Packard Bell

» see packardbell.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Packard Bell's entire business ran through american big box retail, and that channel did not exist in turkey in any comparable form. The 90s home pc where i was got assembled at a shop, part by part, by someone who wrote the spec on a piece of paper while you watched. A brand name on the case was the exception rather than the rule. So this is a grave for a company i knew as a logo in magazines and never sat in front of.

The name was old before the company was. Packard Bell Corporation built radios in california from 1933 and televisions after the war, then got absorbed into Teledyne and stopped being used for anything. In 1986 a group of israeli-american investors led by Beny Alagem bought the trademark for just under a hundred thousand dollars. Surveys at the time put recognition of the name at around seventy percent of american adults, which is an enormous amount of goodwill to acquire for the price of a car.

What the new Packard Bell sold was not a specification. It was a box you could carry out of Sears and use the same evening. The machines shipped loaded with software, and in the mid 90s with Packard Bell Navigator, a shell that sat on top of windows and drew a house you clicked your way around instead of learning where files lived. Dell and Gateway were selling to people who knew what they were ordering. Packard Bell was selling to everybody else.

The numbers went up very fast. Six hundred million dollars of sales in 1989, three billion in 1994 on roughly two point one million units a year. In 1995 it was the top selling pc brand in the united states with thirteen percent of all sales. In retail nobody else was close.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

The thing that made the volume possible also made it unprofitable. A first time buyer who does not know what a driver is will call support, and if the machine disappoints will carry it back to the store. In 1991 alone the company booked a hundred and forty three million dollars of returns against eight hundred and nineteen million of gross sales. That is not a rounding error. That is the business model leaking.

Then the quality stories arrived. Compaq sued in 1995 over used parts going into machines sold as new without disclosure. In september 1996 Packard Bell settled nine class actions across three states and paid five million dollars to twenty two state attorneys general. By that point the name recognition that had been the whole asset was working in the other direction.

~ what really happened ~

NEC announced it was buying in june 1996 and the merger closed the following month as Packard Bell NEC. Groupe Bull was already a shareholder. For a moment the combined company held fifteen percent of us unit share, which was the high water mark and also the last good news. Losses ran past a billion dollars across 1997 and 1998, with 1998 alone at six hundred and fifty million.

On 3 november 1999 NEC announced the end. The Sacramento assembly plant would close by the end of the year, taking about fourteen hundred jobs with it. The call center in Magna, Utah went too, another six hundred. Of roughly two thousand six hundred employees, eighty percent were cut, and twelve of the thirteen senior management positions were eliminated. The american operation was renamed NEC Computers Inc and the Packard Bell name came off the shelves it had owned four years earlier.

~ the long tail ~

Europe kept it. The dutch operation had a decent reputation and went on selling under the name across europe and the middle east, EasyNote laptops mostly, for another decade. Acer made a binding offer in october 2007 and closed the deal in early 2008. By 2013 Acer had phased the name out of its own lineup.

The trademark then did what trademarks do. In 2018 Southern Telecom licensed it for cheap north american laptops, and in 2019 another licensee took it for southern africa. The name has now outlived its company twice, which is more or less what Beny Alagem was betting on in 1986 when he paid for a word nobody was using.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »