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."

Re:Google's Brand

[ackthpt]

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

List of innovations, or a popularity contest?

[Stormwatch]

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?

What a useless top 25 list...

[Stick_Fig]

...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.

Re:Linksys by Cisco

[kidgenius]

Umm....they do say Cisco and have said it for over a year on Linksys wireless access points at least.