From the But Don't Mince Words, Tell Us How You Really Feel
Department --
A nice coda to my
post on the meaninglessness of modern brands came this morning over
email from William Dunk Partners and their Global Province e-mail
newsletter, in which they wrote:
Once upon a time, when our hearts were young and gay, American Telephone
and Telegraph Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Corporation, and International
Business Machines Corporation were great companies that greatly contributed
to the commonweal. Not one of them is ten feet tall today, and the fact
that their names have been shortened into meaninglessness (e.g., AT&T, H-P,
and IBM) aptly symbolizes their decline into short-sighted, hapless
midgets. AT&T once provided affordable universal phone service that
actually worked to all America and was home to the lab that invented
Americaıs technological future. Now the phones work worse and cost more.
AT&T is about to be chewed up for breakfast by one of its undistinguished
offspring (i.e., SBC apparently will snare it for $16 billion). IBM has
forsaken its machine roots, having most recently peddled its personal
computer unit to the Chinese and often lost ground in its mainframe and
server business, in order to become a gigantic Arthur Andersen type
consulting house, an outsourcer, and a semi-software colossus. It no longer
sets the direction of computing in the world. H-P, once the emblem of all
thatıs good in engineering and research, now is a digital supermarket
without a strategy that is probably headed towards breakup. We must ask why
Americaıs biggest and best have fallen into moral disrepair and economic
disarray, no longer legacies to enrich our lives. Itıs a great sadness.
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