Best Brands, Innovative Products

conq writes "BusinessWeek just came out with its best global brands list. The list is quite similar to last year's with Coke topping it. The brand with the highest growth year over year: Google. The comment: 'Its recent inclusion as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary confirms what competitors feared: Google means search to an army of Web users.'" I thought this tied in nicely to tappytibbins' story. They write "eWEEK.com has posted a feature with their picks of the 25 most innovative PC products of the last 25 years. Their #1 pick is a bit uninspired: The IBM PC. Down at #8 is the Mac. And is Apache really more of an innovation than Linux?" From that article: "15 - Palm Pilot: With an almost Zen-like minimalism of both software and hardware complexity, the Palm Pilot was no more than users needed?and exactly what many wanted."

Watch out Coca-Cola!

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

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MS Cola went up my nose when I was laughing, and it hurts
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How can I beta test Crystal Microsoft Cola?

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When will CMC be available
Crystal Microsoft Cola is scheduled to be part of the Vista launch event.

Re:Watch out Coca-Cola!

heh, MS hasn't dealt with any industry as hardball as the cola industry.
They would be destroyed. Heh.

Re:Watch out Coca-Cola!

Microsoft is always playing catch up to Google:

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

But. . .

where is Microsoft on that list?

Google's Brand

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

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

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

Re:Google's Brand

Ah, but Google isn't a generic word for "web-search". It's a word for "web-search using Google". That's quite a distinction. People don't Google things on Yahoo.

Sheesh!

Their #1 pick is a bit uninspired: The IBM PC.

Yeah, clearly nothing ever came of that.

pffft ... crappy list

Any such list that excludes the Creative Labs 3DO blaster can not be taken seriously

what a strange list.

The "linksys 802.11" router is more important than windows 95... among other things.

Do we not know this?

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

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

List of innovations, or a popularity contest?

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?

Linksys by Cisco

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

"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?

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

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.

What about Head On?

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...

...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

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.

Apache Linux? Yes.

Yes, Apache is more innovative than Linux: Linux is just a bog-standard UNIX-imitatory OS kernel (although admittedly an open-source one with the best features), while httpd is an innovatively modular and also innovatively free web server which has been probably the second most-used open-source product. And one mustn't forget non-httpd Apache projects, such as Forrest (a CMS) which is quite cool, certainly innovative in ways.

Sony

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...

Where the heck is AT&T

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?

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?!?

Linux over Apache

And is Apache really more of an innovation than Linux?

You must be kidding, right? With Apache market share being 63% [netcraft.com] and Linux being what? Like 3%? Even if we're talking just about servers, it's got less then 30%. [kryogenix.org] With Apache leading the web server innovation and Linux just trying to replicate more advanced OSes in OSS context (if we're talking about desktops)... ...sure, mod me down. Still, that doesn't prove me wrong.

The IBM PC was unimpressive in 1981

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?

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.

TFA Says Influential, Not Innovative

I might be missing something, but the submitter seems to be the one who inserted the idea that this was a list of the top 25 most INNOVATIVE products. The actual list seems to be based on how influential they are. Based on that, it makes more sense (although I think that I might argue that even on a list of influence, the Macintosh probably should be a fair bit higher than it is, and you might even argue then that Smalltalk and the Xerox Alto should be on there if you want to get into what products were the most influential on where computing is today).