18 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 49.7 ms ] thread
I don't disagree with the general argument here, but the headline may be overstating things a bit-- I tend to think that some of these brands may be able to limp forward for a few more years before ultimately collapsing. There's an art to circling the drain...
Must have been more than one writer involved—items 7–10 are in serious need of punctuation and general editing. (‘Kodak won’t cease to exit.’; ‘Its fate as a standalone company is however looking more and more like an inevitable fate.’)
‘Its fate as a standalone company is however looking more and more like an inevitable fate.’

It sounds like a 1980s videogame localization team wrote this bit of copy...

I hate when articles like this are split across multiple pages. Sure they want to increase the number of their page views for ad revenue, but I'd love to know the bounce rate on these multi-page lists. I did not bother to go further.
I have a brokerage account at etrade. Is my money in danger?
Why do they bother saying "Brands" when everyone knows that never happens?

Motorola, Kodak, Newsweek... whether they get bought out entirely or sold piece by piece, those brandnames are not going anywhere. They may get new management or aggressively downsize but there will always be Kodak products to buy, Newsweek will always be on the stands, and same for Motorola.

So why say the "Brands won't exist"? I don't get it.

Why do you say that "never" happens? Brandnames definitely do go away when they become liabilities and not assets.
Which won't happen to the brands he listed.

The only brands that have actually become net liabilities are a small handful of corrupt ones - Enron, WorldCom, stuff like that.

But Newsweek "disappearing in 2010"? Impossible.

Is there some point to that photo of Buffet eating a popcicle?
It's so frustrating to have to click 10 times to see the list. I thought "Hey, there's a printer-friendly version - I'll click that button!". Of course, it only prints the page you're currently on.

Thanks for the amazing user experience, Business Insider.

And the strange thing is, they only put 4 adds per page, so it's not like they are breaking up the article to increase ad space. They do pimp their own content alot though.
Can we just say that advanced smartphone manufacturers who attempt to compete with the iPhone will suffer massively for it?
No. In fact HTC came out of nowhere post-iPhone.
What? HTC was the largest manufacturer of Windows Mobile phones as early as 2006, when it was #3 in BusinessWeek's IT 100 (and #11 in 2005): http://www.businessweek.com/it100/2006/3.htm

The company's sales and market cap grew explosively in the years just before the iPhone launch in 2007. Since the iPhone launch, its stock is down 40%: http://www.google.com/finance?q=TPE:2498

Hrm, I stand corrected. There's a case of my own experience creating a bias. I don't ever remember seeing HTC products before the iPhone, and now I see them everywhere.

Shouldn't assume I suppose.

In an odd twist of irony, all ten companies post gains in 2010 while the domain businessinsider.com is sold for $200 to a porn company looking to bank on office affairs.