They’ve gone nearly belly up now I think, but for awhile Lucent and their red circle was everywhere. At the time I had no idea what they did.
A friend who worked there told me “We make dial tones.”
I see …
Sodexho ran the caf at the place I used to work.
Accenture is responsible in some way for the slow-motion fuckup that is the deployment of the new provincial payment card for local buses and trains in Ontario. Prime contractor, management, design, testing, installation, I’m not sure. All I know is that it’s taken six years and a quarter of a billion dollars, and it’s only in the middle of the rollout.
The system is confusing and inconsistent to use. Things like: if you load your card at a station, it’s credited immediately. If you load it online, it takes 24h before the funds are available. Unless you have a preset automatic load, in which case the funds are available immediately. But you may have to tap the card on a reader to activate the funds. But if it’s a bus reader, the system isn’t updated till the bus gets back to the garage and can do a batch download. Bwuh? so, is my money there or not? i just want to ride the bus! Then, there’s the issue that Ottawa card system is not compatible with any of the other systems in Southern Ontario.
Yes, these things may have to do with the way the underlying system is configured, but the user shouldn’t be able to tell the difference. That’s what we, the people of Ontario, are paying you to design.
They’re also big in HVAC and building safety and security. Fire alarm systems, for example.
This is the textbook example. Bell Labs…had the little bell in their logo, and everybody heard of them. They invented the transistor and the laser.
So they rebrand themselves “Lucent Technologies”, change their logo to a coffee ring strain, and disappear.
I work for a very famous credit card company – you’d probably recognize their blue and gold logo – but virtually no one understands exactly what it is we do.
Sutherland Global Services is a global provider of business process and technology management services offering an integrated portfolio of analytics-driven back-office and customer facing solutions that support the entire customer lifecycle.
“I work in a call center for nine bucks an hour.”
Obviously there are high paying jobs in management, client sales, IT, telecom, etc. but Sutherland is an outsourcing company. They operate call centers.
I’ve never figured out what line of business the company in the TV show “The Office” are in. Do they make widgets? I just don’t know, but my guess is some kind of consulting.
At least since I was a kid, Tenneco has always done a lot of advertising during pro and college football games… but their TV commercials never give you the slightest idea what business they’re in.
For the record, their primary business is automobile parts. I had to look that up! I have no idea what the point of their commercials is, though. Ordinary viewers have no direct use for their products, while the auto makers who buy their products surely know already who they are!
Assuming you’re referring to the US version, the fictional Dunder-Mifflin is a paper company. A real paper or office supply company is selling paper branded as Dunder-Mifflin as a novelty item, with the humorous or mock slogan “Limitless paper for a paperless world.”
BTW, I’ve never seen more than five minutes of this show. :eek: 
Any holding company. I guess I don’t know what “holdings” are. Sounds fishy to me.
Provident Companies, Provident Financial Group, Providian Financial, these aren’t all current companies but damned if I could figure out what their deal was. I’m sure they took people’s money and did something with it. A lot of the insurance and mutual fund companies have really complicated organization and huge financial reports. To me complexity is a bad thing and can hide problems.
Unisys. I think they used to make mainframes. Now I know they have something to do with computers, but whether it’s hardware, software, or both I don’t know.
AbitibiBowater. Candidate for the funniest company name, I don’t know what in the world they do.
West. Yes that is a company name. Very descriptive right?
Around here, Aldis are always located in poor neighborhoods. Once, the wife and I stopped at one not far from us. The carts are all chained together outside the store. There are special padlocks that require you to insert a quarter to unlock your cart, and you get your quarter back when you lock the cart up again. Inside, there is little variety and no brand names that you would recognize. You are expected to bag your own groceries.
To be brutally honest, Aldi’s target demographic is one step above ghetto. The only thing missing was bullet-proof glass for the cashiers.
Unisys is the succcessor company to a long series of major names in the computer industry: Burroughs, Sperry, Convergent, etc. They are perhaps best known as the makers of the UNIVAC computer.
AbitibiBowater changed its name in 2011 to Resolute Forest Producuts, which gives you a better idea of what they do: pulp and paper.
I once changed all of the locks in the Alexandria, Virginia offices of Raytheon. I was there doing it for over 30 hours that week and when I was done I still had no idea what they did there.
Goddamn it. I knew I was getting screwed on that one.
Nope! They have some great items at low prices. This week I bought 8 oz of salt and pepper cashews, on sale for $1.79. Yum! The pumpkin pie ice cream is back, too. Love that stuff.
The first company I worked for became a holding company. It had a core consulting business, from which some of the projects got spun off into separate companies, which the original company fully owned, but were operated separately. The original consulting business went south and the original company went out of business, but instead of disappearing completely, still exists for the purpose of owning those subsidiaries.
So that’s what a holding company is, and at least one way that a company gets to become one without intending to be one at the outset.
Raytheon is a major defense contractor. They make the cruise missile, for example. They are heavily involved in other aspects of the defense aerospace business. They also have some non-defense business, for example they are a supplier of air traffic control systems.
BASF is an acronym, but even if you know what it stands for, it isn’t connected what they do today: It meas Badische Aniline- und Soda-Fabrik: the Baden (state) Aniline and Soda factory. Originally they made dyes, later all kinds of chemicals and then … other stuff.
Aldi has a lot of conventions that are common in German stores, but apparently exclusive to them in other countries: there are no greeters, no baggers, no dedicated service people beyond cashiers and refillers. Decoration is sparse, you have to bring your own bags or pay for bags, you pay a small deposit for your cart and have to bring it back to the rack personally (or leave it near you car and forfeit the deposit.)
OTOH, they can survive even with low prices because they offer just one or two brands per type of item. The “house” brands are often and rather obviously made by well known companies and just packaged in a neutral way. So they need less shelf space than bigger supermarkets. The quality is not as good as in specialized artisanal shops, but not worse than in other chain stores ans supermarkets. The weekly special offers can be very good.
In Germany, there are four or five different discount store chains that work this way.
Does Westinghouse do anything anymore? I see their “W” logo on all kinds of cheap crap from China these days. I know they started making air brake systems for trains-do they still do that?
Vulcan Materials is a huge corporation (they supply paving materials for roads and highways)-I’ve never seen them here.
“3M” makes Scotch Tape-what else?
Does Kaiser Motors and Studebaker-Packard still exist in some incarnation?
I know this post is over a year old, but in case anyone is interested, Lexis Nexis make legal reference books. The books are printed on loose pages and kept in ring binders. Every few months, the company sends you a bundle of new pages, and a list of instructions (remove page x, replace page y, add new page z).
I once had to do about 5 years’ updates all at one. Tedious as hell. None of the lawyers even used the books, because they could just look up the laws online.
Anyway. My mystery company is Enron. Despite all the news stories about the company a few years ago, none of them mentioned what they actually did.