Saturday Discussion - How do some brands stay so cool?

I've been playing with an iPad this week. What a fabulous piece of kit!

Image: Carlos Porto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

But in the end I couldn't think why I'd want one. Other than to do stuff online while I watch TV, and as I don't watch TV, that's no use at all. It's not as good as the Kindle as a reading device, and it's not as good as my laptop for anything else I might want to do away from my main computer.

Then there are the other, well documented limitations of the device.

Let's imagine for a moment that Microsoft had produced the iPad. Can you hear the scoffing?

What a lame name!
No USB port? That's a joke!
So you can't use flash? A waste of time!
A computer with no way of printing anything? Crazy!
A "closed" app system? Just a way to make more money out of us!

But although there were a few lone voices in the wilderness shouting stuff like that, the reality was that the iPad became another huge success for Apple. Why is that?

And then there's Google. I remember when they seemed so cool.

But this week Wave was put to bed with a whimper, marking another failure in a long run of attempts to move themselves into the social media market place.

Facebook? We all use it, but it's fast becoming a brand we love to hate. The UI is so irritating and we have some huge privacy concerns with them.

There's a pattern here.

We love them when they start. They can't put a foot wrong. But once they grow to become big corporations, we prefer to find the gaps and point out the things they do wrong. To some extent it's human nature. We build them up, then we knock them down.

But some brands transcend that.

Apple is one. What or who are the others?

Why do they remain cool?