Before I moved over to the computer industry, back in the 1980s, I was Editor of What Hi-Fi? magazine. At the time, it was very apparent that I was leaving a mature industry for a much younger and more exciting world. Hi-fi was dominated by well-established corporations, mainly Japanese but some European. With little to distinguish the products of one manufacturer from another, marketing was largely a matter of brand differentiation and awareness. Only occasionally would something genuinely new appear, such as the Sony Walkman, however even these served primarily to differentiate their respective brands from the crowd.

Of course branding has always been significant in the computer industry. Witness Apple’s early success with the campaign that launched the Macintosh, positioning itself as the loan fighter against the corporate dominance of ‘Big Blue’ (as IBM was nicknamed) in a 1984-style world. Since then Apple has stuck true to the brand, to the extent that owning an iMac, an iPod an iPhone, or indeed anything that is white and boasts the Apple logo, is to make a statement about yourself and your lifestyle that goes way beyond the capabilities of the device itself. However not many other computer companies can claim the same success. Adobe perhaps, to the extent that (despite its best efforts) ‘Photoshop’ is widely used as a verb.