With this new incredible CORPORATE MONUMENT PARK, you can pay your respects to great companies and products of the past, or at least the ones with a cult following.

Background:

Famous people and events in history often have some sort of enormous stone monuments to prevent them from being forgotten.

The issue:

Unfortunately, this is NOT true for once-great companies and products (see example in Figure 1). These are consigned to obscurity, with no physical relics to attest to their existence in history.

 

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Fig. 1: Important companies from the past are generally forgotten, as was the fate of the Winton Motor Carriage Company. Perhaps they have great lessons to teach us (such as: should you dispense with a horse?), if only we would remember them!

Proposal:

Companies and products of the past can still teach lessons to the people of the future, and they should be memorialized with enormous monuments that will stand the test of time.

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Fig. 2: Monuments could be created for once-popular defunct companies, like the AltaVista web search engine, to remind us of their contribution to history.

 

 

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Fig. 3: Sometimes, a software product attracts a dedicated fanbase disproportionate to its commercial success (e.g. BeOS). This monument could emphasize the importance of marketing (and luck) in software success, something which is often overlooked by developers.

 

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Fig. 4: Hardware products can also be commemorated in this way. For example, developers who make use of touchscreen devices (i.e. basically all of them) would do well to make a pilgrimage to the Apple Newton MessagePad monolith.

Conclusion:

Next time your city demolishes a building that can’t be easily repurposed for housing or general commercial use (for example, a contaminated landfill or a former gas station), you should push for that area to become a DEFUNCT COMMERCIAL PRODUCT AND/OR COMPANY STATUE GARDEN.

PROS: Brings the lessons of the past to the people of the future.

CONS: May be discouraging to see how many great products and companies failed to make a lasting impact.