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."

Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Who trusts these bozos anymore?

HP didn't make the list?

[Ihlosi]

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

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.

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.

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.

Radio Shack

[mdsolar]

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

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.

Where would 3d gaming be without...

[rjejr]

3dfx?

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...

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: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: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: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.

No Novell?

[Salo2112]

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

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..

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: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: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: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: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:To be Fair...

[selven]

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

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.

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.

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 [tumblr.com])

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).

SCO

[nattt]

surely SCO is the most tarnished?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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?

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.)

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 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: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.

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 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: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.

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: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?

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

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.

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.