
      • yes, we know you love google and own a bunch of stock, but relax and read the comment first. nobody said google wasn't a household name when it comes to serch.
      • Having "Google" be the generic word for web-search is great for Google over the short term, but not necessarily good over the long term. In fact, over the long term, such a thing can actually devalue the company brand.

        Examples:
        "Xerox" is the common verb people use for "photocopy", but people don't think of the Xerox company when using that word, they're just referring to photocopying in general. And Xerox is no longer the top photocopy company even though people use "xerox" as the verb for "photocopy".

        "Kl
      • "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.
    • Yahoo obtained most of their other known departments through acquisition and mergers.
      (Their recruiting was with hotjob).

      Some of their services developped as extensions of their portal. They did it well enough though and still maintain an interesting mix of services, such as the ones you described (finance, personnals...). This is the whole POINT of being a portal, a one stop for all your information.

      I do check news on yahoo, while i search on google. However, the news market online is much smaller than the

  • Sheesh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2006, @06:41PM (#15802979)
    Their #1 pick is a bit uninspired: The IBM PC.

    Yeah, clearly nothing ever came of that.

    • I recall rumors to the effect that a lot of 3rd party hardware manufacturers saw the open bus design as a great opportunity to build more compatible hardware. 'Tis a pity that they never did. It coulda been a contender. Couldn't match a Mac of course, but coulda been a contender.
      • 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...

  • pffft ... crappy list (Score:3, Funny)

    by Average_Joe_Sixpack (534373) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:55PM (#15803032)
    Any such list that excludes the Creative Labs 3DO blaster can not be taken seriously
  • What is their metric? How are they measuring this? Best is a subjective term, you know.

    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 /., where everybody has their own opinion on best stuff?

  • car brands (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vivek7006 (585218) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:55PM (#15803037) Homepage
    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?
  • 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 vs. Linux (Score:5, Funny)

    by tverbeek (457094) on Friday July 28 2006, @07:17PM (#15803112) Homepage
    "And is Apache really more of an innovation than Linux?"

    • 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.
  • 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.

  • How we forget (Score:4, Insightful)

    by caseih (160668) on Friday July 28 2006, @07:32PM (#15803173)
    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.
    • 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 use a Mac. The more things change, the more people still buy the same ol' "locked-in" stuff. And yet, it works so well that I don't feel like I paid too much. A lot, but not too much. Vendor lock-in isn't as bad as most paranoid /.-ers would have you believe.
  • 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!

  • What a useless top 25 list... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Stick_Fig (740331) on Friday July 28 2006, @07:41PM (#15803211) Homepage
    ...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.

  • NASCAR (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • Sony (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • Is eWeek on crack? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Locke2005 (849178) on Friday July 28 2006, @08:34PM (#15803396)
    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?!?

  • The IBM PC was unimpressive in 1981 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Junks Jerzey (54586) on Friday July 28 2006, @10:08PM (#15803713)
    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.

  • And where is the mighty palmpilot now? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xtal (49134) on Saturday July 29 2006, @12:31AM (#15804229) Homepage
    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.

    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 .. 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.

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