First off, I’d like to welcome WAL*MART—er, Walmart—to 2005! It seems the neighborhood-munching behemoth’s nearly two decade old logo wasn’t friendly enough to represent the company in this brave new world. Second, I wonder how long it took to develop this logo. Ten minutes? Fifteen? It probably took a year of focus groups consisting of old people who think lowercase proper nouns are cutting edge.
Business Week had the details on this change last month, and Brand New had a more snarky take—e.g. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
At least Walmart kept the capital; the same can’t be said for AT&T’s 2005 logo change. Hey, Walmart is working on being more environmentally conscious. All they have to do now is stop mistreating their employees, and destroying small-town America, and they just might back up their friendly new logo. In the exact same way that AT&T stopped being evil the moment they changed their logo. Oh, wait, never mind.
So, at this year’s WWDC, the Apple folks announced that .Mac is being replaced with a new service called Mobile Me. They’re still charging $99 a year for 20 GB storage, push e-mail, and and over-the-air syncing between iPhone and Mac or (gasp) Windows PCs…you know, mostly the stuff that Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones do for free.
Anyway, some people seem to love calling Windows Vista the next Windows Me (read: an in-between-versions OS that was mostly forgotten), and Apple likes accusing Windows Vista of copying OS X. So, why on Earth did Apple choose a logo that sickeningly resembles the Windows Me logo?
Oh, also, I found it pretty interesting to see an OS X computer and a Vista computer happily side by side in Apple’s photos for the Mobile Me service.
Years ago, networks began placing their network IDs as digital on-screen graphics, nicknamed “bugs”, small watermark logos that often appear in the lower right-hand corner of the television broadcast. These began as innocuous, only mildly obtrusive logo watermarks which popped up infrequently during broadcasts to remind viewers which network they were viewing. In an era before time-shifted set-top boxes and on-demand digital cable broadcasts, these little logos did provide some measure of benefit to viewers, allowing channel-surfers to know precisely what network they were watching in an instant. This was how these “bugs” became a Trojan horse for advertising.