

The Twelve Most Tarnished Brands in Tech - technologizer
http://technologizer.com/2009/12/30/tarnished-brands/

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cubicle67
It's actually a better article than I was expecting

May I also add Borland, who at one time built some of the best programmer
software ever. Turbo Pascal was brilliant, and Delphi was so far ahead of
anything else in it's day I could cry. [cuts long rant short...] There should
be a special spot reserved in Hell for Borland management, right next to the
management of Commodore.

Finally, lets not forget that once great electronics company Hewlett Packard,
makers of the finest (and most expensive) electronics test gear bar none. A
true engineering company with world class products that has now become yet-
another-printer-manufacturer and maker of crappy budget PCs

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wglb
They actually didn't build much of their stuff, for example, Turbo Pascal was
built by a contractor, and they tried to build Turbo C for quite a while
before they bought that as well.

What they did have was glow-in-the-dark PR and Marketing.

Didn't HP spin off the electronics test gear?

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jbl
Yep. The test gear subsidiary (spin off?) is called Agilent. It's probably the
last remaining vestige of the HP of yore.

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WalterGR
AltaVista was great (or at least sufficient) until they disabled searching for
phrases, which made them useless. It was at that point I switched to Google.

Though AltaVista lost in a big way to Google, is it fair to say they are one
of the 12 most _tarnished_ brands?

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michael_dorfman
I agree; many of the brands listed are not "tarnished" so much as
"diminished".

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johnohara
Back in the day, I was working on my master's using Oregon Pascal on a Vax
11/780 (cost: ~$20,000). I purchased Turbo Pascal for $49.00 out of curiosity
-- not expecting much.

The whole thing came in a standard white box. The disks (I think 2 5 1/4"
floppies) were sandwiched inside the manual which was as thick as the shipping
box. A couple of promotional pieces and my receipt. That was it.

Happiness -- because it worked just as well. I remember thinking "How can this
be?"

Little did I know that it was time to get off the beach and seek higher
ground.

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NikkiA
I'm surprised by the lack of mention of X10 in there. Their 'pioneering' use
of popups must still cause their name to instil bad thoughts in anyone that
grew through the web's early years :)

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jacquesm
I've been in a position several times now where I could have used one of their
products with little to no alternatives even close in price and every time I
thought 'over my dead body'.

Never ever in a 1000 years will I buy something from X10. They're not quite in
line with SCO in my book but they're up there.

(nothing really gets close to SCO, I'm surprised they're not the #1 slot in
this list).

Microsoft and Radio Shack definitely deserve to be on the list too.

