I notice that some spinoff companies of large and famous companies have in some cases continued to exist long after that famous parent company has disappeared.
The one that stands out particularly is Todd-AO Sound The Todd-AO organization was founded in 1953 by Mike Todd in collaboration with the American Optical organization to develop, market, sand promote an original ultra-wide screen film process, called “Todd-AO”. It was characterized as “Cinerama out of one hole”, and used a revolutionary anamorphic lens to capture an incredibly wide film image (when projected on a special curved screen it filled out your field of view to the edges of your peripheral vision). They made several movies that had to be shown in special theaters, like the Rivoli in Nedw York City – Oklahoma, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. If you see these movies on your TV from as streaming service or DVD, know that what you’re seeing is only a pale imitation of the real thing. I’ve seen Around the World in the Rivoli theater, and it’s very impressive, especially in scenes like Passepartout’s high-wheeled bicycle trip around London. The only thing like it today is an Omnimax film (which uses an even more complex anamorphic lens system), or the Circlevision movies they used to show at the Disney parks.
Mike Todd died in a plane crash in 1958, and the film company petered out in the 1970s. But they also had a sound division, which is still going strong. I occasionally still see a credit at the end of a movie for “Todd-AO Sound”. They have a website (which boasts about "Cicada Reducer sound software to reduce the sound of cicada calls without affecting dialogue, which seems particularly timely this year). So, long after Todd-AO movies have bitten the dust, Todd AO sound carries on the name.
Another example is Digital Federal Credit Union, abbreviated DCU (which continues to annoy me – you’d think it would be “DFCU”). This was a company set up in 1969 to help employees of Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corporation to obtain mortgages. Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC, was a computer company that made the PDP and VAX lines of computer that were ubiquitous in the 1970s and 1980s, and which built an enormous chip fabricating facility in Massachusetts. They were acquired by rival Compaq in 1998, who were, in turn, bought by HP in 2002.
Compaq and HP rebranded DEC equipment, but the logo and name were used until 2004 by IT company Digital GlobalSoft in India, but no more. However, the company name lives on in the Credit Union that has offices all over Massachusetts.
Many of the big name audio speaker brands are owned by other companies such as Hardon Karman (BTW now Harmon International) and Panasoninc (Fender and Klispch). Also, the Beats brand is now owned by Apple.
There’s still a line of AO Sunwear sunglasses , and it uses the older American Optical logo (not the one adopted in the 19780s), but the company has nothing to do with the old American Optical, and the glasses aren’t manufactured in any former AO plant.
Similarly, Polaroid Corporation was completely closed down years ago (so that no outstanding debts remained, and so nobody was responsible for pensions and the like), but there was a new Polaroid corporation established which developed and produced camera products. You can even buy Polaroid-logoed instant cameras from them. But they’re not the same company – legally or by any sort of corporate descent.
In 1885 the Bell Telephone Company spun off a company called the Atlantic Telegraph and Telephone Company that was to focus on establishing long-distance telephone lines up and down the east coast.
Soon after Atlantic Telegraph and Telephone became its own company and bought Bell Telephone, creating a monopoly.
Today Bell is long gone and Atlantic Telegraph and Telephone is AT&T. Interestingly, in the early 1980’s AT&T spun off a subsidiary called Southwestern Bell that grew and eventually bought AT&T in the mid-2000’s.
The Canadian version of the Bell Telephone Company very much lives on as Bell Canada.
While it isn’t quite the story from the OP, I find Bombardier amusing as it famously started as a snowmobile company, which later expanded to aircraft and rail. The snowmobile (and other recreational products) arm got spun off as BRP, which is still going strong, the rail segment got sold off, and now Bombardier only builds planes. So it carries a name originally associated with a product it doesn’t build anymore.
I KNOW there are several companies that have radically changed their business over the years, although I can’t think of any of them right now. There are also companies that have moved around and gotten out of large portions of their business, but that’s not what my OP was after> Todd-AO sound, DCU, Polaroid, and AO sunwear really aren’t the original companies (or were vanishingly small portions, at best), even though they have the name
Kaiser-Permanente started out as the insurance provider for employees of the auto manufacturer Kaiser-Frazer, which ceased to exist upon purchase by AMC in '70.
Singer spun off its sewing machine business in 1987 into a company called SSMC. Then SSMC was bought Semi-Tech Global, which also bought the name Singer. The original Singer Corp. then changed its name to SVP.
AT&T was broken up into seven separate regional phone companies in 1984. Two of them , Southwestern Bell and Pacific Telesis, eventually merged into SBC Corp. SBC then bought a couple more regional telephone companies, and finally bought what was left of the original AT&T and changed the corporate name to AT&T in 2005
WaMu Theater in Seattle is still named after Washington Mutual, nearly 20 years after that bank failed and got bought out by Chase. They never managed to sell the naming rights afterward and eventually decided that it’s now short for “Washington’s Music”.
The Southern Pacific Railroad went out of business in the 1990s, but the Southern Pacific Railroad INternal Telegraph company is still a a big player in telecommunications.
The Ball company originally made canning jars, but spun off an aeronautics and later aerospace company during WWII. Ball Aerospace eventually made some of the key components of the Hubble Space Telescope. For a while there, the canning company went away, but lately whoever it was who bought the rights has brought back the name.
I thought that was more of a case of outsourcing rather than a spinoff, but some quick googling informs me that I was wrong.
GE sold off the appliance business to Electrolux in 2014. The business was then sold to the Chinese company Haier and the American investment company KKR in 2016. Haier remains the majority owner, and has the right to use the GE brand name until 2056.
So while GE is obviously not a defunct company, the GE appliance business as owned by GE is certainly defunct.