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We still have Philips power house, a tape recorder bought in 1991 in working condition. It is a wooden tape recorder with stereo wooden box speakers. It has dual cassette slots to transfer the recording from A to B. It has a built in equalizer, FM radio and audio CD mode
I worked at the Philips physics lab (NatLab) for a while in the mid-nineties. I have two clear memories from that time that showed the state of the company: 1) There were "idea boxes" in several locations, but nobody would empty them. 2) I know a guy there that was a very early adopter of MP3, and suggested the walk-man division to make a portable MP3 player two years before the first ones hit the market. He was laughed out of the room, mostly because he didn't have a PhD. The management was very top down, and very hierarchical, only those with the highest levels of academic training and management levels were allowed to have any ideas. This made it impossible to notice trends and made it a very inward looking organisation.
Ive heard stories of offices that were officially closed, but the paychecks kept coming, so it became a hangout spot. Was told by friends that a few of those people got degrees while getting paid since they were never asked to work or report to anything.
Philips is an example of what happens when you replace engineers with MBA's and beancounters.
ปีที่แล้ว +904
I fully agree with you. I worked for IEC (world electrical standardization) and had been in contact with Philipps' top researchers. Already in the 90s they felt deeply concerned about the influence of the financial layer in management. Living now in south east Asia, I am closely tracking the heritage.
As happened to so many other former great companies. Commodore for one. Or make the mistakes that the British did and let politicians meddle. We invented the concept of using computers for business purposes and it came from a tea merchant of all things (J. Lyons & Co) that all got folded into ICL which is now part of Fujitsu. See also British Leyland.
I worked for Philips in the 2010s. It's an extremely top heavy company that prioritizes paying outrageous salaries to the people working in Eindhoven over investing in developing new technology. Hard to compete when you spend all your money hiring middle managers rather than the engineers who do the work. I was a middle manager.
Toshiba in many ways are similar. They invented flash memory and once had large memory division (now called Kioxia), sold image sensor to Sony, healthcare to Canon, sold home appliance to Midea (sell electronic under Toshiba brand), tv business to Hisense. Now mostly involved in non-consumer product like power plant, elevator, lighting, energy system, railway system, automotive parts, hydrogen.
Sounds similar to a video I watched about the destinies of Kodak & FujiFilm. It was not that Kodak failed look to the future beyond film photography; it was just that they chose what eventually turned out to be the wrong sides. Interestingly enough, FujiFilm is nowadays also huge in healthcare imaging as well, among other things.
This is very true. In a modern company, the percentage of people that "actually do something" aka engineers, etc, is very low. Whilst the majority of employees are in Bullsh*t jobs like managers, paper pushers, etc. In fact there is a good book called "Bullsh*t jobs". It is worth a read.
@@deckard5pegasus673 I work at dell and they prioritize in the sales team all the way.....I mean having sales is good but, technology is such a risky industry.....imo the ones who keep it running are the R&D and the people who make the product happen. A good product sells by itself nowdays.
@@deckard5pegasus673 David Graeber. The author of your book and the main who invented the phrase "we are the 99%" during the London occupy movement. A great man much loved and missed. Other notable works: Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
I am Dutch and into technology. I can tell you that Philips has been dying as a tech company for decades, in the 80's/90's it started to go downhill. Why? They cut on R&D in the Netherlands and internationally. They started to buy other companies (like medical diagnostic equipment) instead of developing technology. At its high point Philips got the greatest minds to its campus in Eindhoven to lecture the engineers, including Einstein.
Fun fact: Karl Marx stayed with the family in Zaltbommel (with the parents of the brothers). I don't agree that Philips was dying. They made the choice to shrink down the company and it probably was the right choice. Look what happened to the likes of Nokia, Ericsson, Gründig and to a lesser extent Siemens. It's not a coincidence that all these European tech companies fell away. It actually isn't just in Europe. Look at companies like Motorola in the US and Sharp in Japan.
I'm Dutch and my step father worked at Phillips for over 30 year. He lived all over Asia for years working for Phillips. He's been retired for over a decade now, but still gets his pension from Phillips, but has no love left for the company at all. He has witnessed the mismanagement and mistakes at Phillips first hand and has seen it get worse over the years during his retirement. The company is a former shell of itself and it makes him sad. The company was a lot bigger and important when he started there at the beginning of his career. He told me recently during Christmas holidays that the he knew and worked with the current CEO of Phillips. He said in the old days before he was CEO he would always point the finger at someone else and always find blame in someone other then himself when things went wrong. It's a shame Phillips could have been so much bigger and more important in the global electronic consumer market but it was all wasted due to bad decisions made primarily by management.
Europe at the moment is doing its best to destroy every bit of tech and manufacturing we have left. The chemical and electronics industries were first, the automotive industry will soon follow. And the fact that Poland, when they want to invest in nuclear power, is no longer turning to Germany, but to South Korea, is also quite telling regarding the state of Europe in any high tech.
Exodias, WHY YOU CRY ANONYMOUS ????? Philips lightning, Singapore, Philips Taipei, do i know him ? I would call him no to say how evil you are here. WHY YOU DO THAT ? Roy Jakobs is all new to me, singapore i never was, you don't understand your father i guess, shame ? Margins in semiconductors, mosfet ? Only ASML is lucrative enough to make margins. Why you say this, why so stupid? SHAME ON YOU !
The bad management coming from agreements with the competition. Agreements that allowing the company to target just specific people, not every potential customer. And another thing - the products are to be made to not last forever in order to secure steady sales.
I worked on an assembly line for Philips’ vacuum tubes in the early sixties! The transistor manufacturing part of the plant was out of bounds to mere mortals then, it was very hush hush... PS: interesting bit of trivia: Philips, in cooperation with Gazelle ( a Dutch bicycle manufacturer) produced the first e-bike before the Second World War
It's also left its mark on the actual geography of the Netherlands. Before Philips, Eindhoven was an insignificant city surrounded by some small villages, but due to Philips it grew into the large city it is today.
@@daarom3472 they've got one of the country's best universities of technology there, as well as ASML, a company of global significance (discussed in the video), along with plenty of other companies in the technology industry (such as NXP, also discussed in the video). It may not have the allure of Amsterdam or Rotterdam, but it's hardly 'insignificant'.
@@daarom3472 Yes, Eindhoven (and the surrounding area) is small and it not very interesting to see. What you sadly don't seem to know is that it generates a quarter of the exports of the Netherlands and receives more than a third of the R&D spending in NL. Half of the Dutch patents are made here, also. And ASML has it's main presence here. AKA the only company in the world that makes the machines that make chips. All of the tech events from the Netherlands also happen here, from my experience. Nobody invited you to go there to visit anything, lmao. I fail to see your point other than you either being a troll, or a tourist. Detroit makes cars, not geopolitically significant high-tech machines.
I’m an engineer at Philips around Eindhoven, and while summing up certain facts may look bad, it doesn’t feel bad for me because all the talents and spinoffs that Philips produced have created a very successful tech industry around Eindhoven. The company may be a shadow of what it once was, but the region is stronger than ever, which benefits many people.
I visited Eindhoven during my work trip through ASML and it was eye opening how much influence Philips had on the country and the industries it birthed. Especially when I visited Strijp S, it showed what kind of legacy Philips had created.
There’s absolutely nothing special about Eindhoven. I’ve lived there for years and it’s one of the most boring cities in the Netherlands. Culturally dead, awful housing market, dull architecture, high crime rate in the middle of the city…no landmarks, nothing, it’s an industrial city and I can definitely see why their weakness became lack of creativity. It’s a city for the rich and established who look to increase their wealth or retire. Nothing conducive to creativity. Not to mention the attitude of locals towards immigrants. Sad stuff, as it’s a city that’s so we’ll positioned and has so much potential.
It may work well in that region and help alot of ppl around getting jobs or other benefits But on the other hand, it doesn't "innovative" anymore, more like sub con producing products for larger brand, losing its own identity Giving up innovation and totally disconnected from the market trend Remember LG
My aunt spent her whole career working as an executive secretary and had a front row seat to all of it .She's been retired for 10 years now but her stories are fascinating .She worked for the second in command at the headquarters office.I got my first electric razor from her as a 12th birthday gift
@@nathasyapramudita6312 I would if I could but I'm 47 and she told them to me as a teenager .Too much time has past for me to remember them well enough to repeat .30 years is a long time
Hello Clubber I guess i know who your ant is. The Razor company in Drachten is still in operation, was that the last production facility in Holland ? She was there too,when the mad guy dd the breadche, widescreen, the wrong building, when they just moved from the Rembrandt into the new building. You should upload some stories here, toggetter ?
I spent nearly 40 years in electronics & at the turn of the milemium, Philips was one of my major clients. They were an amazing firm & being bound by confidentiality contract, allowed me access to thier R&D in Eindhoven where I spent a lot of time working on various things which included something called gun pitch modulation in CRT deflection. It was a fantastic invention & had they designed it maybe 5 years earlier would have been as big as the Trinitron was for Sony...
Nah, Philips failed miserably in the marketing of their products. So even if they had developed that tv before Sony did... Btw, Sony had a fantastic name for their televisions: Trinitron. Can you remember a single Philips tv product name? I do. Compare: Sony - Trinitron Philips - 100 Hz television with Digital Scan They did make excellent television sets, but again, marketing was not their strong point.
I used to work at a company that was bought out by Philips (which was then rebranded to Philips Neuro) making brain scan equipment. I can't stress enough how horrified I still am by how little the management cared about making a quality product. Finding out their management has always made baffling decisions isn't too surprising.
It hasn't 'always' made baffling decisions. They started doing that when the MBAs came in and took over. There's a reason it was a gigantic company that produced some of the best equipment ever put out by anyone.
large companies often get lost in layers of management and over time their management gets disillusioned disoriented and live in an alternative reality. Case in point - Boeing overlooked safety which resulted in one of the largest callbacks and losses in history
I actually left philips medical shortly after the apnea drama and my experiences were similair, the fact my superior deliberately tried to hide bad samples when production was already not going too well is something I'm not going to forget soon, especially if you consider the products we made were also for a very vulnerable group of people
I wanted to do a video on Philips' decline for a long time. Now the story has been so well done that I feel I can't ever make a video on it. Great work
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! Seeing how well the video is performing for me I'm sure there is space for you to talk about he company as well if you pick another angle or something :)
Frankly speaking, I follow your channel and only interested in your expertise on high tech but then you are not really good but yet focus on non high tech companies or industries. So what is the point of saying: I always want to do a video on Philips…
Thanks a lot to @TechAltar for this video because it was definitely a big story in tech history that somehow wasn't covered much (probably cause it's not American or Japanese). Very happy to hear the story of Philips. I think there's room for another video that goes in depth in the Philips-Sony duo in physical tech.
My father would have been saddened by this, though not surprised. He worked for Mullard, which became Philips Research Laboratories, based near Redhill in Surrey, UK. He was frequently exasperated by Philips’ management decisions. One year, Philips made a rather poor pay offer, but tried to sweeten the deal by including a fully funded private medical insurance package. The staff argued they’d prefer a better pay rise instead, but eventually accepted. The medical insurance scheme came back to haunt Philips. It was a lifetime deal and covered a spouse too. Belatedly, they realised premiums were becoming extremely costly as the workforce aged and they decided to renege on the deal. The staff, many of them now retired, fought a group action in the courts and won. Philips then had to pay for both parties’ legal expenses in addition to continuing to fund the medical insurance. In the eighties my father, together with almost every other member of staff over the age of 55 years, was made redundant because management decided the average age of employees at the lab was too high.
My Father also worked at Mullard / PRL from the 60's unit the early 90's. He was in the machine shop, where he and his colleagues worked on mechanical components of many of the prototypes which Phillips had in deleopment at the time. They also used to make occasional parts for satellites and experimantal military systems, and Phillips also did some contract work at the site for other companies. The workshops and everything on that part of the site was closed down shortly after my father retired and half the site was sold off. A few years later the rest of the site was sold and Phillips were said to be moving their R&D to Eindhoven.
@@steveg5129 They may well have met then, my father had a high regard for the abilities of the folks in the machine shop. In the 80’s I worked briefly in Systems Division on the south side of the site and revisited the site occasionally via Google Earth over the years. It was sad to see it derelict, then demolished and now occupied by warehouses.
My first job from University in 1988 was at PRL, Salfords, near Redhill. Now it's a storage facility. I still live in the area but have spent the rest of my career in tech working for Americans. In the late 80s there was already a feeling of decay, which is why I left. A great shame.
Firing workers who are too "old" is such a dumb move. Here in Copenhagen there's an electronics component store (Brinck / Elextra) - and they still have a dude working there who's my father's age. A can't believe he isn't pensioned yet: he must be close to 70. He's worked there for at least 28 years. I thought about that the last time I saw him. Made me appreciate the fact that his brain is such a HUGE reservoir of knowledge. Letting him go would be insanely dumb. He has the expertise to serve customers, and make sure they always get the help they need - even with the nerdiest of requests. On the other hand, there's also a camera store here in Copenhagen (Photografica) - and it used to be seen as a deluxe dealer of professional cameras, used cameras (Hasselblad, Rolleiflex, Leica, etc) with a repair facility, etc - and staffed by highly skilled photography experts. Now, the last time I went there, I was shocked that they were only staffed by teenagers, who knew very very little about even elementary photographic history or techniques. I lost a LOT of respect for that store.
I was an engineer at Philips consumer electronics. We used to say that the company was a tech giant with brittle marketing feet. I loved the company, the training, the culture, the pride to work there. I learned a lot. Very sad to see it gone. I was working for another company when the plant closed and I bought the last equipment before the closing. A tear runs down my cheek…..
Here a fun little anedote about Philips which you won't find on the internet but is known to some of the local people. When Philips invented the CD-player they intended to use 14 bits to encode the sound, you can thank Sony for the 2 extra bits, Sony had technological reasons for it - due to their producing business - and Sony worked with Philips on the software-side of the CD-player so eventually Sony twisted Philips its arm and Philips agreed to 16 bits. A better known secret: Philips agreed to make a CD-based console (or at least the CD-part of it) with Nintendo, that failed and that was the direct reason why Sony made its own console, the PlayStation. First Sony tried to take over from Philips for Nintendo but eventually that did not work out and Sony decided to do it themselves.
For several years all the initially produced Philips CD players only used 14-bit DACs so the CD you were playing might have been recorded with 16-bits, but if you owned a Philips branded CD player you only got to listen to 14-bit music.
My father worked at the Aachen Philips research lab for 30 years as an electronics engineer until the early nineties. The research was still interesting at the time developing fiber optics production quality control devices for example. The bureaucratic management style stifled a lot of innovation though and my father was generally dissatisfied with management together with other engineers in his group.
While I grew up in Aachen, there was not only the Philips research center, but also a lightning factory and a monitor factory. Thousands of jobs were lost there in the last 25 years.
I worked for philips in the supply chain dept. They rarely manufactures their stuff they usually use something called LM that is legal manufacturer in their medical field such as ultrasound imaging and MATCso it isn't surprising at all
The thing i used to like about Philips is that their products where sturdy and durable. I still have multiple electronics going strong after nearly 20 years of abuse while other brands of the same product broke down long ago
Yep. And they (mostly used) to have such high quality tech & electronics, especially audio equipement wise, that i could by 10€ earbuds or 100€ portable MP3/USB speakers that would last me years, and have superior quality, compared to all the typical brands like Apple selling you shit that breaks in months if not days (my record is like a couple hours for 50€ Apple earbuds) that would be priced two, to five, and sometimes even TEN times more expensive, for a quarter of its lifespan and similar if not worse quality. Especially those, god forbid, absolute garbage Apple earbuds.
My dad owned a Philips TV (his first one) that lasted over 20 years. It would have lasted even more had not a service guy messed it up. I own a CD-based music player from Philips that still works to this day (although I use it very rarely). I bought it 20 years ago.
@@AshwinSriram I have a Philips CRT that I use for playing retro games, it was manufactured in 1998 and still works perfectly. Someone managed to rip off the front buttons, but I use the remote anyway lol.
To Mr. TechAltar, you forgot to mention an invention of Philips it was a called "Laser Disk" for playing video format. Back in the early 80's I worked at Philips in Hamburg (Germany) and I worked at the production line of the Laser Disk. That was a transition from VHS tapes to DVD discs. This invention didn't live long and died in about 2-3 years later and was replaced by DVD format. The Laser discs wasn't popular anyway due to the high price to buy or even to rent a movie, not to mention the laser laser disk player you also had to buy as well to be able to play the movie. Cheers to you and thank you to bring me back to my old days.
The death cycle of big companies always reads the same , and should always be on your mind if you work at one . My boss was very angry with us one day about feedback to improve my floors efficiency . He opened the suggestion box he had installed , to find a note saying " read the suggestions " signed and dated from me , 4 months ago .
I work at the former Philips campus in Eindhoven and it is kinda sad to see all of old research labs being repurposed as office spaces. In fact the whole city was centered around Philips at some point, where entire neighborhoods would be just production facilities. Now they have all been repurposed for housing. Philips Research still exists, but as far as I know it is on a much smaller scale and they focus mostly on medical-related research. As you said, they have mostly given up on having their R&D stay in the Netherlands. The recent recalls of their respirators also caused a lot of problems for them, so I'm not that optimistic about their future given their track record. Seeing a giant fall this hard is both fascinating and sad at the same time.
They had an incredible run of success for a European company considering how much competition they had from the far east. It's a lesson in not making short sighted decisions in business. A shame though.
My Father worked at Philips for many years. Back in the 60's they made TVs in Australia and every part and I mean every part was made locally in their local production facility. I know because dad took me there to see how everything was made from wires to vacuum tubes and picture tubes. At that time they had a research facility that was at the leading edge of solid state electronics but that facility was closed down and was moved to Singapore and the rest is history. At that time Dad took me to see the installation and commissioning of one of our first electron microscopes (you missed Philips Scientific which was also a business unit). However, the 70's it became very apparent that unless you has a strong connection with someone important in Eindhoven you would go nowhere much. Dad used to refer to the all wise and powerful men from Holland. That introspection got worse so bad mangers went up in the organization and the cancer in Eindhoven was spread globally. Then era of the accountant lead demise had started. The free fall gathered pace in the 80's. So many great ideas, inventions, new products but such poor management.
I had a Philips MP3 player, MP4 player, earphones and I used them a lot. I also have a Philips electric shaver (OneBlade) which still works. We had a Philips TV too, it worked fine as well. We also have a Philips radio which still works as well, but we hadn't used it in a long time. So in general it was a good company. Bit sad that it is not active in the consumer electronics industry, but hey, this happens.
Interestingly, a Philips hair trimmer I bought in 2018 is perhaps the best designed, engineered, and manufactured consumer product I've ever purchased.
Really, I have two Phillips hair trimmers - one made in the early 2000s in Europe and the other one made more recently in China. The newer one is crap, the power cable simply started to disintegrate after a while, while the old one is still going strong.
I have this one blade thing, which is a trimmer but very fine and its great as a wet shaver. I get very close to a blade shave. A less wasteful head would probably better, though.
My grandfather used to build Philips TVs for people in the 50s in western Finland. As a consequence they had one of the first TVs in town despite being working class, which my mother always thought was very cool. My grandmother in turn was quite pleased when she found out I had bought a Philips TV some 10 years ago (still got it). Nothing lasts forever, I guess, but it's a bit sad to hear.
During Mid 1970's - Early 1980'S In India Used To Have A Few Electronics Products Made By Philips As A INDIAN Must Confess This So Called EUROPEAN ELECTRONIC PRODUCT GIANT 😁😁 THIRD GRADE TO THE CORE😁😁 ZERO AFTER SALES SERVICE🤢🤢 ZERO AFTER SALES CUSTOMER CARE 🤢🤢🤢🤢 I ANY DAY IN THE 1980'S - 1990'S PREFERED BUYING JAPANESE ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS SONY, NATIONAL, O GENERAL, PANASONIC, AKAI, NATIONAL, FUNAI COLOUR TV, VCP, VCR , MUSIC SYSTEM, WALKMAN AS AN SOUTH ASIAN PREFERED FAR EAST ASIAN MADE PRODUCTS👍👍👍👍😍😍😍😍😍😍❤❤❤❤❤❤ AND NOT SO CALLED SELF HYPED EUROPEAN COMPANY PRODUCTS 😁😁😁😁😁😁🤣🤣
The sad thing about the dissolution of Philips is that the people responsible for its decline have or have been made to jump ship where they now apply the same proven management style on other healthy companies.
I briefly worked for Philips in the late 90’s. I remember a manager telling me how they once rearranged the words on a company sign to read “Let’s make better things”.
I used to repair CRT TVs and audio equipment in the 80s and 90s, and I dreaded getting Phillips units to look at. They were always grossly over-engineered. For example, in some TVs they had protection circuits to protect the protection circuits and if one part shut down, it took everything else down and it was then difficult to work out which section was actually the problem. We had a saying for Phillips electronics in the workshop "Let's make things overly complicated".
Die slogan was verzonnen door de raad van bestuur om te communiceren met het personeel dat de producten beter moesten zijn. Zo groot was de afstand tussen de directie en de designafdeling inmiddels.
I work in the semiconductor industry and I am surprised how often I run into people who used to work for Philips at some point in time and companies who trace their origin back to Philips. They have certainly created a lasting legacy within the semiconductor industry, its just a shame that they couldn't work out how to make their own company successful in this highly profitable industry.
This is pretty spot on - I worked at Philips Research for 7 years in the 90's, including on CD-i, and yes the company direction was repeatedly wrong. Very sad. Worked with some great people.
Aren't most of them? I work as a software developer and I can't understand how the companies I worked for are still in business and how the most incompetent people are in the most important positions. If I would have worked mostly alone I could have developed better products.
@@UmiharaKawaseTube My personal view reflects the fact that when CD-i was conceived and brought to market, there were no consumer "multimedia" products - this was the first, co-developed by Philips and Sony (as the Green Book standard). Retrospect is a wonderful thing, but from my work at Philips Research in the years while it was developed, the belief was that multimedia experiences themselves (mix of images, sound, and video) would define the product... and this was a new thing. The thing that was in retrospect under-anticipated was the capabilities of the main chip to do more than sequence stuff off the CD. There were lots of multimedia titles (eg encyclopedias, etc) but that wasn't enough... to shift units and prove better value the system also needed to do games. Here the lowly 68070 (don't get confused, not even as powerful as the widely-used 68020 eg in Macs)... this was a 68000-derivative made by Philips. It just couldn't push pixels fast enough to do great games, and had no hardware support for sprites etc. It turned out multimedia was a bit "meh" and it couldn't compete in gaming, so ultimately wasn't successful. As it was a visionary product in a new market it's hard to blame management - the market just didn't materialize for all sorts of reasons. Today the web effectively fills that market space in my mind - multimedia with connectivity backed by all the worlds knowledge and services in the cloud :) If CD-i v2 had gone head then its specs were quite impressive as a gaming system, but it was cancelled pretty soon after being conceived. I think it was going to use the 68340 if my 30-year old memories are correct, plus sprite hardware from one of the games houses at the time.
My grandfather was Dutch and I remember my grandparents used to have a home entertainment system which was entirely made up of a combination of Philips and Sony equipment, they also bought exclusively Philips lightbulbs right up till suddenly the quality dropped after 2000, so they stopped; I remember my grandfather lamenting about it. I personally was upset they exited the market because I always felt their low scale stuff, such as radios, power supplies, lightbulbs etc used to be superior to all the other brands. Cool fact: In Hearts of Iron 4 if you play as Netherlands, under company research and production selection page on the government tab, Phillips is listed for electronics and radar research speed increase.
Just to add that Philips Records was also one of the biggest labels in classical music industry and many of the recordings are still considered to be the finest. It's fate was being absorbed into Universal Music but the American consortium decided to discontinue the Philips brand. Philips huge historical recording repertoire has been reissuing under other labels such as Decca, which is also under Universal Music. It's really a sad story that Philips declined in the music industry and they eventually sold the business. So does for EMI.
EMI was killed by researching developing and building the MRI scanner. It bankrupted them, the early device and everything was snatched up by an American company for peanuts.
Wow. So basically they'd gotten to the point where they sold off all real assets along with the right to use the Phillips name, then even the name became of little worth so Universal ONLY purchased the masters and rights. That is sad.
There are a lot of parallels here to the American company General Electric; another huge "Everything Inc." that's faded down to a shadow of its former self. To be brief about it, the 1980s brought about the lust for "financialization" among large Western manufacturers, driven by pressure from wealthy "activist" stock investors. The Carl Icahns of the business world. Their games with equity drove the rush to globalize production to low-cost Asia; and to convert innovations into debt-service cash way too prematurely. The investors' goals were to turn these corporations into "banks" from manufacturers, with all the "cash cow"/ATM advantages (to only them) that implies. That's the *real* "Story Behind" declines like these.
What's your logic? It's all about inventions, without inventions all these companies will go the way of dodo birds... Apple is doing just fine with low-cost Asian production.
@@jmg8246 it's history, bro. You're talking in basic terms about how something "should" be; I talked about what actually happened. Private equity is the lamprey that grew larger than the whale it was sucking blood from. That's why thieves like Bob Mercer are richer than God, and formerly productive "light bulb" companies like Philips and Sylvania are empty brands.
@@dsnodgrass4843 It worked out well for most American companies. The US currently has like 32 of the top 50 largest companies and most of the top ten. GE was an exception. Most other major companies didn’t decline like that. And GE is still a pretty huge company. They probably make the best jet engines besides pratt & whitney. GE is one of only several companies around the world capable of making advanced jet engines
It really is a shame. When I was a kid, Philips was well respected as a Dutch brand, as well as a global player. They were involved in some of the best products ever invented. It's downright depressing to see how far they've fallen.
the shareholders may have hold the shares of the new companies, I don't think it makes a ton of difference as long as they kept their HQ in the netherlands (which they did)
Yeah, pretty pathetic why not just keep a few share of TSMC, ASML or any of the other dozen companies Phillips help found and invest in, to me just makes absolutely zero sense as to why they sold of anything that could've made them money in the long run... someone over there in Phillips completely regrets all of these inane decisions and is beating themselves up to this very day...
Philips is one of those fallen giants. It used to be huge here in Belgium. It had several factories and anybody who worked at a high tech company HAD to work at Philips... at least that was the story while I was a kid and young teen. But since the 2000s, I only heard about those many, MANY, rounds of layoffs every few years. And every company I've worked for (even today) has people who used to work at Phillips but were fired during one of those rounds of layoffs. And most of those said the same thing: great colleagues, great working environment, but not a single good word of the upper management. The people who worked at the Philips TV factory in Bruges probably had it the worst. Well over a decade of cyclical layoffs, then the change to TP Vision, the Chinese TPV taking over, stripping the factory and eventully closing it in 2014. Then taking only a few hundred to a shell R&D department in Zwijnaarde... only to once again strip it down to 60 employees a few years later. That's barely anything from the 2250 original employees. It's been a while since they've been in the news... wouldn't be surprised if those last few dozen will get the axe sooner or later. *sigh*
Very sad and relatable to decline of industry here in the UK. Our house and my grandparents house both had big Belgian made Philips CRTs as main TVs up until 10 years ago.
One thing for sure they need to Acquire Daewoo Electronics long time ago, as to what has happened to Daewoo Conglomerate has split, yet to add another facility in South Korea as to say their are TVs made by Philips in South Korea exported also under a different name sometimes under Portland. It will be the focus on Philips doing something right for instance acquiring Whirlpool and also acquiring Daewoo Electronics to become Philips Korea as GM took over Daewoo’s automotive arm and Philips to take on Daewoo’s electronic arm probably making some Daewoo branded TVs in Belgium after Daewoo’s bankruptcy at the time like what Magnavox in the US that came out with Philips/Magnavox.
We had a phillips "flat screen" crt from early 90s. It only died a few yrs ago when it lept, with helping hand of someone with a temper, from a 12th floor balcony 😔 Still have my 14" crt frim same period, still works, but only used sometimes for original video gaming computers/consoles i own.
@@zigzagtoes who tf threw a Phillips Magnavox out a 12 story window?? and wtf is it doing up 12 stories anyhow?? wtf?? that could've smashed someone like a cartoon character if you weren't careful...
it is sad up until 2:30 because ive had a philips indoor tv antenna from like the 90s and it still works. They will still be the tech giant they used to be in our hearts
Philips did indeed make good products. My tv was made by Philips back in 1984 and with no servicing, only an occasional external cleaning, it still works perfectly and I still enjoy watching tv on it.
I had a Philips TV that refused to die. I bought it for $350.00 at a pawn shop and it was less than a year old. I had it for 10 years until I decided to upgrade. I was waiting for it to die before purchasing a new one but it refused to die and was totally still trouble free. I liked Philips products and wondered what happened to them. Poor management destroys companies and that's what happened to Philips.
Eventually any good company will go bad, because they hire lots of "smart" people who has nothing to do, and they will try to "renovate" and destroy the perfect products. Example, Mercedes and BMW now add lots of useless features to their cars making them less reliable and expensive.
Just imagining how big Phillips could have been if things went the right way. 1/4 of tsmc, Alone would be a game changer And that in combination with a stake in ASML Incredible
Executives focus on short-term profits. It's easy to see why they will take the easy way out, sell and automatically add some juicy margin to their balance sheet.
Why you say outsourcing is bad, ASML, TSMC, all great companies, this is Frist Philips mission. We are bigger than ever now ! Most TSMC stock is sold now, that is the way how we developed these scanners, on Covid, we saved everyone ! Make better margins, why sell low level trash ?
Amazing video, thanks! 💜 Growing up as a geeky kid in the Netherlands in the 70’s, the magic innovation of Philips was everywhere and extremely inspiring to me. But very soon it became clear something was off when uncles and neighbors who happened to be engineers at Philips shared their deep and growing frustrations with their employer. Devastating mismanagement. Such a shame. 😢
I worked at Philips Design briefly before everything went burst in 2009. IMO one of the big reasons that Philips went down was they stopped recognizing actual values, such as tech and innovation, as the core of the company. They value "brand" more than anything else. They took a very high stance on their Philips brand when in reality no one really cares about it anymore. They often buy smaller up and coming companies that had success in their respective fields, and Philip's goal was always to replace them and wipe that brand off the market. That really pissed off major retailers that valued the smaller brands more than Philips. They also rely on OEM to fill their product line up, and often it was up to the design team to create value. However, even within the design teams, politics meant that their design talents spread all over the world had little chance to interact and collaborate, which was a huge shame. I used to hear all the amazing stories from veteran designers who worked in different design offices all over the world between the 80s and 90s, and wished i was born three decades earlier.
I'm glad my grandfather didn't hear about this. He actually contributed a lot back in the day to the development of color television. A really smart man. Due to WW2, he was never able to get a formal engineering degree. But, he worked as an engineer. His salary though, not an engineer. However, he used to go to Holland a lot, when ever those teams were struggling with something related to TV.
The technical accomplishments of this company is staggering. Their super wide TV built for movies (zero black borders) was seriously impressive and beautifully designed. Their home lighting and Hue products are phenomenal
I and my friend bought a tv at 2013 with same type they both had black pixels all around the tv after a year. Then another friend both after years, after a year or two it also got black screen.
I had the Hue lights and they were indeed phenomenal. Hue has strong technology and tons of features. However, the Hue usability was a disaster. Their iPhone app is visually absolutely beautiful, yet it's cumbersome UI made me want to throw my iPhone off a cliff.
@@umitanonymous3400 I bought a Philips Ambilight TV in November 2021. On the 17th of December the screen gave up. It was just a blank screen all of sudden. I was watching a blu ray movie and the TV was working perfectly. Then when I turned off my blu ray player the screen refused to output an image on all inputs including the home screen
My father used to tell me stories of my grandfather's time working for Philips in Eindhoven back around the 50'-80's. Philips was run very informally back then, at least in practice. Iirc he often paid (and was paid) for favors from other divisions with cigars, which were paid for by the company, and he managed to convince someone to let him take home the sheets where prints had already been cut out which he then reclaimed tiny amounts of gold from till he was able to forge a few rings for his kids. And my father also tells me how that those times ended when for-profit-management was installed. Nowadays ASML seems to have become the shining jewel and much of the lifeblood of the city. A fair chunk of my friends work there. Still, you can see it's legacy all the way into our football team PSV.
I remember my parents buying a Philips double casette deck back in the 90s which made it convenient for making mixed tapes with the option of making the recording process shorter by using a double speed option. It was a system which sounded exemplary as well, and it had a switch to enhance bass. One of our neighbours also bought the same model after a demo at our house on a visit. Sad to see the company fall.
Before the semiconductor era, in 1926, Philips also developed and brought to the market the first major innovation in vacuum tube technology: the five electrodes vacuum tube, called pentode, enabled a huge step forward on early electronic devices capabilities and made Philips one of the biggest and most successful vacuum tube manufacturers in the world. Philips advanced vacuum tube technology, such as the EF50 tube, was a key contribution to RADAR developements during WW2.
Pretty much the same thing happened to Hewlett Packard. HP has been split up many times since 1999 and now exists only as a name. It once was one of the best companies to work for.
from the late 1990s onward it was the printers business that really kept HP at the top level - people used to say that it was a company that was only still sailing because it was floating along on the proceeds from a sea of coloured water!
@@alanmusicman3385 Yep, I worked 11 years at HP's printer plant in Vancouver, WA, best job I ever had. We made 25% of the corporate's profit worldwide for years, huge profits margins that just keep going. We made printers 24/7 but one day the world was full of printers, I had two at home, and the prices impleaded, along with our organization. I got the last of the warm and fuzzy out of HP with 2 years salary and two years fully paid education by leaving. It was super as long as it lasted.
@@HansOvervoorde I worked at the HP printer factory in Vancouver Washington for 11 years, best job of my life. Companies are like people, they are conceived, they grow ans mature and then decline and die. Some last centuries, some last only a few years.
Many years ago I managed a project at Philips Semiconductor in San Jose, CA. The management of the facility and the operations was SO dysfunctional since it required the local management team to pass every decision through management in the Netherlands. I was with IBM at the time and it was apparent to our management that this client was going to be a loss after we returned and gave a report of the issues present at the site.
3:30 please do some more reaserch, the reasoning why they marketed lightbulbs to 1000h is because thats what was found as the best mid point between brightness and durability. The colder you run the tungston fillement the longer the bulb will last, but also it will be less bright. The longest lasting bulb for example is basically as bright as a small led and thats the reason why it lasted so long. It was not some big conspiracy to have programed obsolescense it was a tradeoff of durability and brightness of the bulbs. Technology Conections made a great video about it.
As a Dutchman I find it hard to like this video, but it is what it is, and your overview of Philips was very well done. Nothing we can do about their history.
@@jeff4362 Well they had glory years for sure, now most of what I see is ads for their shaving devices. Kind of a decline after their (almost) big hits.
That is what happens when governments get involved in industry. Everything changes focus to regulations rather than innovation. Most innovations today are nothing more than marketing based around government regulations. A prime example of that would be automobiles.
@@bighands69 the government didn’t tell companies like GE to get into the loan business or tell Boeing to start cutting corners. There are plenty of ways to blame government over regulation, but lots of companies get into trouble all on their own.
@@paleghost Philips owned Magnavox. During WWII, Philips Eindhoven separated from North American Philips. Not knowing who would win the war, they figured one would survive. Well they both did. North American Philips bought out companies like Norelco and Magnavox (and dozens more) early on while being separated. North American Philips kept the other brand names and didn't put the Philips branding on them. My business cards from the 80's still said North American Philips on them. I can't tell you exactly when they officially merged back together, since bits and pieces were merged pieces at a time. When I worked from North American Philips, our division's research and development usually came from Philips Eindhoven. But my division this was always the case since WWII. But I remember the plan was to phase out brands like Norelco and Magnavox and to replace them with Philips. And in the late 80's you started to see Philips Norelco and Philips Magnavox. This continued into the 90's and then everything just said Philips by itself. In Europe, it was always branded as Philips.
I have Philips lighting products in my Eindhoven home that are estimated to be about 40 years old. Still in working condition with "Made in Holland" sticker. Back in Sri Lanka, my parents had several appliances from Philips, each lasted for about 30 years. The longevity of old Philips products are truly impressive. No matter where we were in the world, we grew up with the brand. If Philips is heading towards its death, that would be a very sad news.
Hello, Do you have the US smart bulbs, US company produced them early 90th, outsourced. It still is a great company, thank you. Taipei are our friends, we need to support them more then ever ! Respect Frist Philips mission !
We had the absolutely gigantic Phillips Magnavox big screen TV back in the 90s, it must've been a 90 inch TV or something and was a CRT TV so you know it was heavy as hell and was very deep as well to hold the cathode ray tube in the back to produce the image since there were no LCD or LED TV's back then so it was an absolute behemoth of a device!!!
@@chowderwhillis9448 For anyone reading this and wondering, that would be a rear projection and not a direct-view CRT tv. Direct-view CRT tv screen size was limited to about half the size of this r-p tv, so about 40-45 inches.
That’s a sad story of Philips. Their story is similar to stories of many Japanese and electronics giants such as General Electric, RCA, Toshiba, Sanyo, and NEC. Much of the Japanese electronics companies went downhill when the US barred Japanese made semiconductors, but Philips looks like a collapse from within.
My late dad worked for years in the bulbs department in Hamilton Scotland. He eventually became Departmental head and visited Eindhoven several times. He always said they were a good employer who looked after their employees. Sad to hear how times have changed.
Maybe they were a good employer who looked after their employees, but not in Hamilton any more. Apparently they'll be looking after them in Poland now, which is apparently where that factory was moved to, cos it's more profitable there. They did a Dyson - the much-lauded British inventor/businessman who eventually realised that business was the important bit and relocated his factories to Indonesia. Lower wage-bill, taxes, and I'm guessing, far less concern for health and safety. Never mind all the people who had jobs here.
I worked in Philips during 21 years, my husband 24-year career. WHen we started in Brazil early 80', there were more than 20 manufacturing sites, with 22 thousand employees. LIghting, Public Lighting, Automotive, Sound & Vision, Semiconductors, domestic supplies (Walita), personnal care, Medical, Telecomm, Polygram (motown, polydor, mercury, vertigo, deustch gramophon), with major artists at the time like Police, SUperTramp, Sting, Direstraits, and films like 7 marriages and a funeral) , and our beloved PSV Philips Sport Club (Ronaldo, Romario, Vampeta, etc)... Philips has been our lives, career, opportunities. Gratitude, but sadness on how leaders treated our Philips until the end.
@@adrianotomino Yes and thanks. Well past their heyday and must have gone cheap. So, does that mean Peter Framptons new signing was with PolyGram after A&M dumped him?
In the early 2000's I finished working for the design department of ASML (through a contractor), and did a 6 month contract at Philips in the S-complex, designing parts for the First 2 stage wafer stepper. The old arrogance at Philips was still present; for instance they thought they could use their ERP system of choice (Baan) where they were eventually obliged to use ASML's (SAP). Philips still thought they were the king of the hill in Eindhoven, while across the road in Veldhoven things were progressing much faster. ASML did not need Philips for knowledge, but just lacked manpower. Autonomy as a design engineer was so much better at ASML, Philips was still stuck in the 80's. Someone joked that the fencing around the S-complex was facing inwards, as to keep employees in, not keep the nasties out 😄. At Philips they always keep a boundary between (HTS/Hochschule) Polytechnical educated Engineers and (TU/Universitat) University educated engineers. Maybe a strange concept to most foreigners, but Netherlands and Germany have Engineering at an applied level and at an R&D level. The University Engineers and Physicists had their own canteen, as if they did not want to mingle with the lower mortals. ASML had none of that stuff. There was great collaboration between the levels. I learned a lot talking to the Physicists about the theory behind some of the decisions, but alternatively the HTS engineers were usually the ones to come with a solution for a problem that could be manufactured. I loved the interaction on many levels and only left because my own contractor was pissing me off no-time. Philips offered me a permanent job after I was there for 3 months. They got really antsy when I declined. It was just not a very nice place to work...
I worked as an apprentice then as a tech at the Hendon works in Adelaide in the 60s and 70s. I enjoyed my time there as part of the Philips family. This set me up for my work life like a charm. Fond memories.
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I've worked internships at the NXP facility where they invented the NFC technology, they have a really great innovation culture and spinning it off ended up a good success.
@@peterw4338 They have their place and skills, managing resources, making ends meet, but they arn't visionaries that create value unless they got that extra skill for it, some people are multifaceted. At the same time many companies have gone under because they are completely run by visionaries that can't manage resources. That's why successfull businesses needs either a an incredible individual to drive them forward or a group of people with complementing skillsets that work well together, It's usually the idea of a board to have people with different experiences to provide feedback. I'm the accountant kind, but I also realize that you need to keep the ship moving and competitive, not just afloat, for that you need to keepup. It helps if you know when you need to get feedback and knowing where to look for it. The worst would be those that are like Mao Zedong, normally they don't make it into a business and their reputation tends to get their career shot after a while, but if they do it's doomed.
@@peterzimmerman1114 sure, point is, "let's invest into cool tech now and then look for ways to sell it later" is an approach engineers rather than accountants are prone to take.
My grandpa worked at Philips and invented things like the machine to make flat computer cables. I'll never stop having respect for him, even if it already has been 8 years since his passing. 🌹
They call them ribbon cables but lets remember, it was a process that is only overheating a cable harness... not rocket science to a low level student.
@@jamescagney2713 I have 27 patents. Remember, as you go deep, you can innovate just about anything under the sun. Did you see his work to be little him? The possibility to better is there even today.
Philips lost the plot totally when Kleisterlee abandoned vertical integration. He declared that it was not necessary for an electronics company to make the components that they used. So you ended up with absurd situations like Philips TVs being made with LCD panels that they bought from their competition, Sharp. Apart from allowing your competitor the means to shut down your business, it precludes you from making technical advances yourself in the components. It became more and more impossible to compete on price and quality against the likes of Samsung who remained vertically integrated. Selling off semiconductors was another spectacular own-goal for Philips. But all they were interested in was short term profit, even if that mean self-predation. Van Houten pursued a strategy of increasing profits by selling off or shutting down the less profitable divisions rather than actually fixing them. Eventually it's like a snake eating its own tail, and now we have little more than a branding operation left plus a few toothbrushes and (the management darling) medical imagers.
Yes, I was once asked by a senior manager in their ICT division whether there was a size beyond which a company could not fail. Philips lost its spirit long ago. I attended meetings on its HiFi consumer electronics and we were always met with a wall of conservative stupidity.
When I was 9 years old, my father bought me a Philips Electronic Engineer kit. This set me on a course that steered me towards my current career. Thank you Philips.
Me too! I became an electronics engineer and worked for Philips Telecommunications for almost the entire 1980s, in places like Libya, Iraq, Italy, Nigeria, etc. And I left when the old guys running the company didn’t understand the consumer IT revolution.
Funny that you mentioned that kit. Just had it in my hands to sell it on a big auction site. They are probably too basic for kids nowadays, better sell it while the kids of 40 years ago are still alive.
Funnily, I remember very well that back in the 80's I always loved certain products from them, but the actual build quality was almost always inferior to that of Japanese companys like Sony. For instance, Philips monitors used to be great in terms of picture quality, features etc.; but any mechanical part that they had, like a cover for the front controls, would almost inevitably break after a few years.
There where many bad products, nearly every product with mechanics inside gives soon or late problems, like taperecorders for example. Radio's and measuring equipment were of good quality.
I bought a Phillips LCD TV in about 2015 and replaced it in 2017. It had a terrible user interface, awful colour balance that I could never get tuned in right. Then lines started to appear across the panel and I replaced it with an LG (I'd had an LG before it) it's so much better.
When talking about innovation you could have mentioned that 'SPDIF' is 'Sony/Phillips Digital Interface'. It was probably the first fiber-optic data link in home electronics and was popular before HDMI took over.
@@BavarianM Yeah, you're right, I always thought of them as separate things, partly because spdif was Sony/Philips Digital Interface, and Toslink is Toshiba Link, so in my head they were separate. I guess also that for me Toslink was always the fibre optic connector, spdif was the coax one. I stand corrected 😅
It's very sad whats happened to this company, the great thing about working at a Philips facility was they often had a Philips shop, where you could buy all their products at a big discount, which could be deducted out of your wages, a Philips CDI was the first ever device I connected to the internet with, happy memories.
I worked for Philips Semiconductors, and I knew the story behind TSMC and ASML. When Philips spinned off its semicon division, we engineers felt horrible. Fortunately, NXP keeps growing anyway.
My dad worked for Philips in Toronto, starting at the Leaside factory when they made car radios. We had Philips speakers and radios and kitchen blenders and in 1986 one of their early model CD players. I remember their remote control television (Modular 4?) that used sound. They so dominated the 20th century, but now, their shavers are the only products I'd use.
@@-Muhammad_Ali- I worked for Philips until last month. This is one of the few business units that still is entirely run by core Philips - I worked directly with the factories in Drachten, Netherlands and Batam, Indonesia. Both fully owned and operated Philips factories.
@@jorgepena6412 oh, at least that. Happy to hear that. In fact EU companies who sent the manufacturing to Indonesia or Malaysia (i.e. Bosch) seem to be doing ok. Too bad Nokia got fooled.
The Philips factory in Germany, where the world's first CD was pressed, belonged to Polygram - the recording company, which Philips owned at the time. The first CD to be manufactured at the plant was "The Visitors" by ABBA. By the time CDs were introduced on the market in November 1982, a catalog of around 150 titles - mainly classical music - had been produced. The first CDs and CD players - including Philips' CD100 - were introduced in Japan in November, followed by a United States and European market introduction in March 1983.
Omg! I have still polygrams cassette, but with a cartoon. I remember before the cartoon started, it showed the title polygram video. The cassette was bought in Germany
I have a CD100 and the polygram "The Visitors" in my livingroom, beautiful machine and still works fine. I believe the first fully digitally recorded and mastered (DDD) CD is "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits, released in 1985.
A very sad story and one I have followed as a bystander for many years. It's also far from unique. The story of the development of the CD reminded me of the story of Kodak who were once a giant in film, whether your home 35mm camera or stock for the latest blockbuster movie. As you would expect, they had an R&D department who were early pioneers of digital video, but when the department pitched their invention to the board of Kodak, the response was "we're the kings of film so why would we want to invest in this new technology which can't add anything other than increased costs". Of course Kodak weren't the only people working on digital video, competitors took advantage to become leaders in the new technology leaving Kodak to play catch-up, and the rest is history. Lots of management bods like to think of themselves as innovators and entrepreneurs but in reality very few are. Mainly they are over-hyped (and over paid) administrators and it is this managerial class who I blame for the decline of western business. I'm from the UK where, in common with much of Europe, we have lots of talent - engineers, scientists, artists - but we are let down time and again by poor (often abysmal) management. Two of the main reasons for this are the "it's not what you know but who you know" culture and also the more recent 'fast tracking' of those who can wave a 'degree' in the air and thus over-ride those with years of relevant experience. This has been my personal experience over a lifetime of work and also, reading previous comments, many others. In fact it's 'common knowledge' but something approaching heresy to actually acknowledge. So you have the vampiric managerial classes laying waste to all they come into contact with. They may spot a small-ish company who is doing well so decide to buy it and often in the process likely stifle the very qualities which made it successful. Increasingly, large companies do not initiate real growth, just grow by 'acquisitions'. But they've increased the 'head count' so that's another few million £$ etc for me says the boss. Then when technology moves on, fashions change or we reach an economic downturn it's a a case of 'rationalisation', ie reducing the 'head count' and 'look at how much money I've saved' so that's another few million for me. The fact that so many 'offsprings' have prospered after being set free says it all.
Well said. If a company does not have a culture of internal leadership, and does not demand performance from individuals in upper or even middle management, inertness, bureaucracy and poor decision making begin to creep in. There are many large corporations in EU now, where if half of upper management stopped coming in to work, no one would notice the difference. Too many people who don’t perform keeping chairs warm.
Philips working culture wasn’t adapted to the change required for a lot of these industries. With the Asian companies (and work culture) competing in the same industries (except health care), Philips lost already based on their dedication. Philips was very much an innovation push companies where it invents things in labs and push it to market, where you summed up the biggest losses. The conglomerate concept just didn’t work anymore. Having smaller companies like signify and nxp was the right approach for profitability, but not for the long term Philips (shareholders). As a shell (as you mentioned) Philips just didn’t add value to these businesses anymore. It’s just another industry giant that experiences changes in industries when centre of gravity moves from one continent to another… this happened with computers (ibm), mobile phones (Nokia) and will happen with EVs (American and European car makers). Currently it also affects the previous electronic giants in Korea and Japan vs Chinese. Each company and continent or country need to rediscover what it’s best for their environment. ASML is expanding in the area where Philips used to be huge, for the Dutch economy it was a win, just not for Philips itself.
I started working as an engineer in France in a Philips R&D center which was sold. So I was an engineer at Philips for less than a year 😂. In the same year, they also sold their music business which was the world leader and was later renamed Universal Music. Management believed that the era of large conglomerates was coming to an end. Samsung was much smaller than Philips and Sony at that time but came out on top. Especially since Nokia was also run by the same kind of arrogant pricks.
Best earbuds I ever had were made by Philips. Completely flat frequency profile, durable cable, comfortable and secure in the ear. Their marketing was crap though. They sold them for 20 bucks and people were buying Beats by Dre or Skull Candy for a few times that price, and they were TERRIBLE.
Worked as an intern at Philips Healthcare for half a year. Management acted as your best friend until you started to disagree with them on something. I could either do as I told or get out. Great example of how toxic a work environment can be.
They still sell "Energy savers and LED Blubs" in my country and their Steam Irons are pretty popular here. They lost cuz of declining quality, high prices and rise of 100's of local brands.
Reminds me of the story of RCA. Also once a powerful tech conglomerate, that fell into irrelevancy after a series of failed products resulting from mismanagement and corporate politics.
not to mention GE buying them and stealing all the money and then selling the company piece by piece. insane the US gov let that happen but it was the 80s
It's actually crazy like as a guy who lives in a small African country, Botswana, we didn't really have much tech like we were raised to know brand names and just see their adverts on TV... Philips is actually so engranded in my childhood along the like likes of Sony or Samsung it's actually crazy they aren't really a thing from about a couple years ago like they did TV's and batteries but I assume their battery business is going alright but it's actually crazy to undertate just how big of a company they were, literally a household name 😶
I have a Philips headphone which i purchased in 2013 still working. Sad to see it in this state. My dad had a radio which worked for around 20+ year with carbon zinc battery.
They are still producing the absolutely best TVs in the world. I have the older verson ot their flagship THE ONE 7354,but when I had the chace to exoerience the new one serie 8837,I was stunned... Absolute perfection for that money.
@@stefanlukic7272 they are not, or POLED OLED supremacy is taken by Samsung and Sony, and their mainetance policy is very poor, if TV has issues there is no authorized centers in Europe to fix those, so, nothing in return for the value....
@@stefanlukic7272 my dad bought two years ago a new philips tv and it's amazing! The quality is great. Recently I watched tv from samsung, and the picture was jittery. Just ugly. I'm not a tech person, but I am an artist and can notice details very much
@@franfinesim Yeah,very true. My friend gave a huge amount of money for one LG,but it had so bad picture, no matter what I tried in set up... Philips series "The ONE",Is absolutely unbeatable! I have the model from three years ago 7534,and one important detail,it has 1700 PPI(pixel per inch),that in my opignion also contributes in picture quality,natural colours,eye relaxing picture... On my influence,my son in Germany bought the next generation 8545,who has 2100 PPI, and 20 percent richer colour stating by factory,and it was true! And this year je bought the actual model from "The ONE"series,8837 with 2400 PPI,and 120Hz refresh rate. Not to mention what a beauty this is! It Is also important to choose models with VA panels instead of those with IPS,and those are the 50,58 and 65",since 43,55 and 70" and above has IPS. The company TP Vision responsible for panels made exellent job,and in combination with famous Philips procesor,they deliver magic.
I've never even heard of Asianometry or this channel until a couple days ago when I got one of Asianometry's videos suggested on the front page, and today this video popped up on the recommended. Looks like the algorithm agrees with you on this one.
It’s going to be so weird one day not seeing Philips products around. My name is Phil and ever since I was a kid in the early 2000s I saw those “me”-branded products around, joking about how I’m still waiting for royalty checks. They will be missed
I have a family member who used to work at Philips in Bangladesh back in late 90's. He also shared the same concerns as many others here that is mismanagement of the company and the leadership not being qualified enough. It's a shame!
As early as 1979, Philips and Sony set up a joint task force of engineers to design the new digital audio disc. Many decisions were made in the year to follow - such as the disc diameter. The original target storage capacity for a CD was one hour of audio content, and a disc diameter of 115 millimeters was sufficient for this, however both parties extended the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. In June 1980, the new standard was proposed by Philips and Sony as the "Red Book" containing all the technical specification for all CD and CD
Legend has it, that the diameter of the hole in the middle was taken from the diameter of the Dutch guilder coin of 10 cents (called "dubbeltje")....one of the engineers took it from his wallet and proposed it...
To add - the track pitch/distance was taken from Philips (Magnavox in the US) DiscoVision, then LaserVision and then after Pioneer took up the pile of noodles it was rebranded as "LaserDisc". Not to forget "CD Video" (the golden Laserdisc). Philips also came up with the same PCM as Sony did (Sony even offered PCM processors to use their Betamax VCRs as audio recorders). Sony added the laser diode to be able to make CD players compact and with a long life (the HeNe-Laser tubes wore out, the Laser diodes rather not). Philips learned its lessons together with IBM (ah you need a dust-free room to press LaserVision discs? - In the DiscoVision era, 2 out of 3 produced discs would not play because of dust particles molded inside). So yeah. That's it.
They had a marketing slogal about 25 years ago "Let's make things better". Made me think at the time, were they making bad products up to that moment in time?
i found a old philips radio, it was of my grandfather.............I cleaned it a little and plugged it in and it worked like a charm. I was amazed to see this kind of reliability.
I worked there for 1.5 years. Internally it is a open and amazing workplace. Reason it is failing is thinking way too much as a volunteer company than profit driven business. And definitely some old folks making bad decision. In general, it is full of innovative and talented people. I hope this company will rise again and continue its‘ legacy.
Besides some minor errors, this is a good description of what happened to Philips over the last 30-40 years. One glaring omission is that Philips also had a Philips record company and later they owned Polygram and Mercury. But like everything that was successful or had potential, it was sold to UMG and then did even better than when it was part of Philips. And of course the same happened with other divisions. Philips invented plumbicon TV cameras, but the division was first joint ventured with, then sold to Bosch (BTS). Hearing instruments was sold to Beltone. Fluke now makes the measuring instruments that Philips used to make. Etc etc etc
Am I missing something? Philips is quite big still and defo hasn’t stopped making electronics?? I literally have one of their new Ambilight TVs sat in my living room.
Yeah, seems like you missed watching the video. The TV, despite having a Philips logo, isn't actually made by Philips. As I said in the video, the company Philips sold its TV business together with the right to use their logo to a random company
I was born and have grown up in the city where Philips was founded and grew into it's giant size. I have gone to a high school founded by Philips workers and gone to the university that existed mostly because of Philips. I think todays Philips is truly a sad shadow of what it once was. And maybe it's just the opinion of some random guy from the netherlands' tech city but I really do still believe that things really started going downhill for Philips when they decided to move their headquarters from Eindhoven to Amsterdam. Going from a city completely focused on tech to a city far more focused on business in the traditional Dutch sense. Philips was our first big tech company and I think it functioned unlike any of the other more traditional big Dutch companies and trying to run it as if it were Shell or Unilever or ING killed it.
Thank you for making this vid. Still after all those failures and mistakes Philips deserves a HUGE RESPECT for propelling and pushing innovations for the societies and people around the world. What they made possible for all of us is amazing and very inspiring!
Yes, it does. Makes it even harder to accept this company has been gutted by incompetent CEO's who've "restructured' the company for short term bonusses.
I spent some time at the Philips campus in Drachten, where the Philishave, Senseo, vacuum cleaners and Airfryer technology was largely developed and tested. This was back in 2012 and it already struck me as a company that wasn't keeping up. The campus was old, falling apart and generally quite a depressing place. I was there for an IT overhaul, and I was baffled at how primitive and outdated their IT environment was for 2012 standards.
Great video and it showed the product I worked on. As someone from The Netherlands I enjoyed this video. Also seeing the Azurion FlexArm as one of the featured medical products. It was the last project I did at Philips and was an honour to help with this technological marvel. We even called in a complete un-Philips project. Removing managers in the project and adding more techs along the way, to get it out the door. Then at the end we still had to wait one year for it to get released. But we were also wondering what technological challenging project would come next, and except for a lot of maintenace, we couldn't think of any. Which recalls the moral of the Philips story. Gold in their hands, expensive bets and no way to sell them.
Wow, quite a considerable downfall. The "planned obsolescence" aspect obvious did not become a part of my Philishave. I have been using it for 42 years now, and I know it wasn't new when I started using it. I have no idea how old it really is, and on the back of this, I tried finding out. All I could find was a reference on one site listing it as "vintage". It will probably out-last me 😁
The "planned obsolescence of light bulbs" is a conspiracy myth. There's simply a connection between the strength (and hence lifespan) of the filament, and the light output at a certain wattage. Standardizing the latter automatically resulted on also standardizing the lifespan. So why is this story still told? I think because it's fits very well into a narrative people like.
@@NeovanGoth Indeed. There's one Kodak made incandescent bulb that VWestlife showed in a video that had a lifespan of 10 minutes but was very bright and ran very hot. It was used in photography or something.
I had the opposite fate with PHILIPS products, not lasting very long* but l still love the company and sad to hear of its impending doom. *Actually, l must add that every new tech product from the 80s 90s 2000s l bought never lasted very long for me. Just my bad luck l suppose.
I wonder whether companies are like animals and plants. Maybe they have a finite lifetime, suffering from the evolution of competitors or internal decay and then dying. Perhaps this is inevitable?
My uncle was a great fan of Philips and I loved their products in the eighties. Video 2000 was simply years ahead. I was also interested to learn about the Philips football team PSV one of the perks of playing for PSV was that players who were offered a football contract were always offered a Philips job as well! Wouldn't happen today :)
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I want to buy Phillips vibe rator
@@dongshengdi773 I r8 ur vibe 8/8 m8
Does this discount apply only for the first year or permanently?
We still have Philips power house, a tape recorder bought in 1991 in working condition. It is a wooden tape recorder with stereo wooden box speakers. It has dual cassette slots to transfer the recording from A to B. It has a built in equalizer, FM radio and audio CD mode
It is very saddening to see true innovators like LG and Philips going dead, and to see idiotic companies like xiaomi and BBK flourish
I worked at the Philips physics lab (NatLab) for a while in the mid-nineties. I have two clear memories from that time that showed the state of the company:
1) There were "idea boxes" in several locations, but nobody would empty them.
2) I know a guy there that was a very early adopter of MP3, and suggested the walk-man division to make a portable MP3 player two years before the first ones hit the market. He was laughed out of the room, mostly because he didn't have a PhD.
The management was very top down, and very hierarchical, only those with the highest levels of academic training and management levels were allowed to have any ideas. This made it impossible to notice trends and made it a very inward looking organisation.
Now that same guy is laughing watching Philips dying lmao.
One notable example; cd-i. Let's keep this Phillips only..sure it will catch on 😜
Sounds absolutely frustrating
True, very true.
Ive heard stories of offices that were officially closed, but the paychecks kept coming, so it became a hangout spot. Was told by friends that a few of those people got degrees while getting paid since they were never asked to work or report to anything.
Philips is an example of what happens when you replace engineers with MBA's and beancounters.
I fully agree with you. I worked for IEC (world electrical standardization) and had been in contact with Philipps' top researchers. Already in the 90s they felt deeply concerned about the influence of the financial layer in management. Living now in south east Asia, I am closely tracking the heritage.
As an MBA holder working in corporate, I completely agree with you
As happened to so many other former great companies. Commodore for one. Or make the mistakes that the British did and let politicians meddle. We invented the concept of using computers for business purposes and it came from a tea merchant of all things (J. Lyons & Co) that all got folded into ICL which is now part of Fujitsu. See also British Leyland.
These dumb MBAs know one thing, maximize profits by outsourcing manufacturing to China.
@@GeoNeilUK The Labour governments of the 70s nationalising things pretty much killed off car production and other things.
I worked for Philips in the 2010s. It's an extremely top heavy company that prioritizes paying outrageous salaries to the people working in Eindhoven over investing in developing new technology. Hard to compete when you spend all your money hiring middle managers rather than the engineers who do the work. I was a middle manager.
"I can blame you but I shoul not"
😂
Lies again? Don't Die Pig Heads
Miss manage as you mention it
Absolute nonsense.
It was like a big stake ready to be sliced. You were lucky to have a piece then. 😅
Toshiba in many ways are similar. They invented flash memory and once had large memory division (now called Kioxia), sold image sensor to Sony, healthcare to Canon, sold home appliance to Midea (sell electronic under Toshiba brand), tv business to Hisense. Now mostly involved in non-consumer product like power plant, elevator, lighting, energy system, railway system, automotive parts, hydrogen.
Yep! As far as I could tell, their memory and flash storage division was spun off into Kioxia, and their PC division was spun off into Dynabook.
General Electric too!
Makes sense since the margins on enduser products are very small.
Toshiba produce everything. From transistors to transformators, electromotors until Generator and Turbine for steam Engine and Water Dam.
Sounds similar to a video I watched about the destinies of Kodak & FujiFilm. It was not that Kodak failed look to the future beyond film photography; it was just that they chose what eventually turned out to be the wrong sides.
Interestingly enough, FujiFilm is nowadays also huge in healthcare imaging as well, among other things.
As a techie, I believe there will be more such companies which will fail because of hiring more managers than engineers or skilled workers.
This is very true. In a modern company, the percentage of people that "actually do something" aka engineers, etc, is very low. Whilst the majority of employees are in Bullsh*t jobs like managers, paper pushers, etc.
In fact there is a good book called "Bullsh*t jobs". It is worth a read.
@@deckard5pegasus673 I work at dell and they prioritize in the sales team all the way.....I mean having sales is good but, technology is such a risky industry.....imo the ones who keep it running are the R&D and the people who make the product happen. A good product sells by itself nowdays.
I think it will happen to EVERY company after a certain amount of time. Inevitable.
@@deckard5pegasus673 David Graeber. The author of your book and the main who invented the phrase "we are the 99%" during the London occupy movement. A great man much loved and missed. Other notable works: Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
There's also a complete lack of true marketers at Philips. Good riddance.
I am Dutch and into technology. I can tell you that Philips has been dying as a tech company for decades, in the 80's/90's it started to go downhill. Why? They cut on R&D in the Netherlands and internationally. They started to buy other companies (like medical diagnostic equipment) instead of developing technology. At its high point Philips got the greatest minds to its campus in Eindhoven to lecture the engineers, including Einstein.
Fun fact: Karl Marx stayed with the family in Zaltbommel (with the parents of the brothers). I don't agree that Philips was dying. They made the choice to shrink down the company and it probably was the right choice. Look what happened to the likes of Nokia, Ericsson, Gründig and to a lesser extent Siemens. It's not a coincidence that all these European tech companies fell away. It actually isn't just in Europe. Look at companies like Motorola in the US and Sharp in Japan.
@@djoetma These are going away because of red communist сhіnks playing dirty and stealing any tech they can.
They don't have a choice, declining demographics will lead to this, Japan is in a similar situation as well
All I know Philips for now is shavers and toothbrushes
@@djoetma And RCA. A bit like the UK car industry.
I'm Dutch and my step father worked at Phillips for over 30 year. He lived all over Asia for years working for Phillips. He's been retired for over a decade now, but still gets his pension from Phillips, but has no love left for the company at all. He has witnessed the mismanagement and mistakes at Phillips first hand and has seen it get worse over the years during his retirement. The company is a former shell of itself and it makes him sad. The company was a lot bigger and important when he started there at the beginning of his career. He told me recently during Christmas holidays that the he knew and worked with the current CEO of Phillips. He said in the old days before he was CEO he would always point the finger at someone else and always find blame in someone other then himself when things went wrong. It's a shame Phillips could have been so much bigger and more important in the global electronic consumer market but it was all wasted due to bad decisions made primarily by management.
I think thats the same with all failed western companies. Which seems to be most of them. They got taken over by jerks.
Europe at the moment is doing its best to destroy every bit of tech and manufacturing we have left. The chemical and electronics industries were first, the automotive industry will soon follow. And the fact that Poland, when they want to invest in nuclear power, is no longer turning to Germany, but to South Korea, is also quite telling regarding the state of Europe in any high tech.
Exodias,
WHY YOU CRY ANONYMOUS ?????
Philips lightning, Singapore, Philips Taipei, do i know him ? I would call him no to say how evil you are here. WHY YOU DO THAT ?
Roy Jakobs is all new to me, singapore i never was, you don't understand your father i guess, shame ?
Margins in semiconductors, mosfet ? Only ASML is lucrative enough to make margins.
Why you say this, why so stupid? SHAME ON YOU !
I stopped buying their products because of poor after sales services
The bad management coming from agreements with the competition. Agreements that allowing the company to target just specific people, not every potential customer. And another thing - the products are to be made to not last forever in order to secure steady sales.
I worked on an assembly line for Philips’ vacuum tubes in the early sixties! The transistor manufacturing part of the plant was out of bounds to mere mortals then, it was very hush hush...
PS: interesting bit of trivia: Philips, in cooperation with Gazelle ( a Dutch bicycle manufacturer) produced the first e-bike before the Second World War
Wow!
Actual neat tidbit, thanks.
Interesting
Very interesting, thank you!
In India Phillips lasted till outset of Corona
It's also left its mark on the actual geography of the Netherlands. Before Philips, Eindhoven was an insignificant city surrounded by some small villages, but due to Philips it grew into the large city it is today.
it's still an insignificant city surrounded by some small villages. No one here ever goes to Eindhoven unless you absolutely have to.
@@daarom3472 lmao chill bro
@@thunderb00m just calling it how it is. It's like living in the US and saying the car industry turned Detroit in a major metropole.
@@daarom3472 they've got one of the country's best universities of technology there, as well as ASML, a company of global significance (discussed in the video), along with plenty of other companies in the technology industry (such as NXP, also discussed in the video). It may not have the allure of Amsterdam or Rotterdam, but it's hardly 'insignificant'.
@@daarom3472 Yes, Eindhoven (and the surrounding area) is small and it not very interesting to see. What you sadly don't seem to know is that it generates a quarter of the exports of the Netherlands and receives more than a third of the R&D spending in NL. Half of the Dutch patents are made here, also. And ASML has it's main presence here. AKA the only company in the world that makes the machines that make chips. All of the tech events from the Netherlands also happen here, from my experience. Nobody invited you to go there to visit anything, lmao. I fail to see your point other than you either being a troll, or a tourist.
Detroit makes cars, not geopolitically significant high-tech machines.
I’m an engineer at Philips around Eindhoven, and while summing up certain facts may look bad, it doesn’t feel bad for me because all the talents and spinoffs that Philips produced have created a very successful tech industry around Eindhoven.
The company may be a shadow of what it once was, but the region is stronger than ever, which benefits many people.
I visited Eindhoven during my work trip through ASML and it was eye opening how much influence Philips had on the country and the industries it birthed. Especially when I visited Strijp S, it showed what kind of legacy Philips had created.
There’s absolutely nothing special about Eindhoven. I’ve lived there for years and it’s one of the most boring cities in the Netherlands. Culturally dead, awful housing market, dull architecture, high crime rate in the middle of the city…no landmarks, nothing, it’s an industrial city and I can definitely see why their weakness became lack of creativity. It’s a city for the rich and established who look to increase their wealth or retire. Nothing conducive to creativity. Not to mention the attitude of locals towards immigrants. Sad stuff, as it’s a city that’s so we’ll positioned and has so much potential.
It may work well in that region and help alot of ppl around getting jobs or other benefits
But on the other hand, it doesn't "innovative" anymore, more like sub con producing products for larger brand, losing its own identity
Giving up innovation and totally disconnected from the market trend
Remember LG
Phillips failed because they should have bought in a American CEO. Americans know how to combine creativity and knowing how to make money.
Irrelevant.
My aunt spent her whole career working as an executive secretary and had a front row seat to all of it .She's been retired for 10 years now but her stories are fascinating .She worked for the second in command at the headquarters office.I got my first electric razor from her as a 12th birthday gift
Care to share some of your aunt story?
@@nathasyapramudita6312 I would if I could but I'm 47 and she told them to me as a teenager .Too much time has past for me to remember them well enough to repeat .30 years is a long time
That's a story enough for me. Thanks ❤️
Hello Clubber
I guess i know who your ant is.
The Razor company in Drachten is still in operation, was that the last production facility in Holland ?
She was there too,when the mad guy dd the breadche, widescreen, the wrong building, when they just moved from the Rembrandt into the new building.
You should upload some stories here, toggetter ?
@@lucasRem-ku6eb She worked at the Belgian HQ in Turnhout
I spent nearly 40 years in electronics & at the turn of the milemium, Philips was one of my major clients. They were an amazing firm & being bound by confidentiality contract, allowed me access to thier R&D in Eindhoven where I spent a lot of time working on various things which included something called gun pitch modulation in CRT deflection. It was a fantastic invention & had they designed it maybe 5 years earlier would have been as big as the Trinitron was for Sony...
Nah, Philips failed miserably in the marketing of their products. So even if they had developed that tv before Sony did...
Btw, Sony had a fantastic name for their televisions: Trinitron.
Can you remember a single Philips tv product name?
I do. Compare:
Sony - Trinitron
Philips - 100 Hz television with Digital Scan
They did make excellent television sets, but again, marketing was not their strong point.
@@AudieHolland philips ambilight
@@TheDutchMitchell Now that was a great name. Don't know how succesful the product was though.
I used to work at a company that was bought out by Philips (which was then rebranded to Philips Neuro) making brain scan equipment. I can't stress enough how horrified I still am by how little the management cared about making a quality product. Finding out their management has always made baffling decisions isn't too surprising.
It hasn't 'always' made baffling decisions. They started doing that when the MBAs came in and took over. There's a reason it was a gigantic company that produced some of the best equipment ever put out by anyone.
The target of most of those smaller companies is to be bought by a big company like Philips/sms/abbot or whatever.
large companies often get lost in layers of management and over time their management gets disillusioned disoriented and live in an alternative reality. Case in point - Boeing overlooked safety which resulted in one of the largest callbacks and losses in history
BT are the same, like a wafer biscuit, layer after layer of pointless and clueless managers all trying to account for their existence
I actually left philips medical shortly after the apnea drama and my experiences were similair, the fact my superior deliberately tried to hide bad samples when production was already not going too well is something I'm not going to forget soon, especially if you consider the products we made were also for a very vulnerable group of people
I wanted to do a video on Philips' decline for a long time. Now the story has been so well done that I feel I can't ever make a video on it. Great work
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! Seeing how well the video is performing for me I'm sure there is space for you to talk about he company as well if you pick another angle or something :)
doooo iittttttt
Maybe there's a business school analysis out there? Lessons learned etc. I'm interested in WHY Phillips kept failing.
Frankly speaking, I follow your channel and only interested in your expertise on high tech but then you are not really good but yet focus on non high tech companies or industries. So what is the point of saying: I always want to do a video on Philips…
Thanks a lot to @TechAltar for this video because it was definitely a big story in tech history that somehow wasn't covered much (probably cause it's not American or Japanese). Very happy to hear the story of Philips. I think there's room for another video that goes in depth in the Philips-Sony duo in physical tech.
My father would have been saddened by this, though not surprised.
He worked for Mullard, which became Philips Research Laboratories, based near Redhill in Surrey, UK. He was frequently exasperated by Philips’ management decisions.
One year, Philips made a rather poor pay offer, but tried to sweeten the deal by including a fully funded private medical insurance package. The staff argued they’d prefer a better pay rise instead, but eventually accepted.
The medical insurance scheme came back to haunt Philips. It was a lifetime deal and covered a spouse too. Belatedly, they realised premiums were becoming extremely costly as the workforce aged and they decided to renege on the deal. The staff, many of them now retired, fought a group action in the courts and won. Philips then had to pay for both parties’ legal expenses in addition to continuing to fund the medical insurance.
In the eighties my father, together with almost every other member of staff over the age of 55 years, was made redundant because management decided the average age of employees at the lab was too high.
My Father also worked at Mullard / PRL from the 60's unit the early 90's. He was in the machine shop, where he and his colleagues worked on mechanical components of many of the prototypes which Phillips had in deleopment at the time. They also used to make occasional parts for satellites and experimantal military systems, and Phillips also did some contract work at the site for other companies. The workshops and everything on that part of the site was closed down shortly after my father retired and half the site was sold off. A few years later the rest of the site was sold and Phillips were said to be moving their R&D to Eindhoven.
@@steveg5129 They may well have met then, my father had a high regard for the abilities of the folks in the machine shop. In the 80’s I worked briefly in Systems Division on the south side of the site and revisited the site occasionally via Google Earth over the years. It was sad to see it derelict, then demolished and now occupied by warehouses.
My first job from University in 1988 was at PRL, Salfords, near Redhill. Now it's a storage facility. I still live in the area but have spent the rest of my career in tech working for Americans. In the late 80s there was already a feeling of decay, which is why I left. A great shame.
Ericsson too made the mistake of letting their 'too old' staff go. Pure insanity.
Firing workers who are too "old" is such a dumb move. Here in Copenhagen there's an electronics component store (Brinck / Elextra) - and they still have a dude working there who's my father's age. A can't believe he isn't pensioned yet: he must be close to 70. He's worked there for at least 28 years. I thought about that the last time I saw him. Made me appreciate the fact that his brain is such a HUGE reservoir of knowledge. Letting him go would be insanely dumb. He has the expertise to serve customers, and make sure they always get the help they need - even with the nerdiest of requests.
On the other hand, there's also a camera store here in Copenhagen (Photografica) - and it used to be seen as a deluxe dealer of professional cameras, used cameras (Hasselblad, Rolleiflex, Leica, etc) with a repair facility, etc - and staffed by highly skilled photography experts. Now, the last time I went there, I was shocked that they were only staffed by teenagers, who knew very very little about even elementary photographic history or techniques. I lost a LOT of respect for that store.
I was an engineer at Philips consumer electronics. We used to say that the company was a tech giant with brittle marketing feet. I loved the company, the training, the culture, the pride to work there. I learned a lot. Very sad to see it gone. I was working for another company when the plant closed and I bought the last equipment before the closing. A tear runs down my cheek…..
Here a fun little anedote about Philips which you won't find on the internet but is known to some of the local people. When Philips invented the CD-player they intended to use 14 bits to encode the sound, you can thank Sony for the 2 extra bits, Sony had technological reasons for it - due to their producing business - and Sony worked with Philips on the software-side of the CD-player so eventually Sony twisted Philips its arm and Philips agreed to 16 bits. A better known secret: Philips agreed to make a CD-based console (or at least the CD-part of it) with Nintendo, that failed and that was the direct reason why Sony made its own console, the PlayStation. First Sony tried to take over from Philips for Nintendo but eventually that did not work out and Sony decided to do it themselves.
I mean it is a fun anecdote, but is not exactly secret and definitely on the internet. It's even part of the Wikipedia articles on it.
Wow, I did not know that.
Thanks for the anecdote. It was new to me!
You could say the Philips CD-i and Sony PlayStation both came about as a result of Nintendo being impossible to work with 🙃
For several years all the initially produced Philips CD players only used 14-bit DACs so the CD you were playing might have been recorded with 16-bits, but if you owned a Philips branded CD player you only got to listen to 14-bit music.
My father worked at the Aachen Philips research lab for 30 years as an electronics engineer until the early nineties. The research was still interesting at the time developing fiber optics production quality control devices for example. The bureaucratic management style stifled a lot of innovation though and my father was generally dissatisfied with management together with other engineers in his group.
How cool, i live in Aachen
While I grew up in Aachen, there was not only the Philips research center, but also a lightning factory and a monitor factory. Thousands of jobs were lost there in the last 25 years.
@Carlavagnen 13 Quattroporte?
I worked for philips in the supply chain dept. They rarely manufactures their stuff they usually use something called LM that is legal manufacturer in their medical field such as ultrasound imaging and MATCso it isn't surprising at all
This is very disheartening story.
The thing i used to like about Philips is that their products where sturdy and durable. I still have multiple electronics going strong after nearly 20 years of abuse while other brands of the same product broke down long ago
Yep. And they (mostly used) to have such high quality tech & electronics, especially audio equipement wise, that i could by 10€ earbuds or 100€ portable MP3/USB speakers that would last me years, and have superior quality, compared to all the typical brands like Apple selling you shit that breaks in months if not days (my record is like a couple hours for 50€ Apple earbuds) that would be priced two, to five, and sometimes even TEN times more expensive, for a quarter of its lifespan and similar if not worse quality. Especially those, god forbid, absolute garbage Apple earbuds.
My dad owned a Philips TV (his first one) that lasted over 20 years. It would have lasted even more had not a service guy messed it up. I own a CD-based music player from Philips that still works to this day (although I use it very rarely). I bought it 20 years ago.
My father has a radio from Phillips from 1974. Still works after 50 years, with dirt and grime on the outside
My 1962 philips radio I inherited from my grandfather also still works. All vacuum tubes, and it sounds great.
@@AshwinSriram I have a Philips CRT that I use for playing retro games, it was manufactured in 1998 and still works perfectly. Someone managed to rip off the front buttons, but I use the remote anyway lol.
To Mr. TechAltar, you forgot to mention an invention of Philips it was a called "Laser Disk" for playing video format. Back in the early 80's I worked at Philips in Hamburg (Germany) and I worked at the production line of the Laser Disk. That was a transition from VHS tapes to DVD discs. This invention didn't live long and died in about 2-3 years later and was replaced by DVD format. The Laser discs wasn't popular anyway due to the high price to buy or even to rent a movie, not to mention the laser laser disk player you also had to buy as well to be able to play the movie. Cheers to you and thank you to bring me back to my old days.
The death cycle of big companies always reads the same , and should always be on your mind if you work at one .
My boss was very angry with us one day about feedback to improve my floors efficiency .
He opened the suggestion box he had installed , to find a note saying " read the suggestions " signed and dated from me , 4 months ago .
How right you are. All businesses ( no matter how successful they have been) have a lifespan.
I work at the former Philips campus in Eindhoven and it is kinda sad to see all of old research labs being repurposed as office spaces. In fact the whole city was centered around Philips at some point, where entire neighborhoods would be just production facilities. Now they have all been repurposed for housing. Philips Research still exists, but as far as I know it is on a much smaller scale and they focus mostly on medical-related research. As you said, they have mostly given up on having their R&D stay in the Netherlands. The recent recalls of their respirators also caused a lot of problems for them, so I'm not that optimistic about their future given their track record. Seeing a giant fall this hard is both fascinating and sad at the same time.
The problem with the respirators, that's karma.
I remember the Evoluon in Eindhoven. I am that old :)
They had an incredible run of success for a European company considering how much competition they had from the far east. It's a lesson in not making short sighted decisions in business. A shame though.
So, you work in HTC ?
Update: "Philips Research still exists", it will not in the very next months.
My Father worked at Philips for many years. Back in the 60's they made TVs in Australia and every part and I mean every part was made locally in their local production facility. I know because dad took me there to see how everything was made from wires to vacuum tubes and picture tubes. At that time they had a research facility that was at the leading edge of solid state electronics but that facility was closed down and was moved to Singapore and the rest is history. At that time Dad took me to see the installation and commissioning of one of our first electron microscopes (you missed Philips Scientific which was also a business unit). However, the 70's it became very apparent that unless you has a strong connection with someone important in Eindhoven you would go nowhere much. Dad used to refer to the all wise and powerful men from Holland. That introspection got worse so bad mangers went up in the organization and the cancer in Eindhoven was spread globally. Then era of the accountant lead demise had started. The free fall gathered pace in the 80's. So many great ideas, inventions, new products but such poor management.
You can make article with this... 😁
It looks like the company still tried hard and just didn't get any home runs later in its life.
@@Toro_Da_Corsa more like: managers their pet projects didnt score any homeruns.
Same here in Naenae, across the ditch here in New Zealand. They closed up their TV manufacturing here in 1987-1988?
This must've been the Adelaide facility then?
I had a Philips MP3 player, MP4 player, earphones and I used them a lot. I also have a Philips electric shaver (OneBlade) which still works. We had a Philips TV too, it worked fine as well. We also have a Philips radio which still works as well, but we hadn't used it in a long time. So in general it was a good company. Bit sad that it is not active in the consumer electronics industry, but hey, this happens.
Interestingly, a Philips hair trimmer I bought in 2018 is perhaps the best designed, engineered, and manufactured consumer product I've ever purchased.
Same lol. I've never had a single issue with my oneblade, even intentionally trying to cut myself with it, just to see if I could.
I had a Philips trimmer made in Hungary for 10 years
No even exaggerating
Really, I have two Phillips hair trimmers - one made in the early 2000s in Europe and the other one made more recently in China. The newer one is crap, the power cable simply started to disintegrate after a while, while the old one is still going strong.
made in China = Crap.
I have this one blade thing, which is a trimmer but very fine and its great as a wet shaver. I get very close to a blade shave. A less wasteful head would probably better, though.
My grandfather used to build Philips TVs for people in the 50s in western Finland. As a consequence they had one of the first TVs in town despite being working class, which my mother always thought was very cool. My grandmother in turn was quite pleased when she found out I had bought a Philips TV some 10 years ago (still got it). Nothing lasts forever, I guess, but it's a bit sad to hear.
My father in Vietnam bought a Philips radio 50 years ago and it is still working today after he died 3 years ago.
During Mid 1970's - Early 1980'S In India Used To Have A Few Electronics Products Made By Philips
As A INDIAN Must Confess
This So Called EUROPEAN ELECTRONIC PRODUCT GIANT 😁😁
THIRD GRADE TO THE CORE😁😁
ZERO AFTER SALES SERVICE🤢🤢
ZERO AFTER SALES CUSTOMER CARE 🤢🤢🤢🤢
I ANY DAY IN THE 1980'S - 1990'S PREFERED BUYING JAPANESE ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS
SONY, NATIONAL, O GENERAL, PANASONIC, AKAI, NATIONAL, FUNAI COLOUR TV, VCP, VCR , MUSIC SYSTEM, WALKMAN
AS AN SOUTH ASIAN PREFERED FAR EAST ASIAN MADE PRODUCTS👍👍👍👍😍😍😍😍😍😍❤❤❤❤❤❤
AND NOT SO CALLED SELF HYPED EUROPEAN COMPANY PRODUCTS 😁😁😁😁😁😁🤣🤣
They had TVs in fucking 50s???????? anyways Samsung made their first TV in 70s hahahaha
The sad thing about the dissolution of Philips is that the people responsible for its decline have or have been made to jump ship where they now apply the same proven management style on other healthy companies.
Almost like a disease 😬
I used to work for Phillips as a janitor
Siemens, the last European Giant.
my first thoght too
Nokia telecommunications also
Don't forget ASML either. By market cap, it's the largest
Don’t forget asml largest of em all
@@paweswierczek6265 Nokia is owned by HMD
I worked at Philips Semiconductors until 2002. It's very sad knowing what's happened.
"Let's make things better" was our sentence.
By the time they used that slogan, the reality was already
"Let's make things as cheap as possible (to produce)"
I briefly worked for Philips in the late 90’s. I remember a manager telling me how they once rearranged the words on a company sign to read “Let’s make better things”.
@@hemptinyhouse6663
😀 😀 + 😞
I used to repair CRT TVs and audio equipment in the 80s and 90s, and I dreaded getting Phillips units to look at. They were always grossly over-engineered. For example, in some TVs they had protection circuits to protect the protection circuits and if one part shut down, it took everything else down and it was then difficult to work out which section was actually the problem. We had a saying for Phillips electronics in the workshop "Let's make things overly complicated".
Die slogan was verzonnen door de raad van bestuur om te communiceren met het personeel dat de producten beter moesten zijn. Zo groot was de afstand tussen de directie en de designafdeling inmiddels.
I work in the semiconductor industry and I am surprised how often I run into people who used to work for Philips at some point in time and companies who trace their origin back to Philips. They have certainly created a lasting legacy within the semiconductor industry, its just a shame that they couldn't work out how to make their own company successful in this highly profitable industry.
This is pretty spot on - I worked at Philips Research for 7 years in the 90's, including on CD-i, and yes the company direction was repeatedly wrong. Very sad. Worked with some great people.
Aren't most of them? I work as a software developer and I can't understand how the companies I worked for are still in business and how the most incompetent people are in the most important positions. If I would have worked mostly alone I could have developed better products.
Can you say more about the CD-i side of things? What went wrong? Any anecdotes would be amazing :)
@@UmiharaKawaseTube My personal view reflects the fact that when CD-i was conceived and brought to market, there were no consumer "multimedia" products - this was the first, co-developed by Philips and Sony (as the Green Book standard). Retrospect is a wonderful thing, but from my work at Philips Research in the years while it was developed, the belief was that multimedia experiences themselves (mix of images, sound, and video) would define the product... and this was a new thing. The thing that was in retrospect under-anticipated was the capabilities of the main chip to do more than sequence stuff off the CD. There were lots of multimedia titles (eg encyclopedias, etc) but that wasn't enough... to shift units and prove better value the system also needed to do games. Here the lowly 68070 (don't get confused, not even as powerful as the widely-used 68020 eg in Macs)... this was a 68000-derivative made by Philips. It just couldn't push pixels fast enough to do great games, and had no hardware support for sprites etc. It turned out multimedia was a bit "meh" and it couldn't compete in gaming, so ultimately wasn't successful. As it was a visionary product in a new market it's hard to blame management - the market just didn't materialize for all sorts of reasons. Today the web effectively fills that market space in my mind - multimedia with connectivity backed by all the worlds knowledge and services in the cloud :) If CD-i v2 had gone head then its specs were quite impressive as a gaming system, but it was cancelled pretty soon after being conceived. I think it was going to use the 68340 if my 30-year old memories are correct, plus sprite hardware from one of the games houses at the time.
My grandfather was Dutch and I remember my grandparents used to have a home entertainment system which was entirely made up of a combination of Philips and Sony equipment, they also bought exclusively Philips lightbulbs right up till suddenly the quality dropped after 2000, so they stopped; I remember my grandfather lamenting about it. I personally was upset they exited the market because I always felt their low scale stuff, such as radios, power supplies, lightbulbs etc used to be superior to all the other brands.
Cool fact: In Hearts of Iron 4 if you play as Netherlands, under company research and production selection page on the government tab, Phillips is listed for electronics and radar research speed increase.
Just to add that Philips Records was also one of the biggest labels in classical music industry and many of the recordings are still considered to be the finest. It's fate was being absorbed into Universal Music but the American consortium decided to discontinue the Philips brand. Philips huge historical recording repertoire has been reissuing under other labels such as Decca, which is also under Universal Music. It's really a sad story that Philips declined in the music industry and they eventually sold the business. So does for EMI.
EMI was killed by researching developing and building the MRI scanner.
It bankrupted them, the early device and everything was snatched up by an American company for peanuts.
Wow. So basically they'd gotten to the point where they sold off all real assets along with the right to use the Phillips name, then even the name became of little worth so Universal ONLY purchased the masters and rights. That is sad.
Philips was owner of polygram until 1998 the largest music company at time.
Philips was also huge in pop recording in the 1960s. Dusty Springfield and the Four Seasons.
@@donnafromnyc and jazz with Nina Simone
There are a lot of parallels here to the American company General Electric; another huge "Everything Inc." that's faded down to a shadow of its former self. To be brief about it, the 1980s brought about the lust for "financialization" among large Western manufacturers, driven by pressure from wealthy "activist" stock investors. The Carl Icahns of the business world. Their games with equity drove the rush to globalize production to low-cost Asia; and to convert innovations into debt-service cash way too prematurely. The investors' goals were to turn these corporations into "banks" from manufacturers, with all the "cash cow"/ATM advantages (to only them) that implies. That's the *real* "Story Behind" declines like these.
What's your logic? It's all about inventions, without inventions all these companies will go the way of dodo birds... Apple is doing just fine with low-cost Asian production.
Tbf to GE, they did like $75b in revenue last year vs like $15b for Philips
@@EhEhEhEINSTEIN GE was bigger, and they accomplished more "financialization" than most, earlier.
@@jmg8246 it's history, bro. You're talking in basic terms about how something "should" be; I talked about what actually happened. Private equity is the lamprey that grew larger than the whale it was sucking blood from. That's why thieves like Bob Mercer are richer than God, and formerly productive "light bulb" companies like Philips and Sylvania are empty brands.
@@dsnodgrass4843 It worked out well for most American companies. The US currently has like 32 of the top 50 largest companies and most of the top ten.
GE was an exception. Most other major companies didn’t decline like that. And GE is still a pretty huge company. They probably make the best jet engines besides pratt & whitney. GE is one of only several companies around the world capable of making advanced jet engines
I hope Philips makes a comeback. They have always produced electronics of the highest quality.
It really is a shame. When I was a kid, Philips was well respected as a Dutch brand, as well as a global player. They were involved in some of the best products ever invented. It's downright depressing to see how far they've fallen.
Crazy to think if they just kept like 1-5% of some of these ventures, they would likely be one of the highest valued companies today.
The extensive red tape, to many manegers and bean counters brought Philips to it knees
@@obelic71 yeah it's sad but true, used to be an absolute behomoth and an amazing innovator now it is just razors and toothbrushes...
the shareholders may have hold the shares of the new companies, I don't think it makes a ton of difference as long as they kept their HQ in the netherlands (which they did)
@@ysbrandd not even those anymore..
Yeah, pretty pathetic why not just keep a few share of TSMC, ASML or any of the other dozen companies Phillips help found and invest in, to me just makes absolutely zero sense as to why they sold of anything that could've made them money in the long run... someone over there in Phillips completely regrets all of these inane decisions and is beating themselves up to this very day...
Philips is one of those fallen giants. It used to be huge here in Belgium. It had several factories and anybody who worked at a high tech company HAD to work at Philips... at least that was the story while I was a kid and young teen.
But since the 2000s, I only heard about those many, MANY, rounds of layoffs every few years. And every company I've worked for (even today) has people who used to work at Phillips but were fired during one of those rounds of layoffs.
And most of those said the same thing: great colleagues, great working environment, but not a single good word of the upper management.
The people who worked at the Philips TV factory in Bruges probably had it the worst. Well over a decade of cyclical layoffs, then the change to TP Vision, the Chinese TPV taking over, stripping the factory and eventully closing it in 2014. Then taking only a few hundred to a shell R&D department in Zwijnaarde... only to once again strip it down to 60 employees a few years later. That's barely anything from the 2250 original employees.
It's been a while since they've been in the news... wouldn't be surprised if those last few dozen will get the axe sooner or later. *sigh*
Very sad and relatable to decline of industry here in the UK. Our house and my grandparents house both had big Belgian made Philips CRTs as main TVs up until 10 years ago.
One thing for sure they need to Acquire Daewoo Electronics long time ago, as to what has happened to Daewoo Conglomerate has split, yet to add another facility in South Korea as to say their are TVs made by Philips in South Korea exported also under a different name sometimes under Portland.
It will be the focus on Philips doing something right for instance acquiring Whirlpool and also acquiring Daewoo Electronics to become Philips Korea as GM took over Daewoo’s automotive arm and Philips to take on Daewoo’s electronic arm probably making some Daewoo branded TVs in Belgium after Daewoo’s bankruptcy at the time like what Magnavox in the US that came out with Philips/Magnavox.
We had a phillips "flat screen" crt from early 90s. It only died a few yrs ago when it lept, with helping hand of someone with a temper, from a 12th floor balcony 😔
Still have my 14" crt frim same period, still works, but only used sometimes for original video gaming computers/consoles i own.
@@Embargoman say Daewoo one more time...
@@zigzagtoes who tf threw a Phillips Magnavox out a 12 story window?? and wtf is it doing up 12 stories anyhow?? wtf?? that could've smashed someone like a cartoon character if you weren't careful...
it is sad up until 2:30 because ive had a philips indoor tv antenna from like the 90s and it still works. They will still be the tech giant they used to be in our hearts
Philips did indeed make good products. My tv was made by Philips back in 1984 and with no servicing, only an occasional external cleaning, it still works perfectly and I still enjoy watching tv on it.
A 1984 TV, antique product, amazing
I had a Philips TV that refused to die. I bought it for $350.00 at a pawn shop and it was less than a year old. I had it for 10 years until I decided to upgrade. I was waiting for it to die before purchasing a new one but it refused to die and was totally still trouble free. I liked Philips products and wondered what happened to them. Poor management destroys companies and that's what happened to Philips.
Eventually any good company will go bad, because they hire lots of "smart" people who has nothing to do, and they will try to "renovate" and destroy the perfect products. Example, Mercedes and BMW now add lots of useless features to their cars making them less reliable and expensive.
This. I swear by my Philips blenders and hair dryers ( the older one is from 2009 and still works flawlessly)
@@himadrijoshi my grandmother uses a Philips hairdryer from 1995, still works great.
Just imagining how big Phillips could have been if things went the right way.
1/4 of tsmc,
Alone would be a game changer
And that in combination with a stake in ASML
Incredible
Executives focus on short-term profits. It's easy to see why they will take the easy way out, sell and automatically add some juicy margin to their balance sheet.
Why you say outsourcing is bad, ASML, TSMC, all great companies, this is Frist Philips mission.
We are bigger than ever now !
Most TSMC stock is sold now, that is the way how we developed these scanners, on Covid, we saved everyone ! Make better margins, why sell low level trash ?
Where I come from there's a saying that translates as such: We planted "what if" and it grew to become "how I wish".
They couldve been the "European Samsung".
@@nassimabed I think I get what you mean but not really... what are you, Indian? Pakistani? Burmese?
Amazing video, thanks! 💜
Growing up as a geeky kid in the Netherlands in the 70’s, the magic innovation of Philips was everywhere and extremely inspiring to me.
But very soon it became clear something was off when uncles and neighbors who happened to be engineers at Philips shared their deep and growing frustrations with their employer.
Devastating mismanagement. Such a shame. 😢
I worked at Philips Design briefly before everything went burst in 2009. IMO one of the big reasons that Philips went down was they stopped recognizing actual values, such as tech and innovation, as the core of the company. They value "brand" more than anything else. They took a very high stance on their Philips brand when in reality no one really cares about it anymore. They often buy smaller up and coming companies that had success in their respective fields, and Philip's goal was always to replace them and wipe that brand off the market. That really pissed off major retailers that valued the smaller brands more than Philips. They also rely on OEM to fill their product line up, and often it was up to the design team to create value. However, even within the design teams, politics meant that their design talents spread all over the world had little chance to interact and collaborate, which was a huge shame. I used to hear all the amazing stories from veteran designers who worked in different design offices all over the world between the 80s and 90s, and wished i was born three decades earlier.
I'm glad my grandfather didn't hear about this. He actually contributed a lot back in the day to the development of color television. A really smart man. Due to WW2, he was never able to get a formal engineering degree. But, he worked as an engineer. His salary though, not an engineer. However, he used to go to Holland a lot, when ever those teams were struggling with something related to TV.
The technical accomplishments of this company is staggering. Their super wide TV built for movies (zero black borders) was seriously impressive and beautifully designed. Their home lighting and Hue products are phenomenal
I and my friend bought a tv at 2013 with same type they both had black pixels all around the tv after a year. Then another friend both after years, after a year or two it also got black screen.
@@umitanonymous3400 Really it's was chinees TPV Technology product under PHILIPS name.
I had the Hue lights and they were indeed phenomenal. Hue has strong technology and tons of features. However, the Hue usability was a disaster. Their iPhone app is visually absolutely beautiful, yet it's cumbersome UI made me want to throw my iPhone off a cliff.
@@umitanonymous3400 I bought a Philips Ambilight TV in November 2021. On the 17th of December the screen gave up. It was just a blank screen all of sudden. I was watching a blu ray movie and the TV was working perfectly. Then when I turned off my blu ray player the screen refused to output an image on all inputs including the home screen
My father used to tell me stories of my grandfather's time working for Philips in Eindhoven back around the 50'-80's. Philips was run very informally back then, at least in practice. Iirc he often paid (and was paid) for favors from other divisions with cigars, which were paid for by the company, and he managed to convince someone to let him take home the sheets where prints had already been cut out which he then reclaimed tiny amounts of gold from till he was able to forge a few rings for his kids.
And my father also tells me how that those times ended when for-profit-management was installed.
Nowadays ASML seems to have become the shining jewel and much of the lifeblood of the city. A fair chunk of my friends work there. Still, you can see it's legacy all the way into our football team PSV.
I remember my parents buying a Philips double casette deck back in the 90s which made it convenient for making mixed tapes with the option of making the recording process shorter by using a double speed option. It was a system which sounded exemplary as well, and it had a switch to enhance bass. One of our neighbours also bought the same model after a demo at our house on a visit. Sad to see the company fall.
Before the semiconductor era, in 1926, Philips also developed and brought to the market the first major innovation in vacuum tube technology: the five electrodes vacuum tube, called pentode, enabled a huge step forward on early electronic devices capabilities and made Philips one of the biggest and most successful vacuum tube manufacturers in the world. Philips advanced vacuum tube technology, such as the EF50 tube, was a key contribution to RADAR developements during WW2.
Something to do with Bernard Tellegen, wasn't it?
Pretty much the same thing happened to Hewlett Packard. HP has been split up many times since 1999 and now exists only as a name. It once was one of the best companies to work for.
So sad, HP was such a trusted name in the medical field and in the field of computer servers, among other fields.
from the late 1990s onward it was the printers business that really kept HP at the top level - people used to say that it was a company that was only still sailing because it was floating along on the proceeds from a sea of coloured water!
@@alanmusicman3385 Yep, I worked 11 years at HP's printer plant in Vancouver, WA, best job I ever had. We made 25% of the corporate's profit worldwide for years, huge profits margins that just keep going. We made printers 24/7 but one day the world was full of printers, I had two at home, and the prices impleaded, along with our organization. I got the last of the warm and fuzzy out of HP with 2 years salary and two years fully paid education by leaving. It was super as long as it lasted.
@@HansOvervoorde I worked at the HP printer factory in Vancouver Washington for 11 years, best job of my life. Companies are like people, they are conceived, they grow ans mature and then decline and die. Some last centuries, some last only a few years.
I used to work for Univac.
Many years ago I managed a project at Philips Semiconductor in San Jose, CA. The management of the facility and the operations was SO dysfunctional since it required the local management team to pass every decision through management in the Netherlands. I was with IBM at the time and it was apparent to our management that this client was going to be a loss after we returned and gave a report of the issues present at the site.
3:30 please do some more reaserch, the reasoning why they marketed lightbulbs to 1000h is because thats what was found as the best mid point between brightness and durability. The colder you run the tungston fillement the longer the bulb will last, but also it will be less bright. The longest lasting bulb for example is basically as bright as a small led and thats the reason why it lasted so long. It was not some big conspiracy to have programed obsolescense it was a tradeoff of durability and brightness of the bulbs. Technology Conections made a great video about it.
As a Dutchman I find it hard to like this video, but it is what it is, and your overview of Philips was very well done. Nothing we can do about their history.
@Changeur2009 apa hubungannya philips dengsn indonesia ?
I went to Netherlands recently and still saw many Philips TV's in people's homes and in hotels. Was interesting.
@@jeff4362 Well they had glory years for sure, now most of what I see is ads for their shaving devices. Kind of a decline after their (almost) big hits.
I used to work at GE and it is amazing the amount of overlap in the two stories.
That is what happens when governments get involved in industry. Everything changes focus to regulations rather than innovation.
Most innovations today are nothing more than marketing based around government regulations. A prime example of that would be automobiles.
@@bighands69 the government didn’t tell companies like GE to get into the loan business or tell Boeing to start cutting corners. There are plenty of ways to blame government over regulation, but lots of companies get into trouble all on their own.
How about RCA, Westinghouse, Xerox, DEC, Magnavox, DuPont, MaBell
I’ve always felt GE and Philips were separated at birth
@@paleghost Philips owned Magnavox. During WWII, Philips Eindhoven separated from North American Philips. Not knowing who would win the war, they figured one would survive. Well they both did. North American Philips bought out companies like Norelco and Magnavox (and dozens more) early on while being separated. North American Philips kept the other brand names and didn't put the Philips branding on them. My business cards from the 80's still said North American Philips on them.
I can't tell you exactly when they officially merged back together, since bits and pieces were merged pieces at a time. When I worked from North American Philips, our division's research and development usually came from Philips Eindhoven. But my division this was always the case since WWII. But I remember the plan was to phase out brands like Norelco and Magnavox and to replace them with Philips. And in the late 80's you started to see Philips Norelco and Philips Magnavox. This continued into the 90's and then everything just said Philips by itself. In Europe, it was always branded as Philips.
I have Philips lighting products in my Eindhoven home that are estimated to be about 40 years old. Still in working condition with "Made in Holland" sticker.
Back in Sri Lanka, my parents had several appliances from Philips, each lasted for about 30 years.
The longevity of old Philips products are truly impressive. No matter where we were in the world, we grew up with the brand.
If Philips is heading towards its death, that would be a very sad news.
Philips has been dead for a very long time. Vergane glorie zeggen we dan.
Hello,
Do you have the US smart bulbs, US company produced them early 90th, outsourced.
It still is a great company, thank you.
Taipei are our friends, we need to support them more then ever ! Respect Frist Philips mission !
We had the absolutely gigantic Phillips Magnavox big screen TV back in the 90s, it must've been a 90 inch TV or something and was a CRT TV so you know it was heavy as hell and was very deep as well to hold the cathode ray tube in the back to produce the image since there were no LCD or LED TV's back then so it was an absolute behemoth of a device!!!
Do you remember those thick heavy af TV? They should lasted almost a freaking century!
@@chowderwhillis9448 For anyone reading this and wondering, that would be a rear projection and not a direct-view CRT tv. Direct-view CRT tv screen size was limited to about half the size of this r-p tv, so about 40-45 inches.
That’s a sad story of Philips. Their story is similar to stories of many Japanese and electronics giants such as General Electric, RCA, Toshiba, Sanyo, and NEC. Much of the Japanese electronics companies went downhill when the US barred Japanese made semiconductors, but Philips looks like a collapse from within.
My late dad worked for years in the bulbs department in Hamilton Scotland. He eventually became Departmental head and visited Eindhoven several times. He always said they were a good employer who looked after their employees. Sad to hear how times have changed.
well Philips still takes good care of its employee until those business was sold or failed....
Maybe they were a good employer who looked after their employees, but not in Hamilton any more. Apparently they'll be looking after them in Poland now, which is apparently where that factory was moved to, cos it's more profitable there. They did a Dyson - the much-lauded British inventor/businessman who eventually realised that business was the important bit and relocated his factories to Indonesia. Lower wage-bill, taxes, and I'm guessing, far less concern for health and safety. Never mind all the people who had jobs here.
I worked in Philips during 21 years, my husband 24-year career. WHen we started in Brazil early 80', there were more than 20 manufacturing sites, with 22 thousand employees. LIghting, Public Lighting, Automotive, Sound & Vision, Semiconductors, domestic supplies (Walita), personnal care, Medical, Telecomm, Polygram (motown, polydor, mercury, vertigo, deustch gramophon), with major artists at the time like Police, SUperTramp, Sting, Direstraits, and films like 7 marriages and a funeral) , and our beloved PSV Philips Sport Club (Ronaldo, Romario, Vampeta, etc)... Philips has been our lives, career, opportunities. Gratitude, but sadness on how leaders treated our Philips until the end.
Hear hear.... very sad.
Sorry, Supertramp was an A&M label and always was. If you got that wrong, what else did you get wrong.
@@dannysdailys A&M was bought by PolyGram in 1989.
@@adrianotomino Yes and thanks. Well past their heyday and must have gone cheap. So, does that mean Peter Framptons new signing was with PolyGram after A&M dumped him?
Your 2nd name is middle eastern 🤔
In the early 2000's I finished working for the design department of ASML (through a contractor), and did a 6 month contract at Philips in the S-complex, designing parts for the First 2 stage wafer stepper. The old arrogance at Philips was still present; for instance they thought they could use their ERP system of choice (Baan) where they were eventually obliged to use ASML's (SAP). Philips still thought they were the king of the hill in Eindhoven, while across the road in Veldhoven things were progressing much faster. ASML did not need Philips for knowledge, but just lacked manpower. Autonomy as a design engineer was so much better at ASML, Philips was still stuck in the 80's. Someone joked that the fencing around the S-complex was facing inwards, as to keep employees in, not keep the nasties out 😄. At Philips they always keep a boundary between (HTS/Hochschule) Polytechnical educated Engineers and (TU/Universitat) University educated engineers. Maybe a strange concept to most foreigners, but Netherlands and Germany have Engineering at an applied level and at an R&D level. The University Engineers and Physicists had their own canteen, as if they did not want to mingle with the lower mortals. ASML had none of that stuff. There was great collaboration between the levels. I learned a lot talking to the Physicists about the theory behind some of the decisions, but alternatively the HTS engineers were usually the ones to come with a solution for a problem that could be manufactured. I loved the interaction on many levels and only left because my own contractor was pissing me off no-time. Philips offered me a permanent job after I was there for 3 months. They got really antsy when I declined. It was just not a very nice place to work...
You probably mean 'physicists', not medical doctors.
@@Nettlebed7 changed, thanks for the input
I worked as an apprentice then as a tech at the Hendon works in Adelaide in the 60s and 70s. I enjoyed my time there as part of the Philips family. This set me up for my work life like a charm. Fond memories.
I've worked internships at the NXP facility where they invented the NFC technology, they have a really great innovation culture and spinning it off ended up a good success.
The quickest way to fail a company is to put an accountant in charge
Solving extremely complex technical problems only to fail to sell them doesn't sound like a problem an accountant in charge is likely to produce, tbh.
The Accountant will euthanize the company in a "humane manner" and slowly dismantle it while paying out dividends.
@@peterzimmerman1114 Well said. This happened to a few companies I contracted with.
@@peterw4338 They have their place and skills, managing resources, making ends meet, but they arn't visionaries that create value unless they got that extra skill for it, some people are multifaceted. At the same time many companies have gone under because they are completely run by visionaries that can't manage resources. That's why successfull businesses needs either a an incredible individual to drive them forward or a group of people with complementing skillsets that work well together, It's usually the idea of a board to have people with different experiences to provide feedback. I'm the accountant kind, but I also realize that you need to keep the ship moving and competitive, not just afloat, for that you need to keepup. It helps if you know when you need to get feedback and knowing where to look for it. The worst would be those that are like Mao Zedong, normally they don't make it into a business and their reputation tends to get their career shot after a while, but if they do it's doomed.
@@peterzimmerman1114 sure, point is, "let's invest into cool tech now and then look for ways to sell it later" is an approach engineers rather than accountants are prone to take.
My grandpa worked at Philips and invented things like the machine to make flat computer cables. I'll never stop having respect for him, even if it already has been 8 years since his passing. 🌹
RIP
R.I.P.
They call them ribbon cables but lets remember, it was a process that is only overheating a cable harness... not rocket science to a low level student.
Why would you stop having respect for people when they pass?
@@jamescagney2713 I have 27 patents. Remember, as you go deep, you can innovate just about anything under the sun. Did you see his work to be little him? The possibility to better is there even today.
Philips lost the plot totally when Kleisterlee abandoned vertical integration. He declared that it was not necessary for an electronics company to make the components that they used. So you ended up with absurd situations like Philips TVs being made with LCD panels that they bought from their competition, Sharp. Apart from allowing your competitor the means to shut down your business, it precludes you from making technical advances yourself in the components. It became more and more impossible to compete on price and quality against the likes of Samsung who remained vertically integrated. Selling off semiconductors was another spectacular own-goal for Philips. But all they were interested in was short term profit, even if that mean self-predation. Van Houten pursued a strategy of increasing profits by selling off or shutting down the less profitable divisions rather than actually fixing them. Eventually it's like a snake eating its own tail, and now we have little more than a branding operation left plus a few toothbrushes and (the management darling) medical imagers.
My brother used to work for Philips. He left because the entire management structure was toxic.
Yes, I was once asked by a senior manager in their ICT division whether there was a size beyond which a company could not fail. Philips lost its spirit long ago. I attended meetings on its HiFi consumer electronics and we were always met with a wall of conservative stupidity.
When I was 9 years old, my father bought me a Philips Electronic Engineer kit. This set me on a course that steered me towards my current career. Thank you Philips.
Same here. Those kits were brilliant; each set adding to the last to allow more complex projects, up to building an oscilloscope and a b&w TV.
Me too! I became an electronics engineer and worked for Philips Telecommunications for almost the entire 1980s, in places like Libya, Iraq, Italy, Nigeria, etc.
And I left when the old guys running the company didn’t understand the consumer IT revolution.
In my time it was the Pioneer build boxes, but that was in the sixties last century.
My father was working at a trading company for Philips but I never didn't get one, it was too expansive.
Funny that you mentioned that kit. Just had it in my hands to sell it on a big auction site. They are probably too basic for kids nowadays, better sell it while the kids of 40 years ago are still alive.
Philips products from back in the day were just brilliant. I certainly wish we still had more of that level of quality in this era.
But they literally invented planned obsolescence
Funnily, I remember very well that back in the 80's I always loved certain products from them, but the actual build quality was almost always inferior to that of Japanese companys like Sony. For instance, Philips monitors used to be great in terms of picture quality, features etc.; but any mechanical part that they had, like a cover for the front controls, would almost inevitably break after a few years.
I find that compared to today's trash they still give you bang for your buck.
There where many bad products, nearly every product with mechanics inside gives soon or late problems, like taperecorders for example. Radio's and measuring equipment were of good quality.
I bought a Phillips LCD TV in about 2015 and replaced it in 2017. It had a terrible user interface, awful colour balance that I could never get tuned in right. Then lines started to appear across the panel and I replaced it with an LG (I'd had an LG before it) it's so much better.
Great information! Sadly, I'm sure the top management at Phillips was always well compensated for their incompetence...
Exactly
When talking about innovation you could have mentioned that 'SPDIF' is 'Sony/Phillips Digital Interface'. It was probably the first fiber-optic data link in home electronics and was popular before HDMI took over.
SPDIF is the ONLY consumer fiber interface/connector :c
@@nalesnikwiciu it isn't, there's also Toslink
@@PaulTheFox1988 toslink is spidif…
@@BavarianM Yeah, you're right, I always thought of them as separate things, partly because spdif was Sony/Philips Digital Interface, and Toslink is Toshiba Link, so in my head they were separate.
I guess also that for me Toslink was always the fibre optic connector, spdif was the coax one.
I stand corrected 😅
It's very sad whats happened to this company, the great thing about working at a Philips facility was they often had a Philips shop, where you could buy all their products at a big discount, which could be deducted out of your wages, a Philips CDI was the first ever device I connected to the internet with, happy memories.
I worked for Philips Semiconductors, and I knew the story behind TSMC and ASML. When Philips spinned off its semicon division, we engineers felt horrible. Fortunately, NXP keeps growing anyway.
My dad worked for Philips in Toronto, starting at the Leaside factory when they made car radios. We had Philips speakers and radios and kitchen blenders and in 1986 one of their early model CD players. I remember their remote control television (Modular 4?) that used sound. They so dominated the 20th century, but now, their shavers are the only products I'd use.
Those shavers are probably being made by some chinese nobody-know-makers under the brand of Phillips anyways.
@@-Muhammad_Ali- I worked for Philips until last month. This is one of the few business units that still is entirely run by core Philips - I worked directly with the factories in Drachten, Netherlands and Batam, Indonesia. Both fully owned and operated Philips factories.
@@jorgepena6412 oh, at least that. Happy to hear that. In fact EU companies who sent the manufacturing to Indonesia or Malaysia (i.e. Bosch) seem to be doing ok. Too bad Nokia got fooled.
The Philips factory in Germany, where the world's first CD was pressed, belonged to Polygram - the recording company, which Philips owned at the time. The first CD to be manufactured at the plant was "The Visitors" by ABBA. By the time CDs were introduced on the market in November 1982, a catalog of around 150 titles - mainly classical music - had been produced. The first CDs and CD players - including Philips' CD100 - were introduced in Japan in November, followed by a United States and European market introduction in March 1983.
Omg! I have still polygrams cassette, but with a cartoon. I remember before the cartoon started, it showed the title polygram video. The cassette was bought in Germany
Ah..thanx. As a Abba Fan..it was my first Cd to buy too ;-)
The first CDs were glass discs. Internally within Philips we used glass discs all of the time. I take it that first CD wasn't glass?
I have a CD100 and the polygram "The Visitors" in my livingroom, beautiful machine and still works fine. I believe the first fully digitally recorded and mastered (DDD) CD is "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits, released in 1985.
@@fritsified5952 I'm pretty sure the first DDD release was Peter Gabriel's 4th album (aka "Security), when it was released on CD in 1984.
A very sad story and one I have followed as a bystander for many years. It's also far from unique. The story of the development of the CD reminded me of the story of Kodak who were once a giant in film, whether your home 35mm camera or stock for the latest blockbuster movie. As you would expect, they had an R&D department who were early pioneers of digital video, but when the department pitched their invention to the board of Kodak, the response was "we're the kings of film so why would we want to invest in this new technology which can't add anything other than increased costs". Of course Kodak weren't the only people working on digital video, competitors took advantage to become leaders in the new technology leaving Kodak to play catch-up, and the rest is history.
Lots of management bods like to think of themselves as innovators and entrepreneurs but in reality very few are. Mainly they are over-hyped (and over paid) administrators and it is this managerial class who I blame for the decline of western business.
I'm from the UK where, in common with much of Europe, we have lots of talent - engineers, scientists, artists - but we are let down time and again by poor (often abysmal) management. Two of the main reasons for this are the "it's not what you know but who you know" culture and also the more recent 'fast tracking' of those who can wave a 'degree' in the air and thus over-ride those with years of relevant experience. This has been my personal experience over a lifetime of work and also, reading previous comments, many others. In fact it's 'common knowledge' but something approaching heresy to actually acknowledge.
So you have the vampiric managerial classes laying waste to all they come into contact with. They may spot a small-ish company who is doing well so decide to buy it and often in the process likely stifle the very qualities which made it successful. Increasingly, large companies do not initiate real growth, just grow by 'acquisitions'. But they've increased the 'head count' so that's another few million £$ etc for me says the boss. Then when technology moves on, fashions change or we reach an economic downturn it's a a case of 'rationalisation', ie reducing the 'head count' and 'look at how much money I've saved' so that's another few million for me. The fact that so many 'offsprings' have prospered after being set free says it all.
Well said.
If a company does not have a culture of internal leadership, and does not demand performance from individuals in upper or even middle management, inertness, bureaucracy and poor decision making begin to creep in.
There are many large corporations in EU now, where if half of upper management stopped coming in to work, no one would notice the difference. Too many people who don’t perform keeping chairs warm.
@@PRH123 You just gave us a definition of the typical manager working at Signify in 2023.
This is exactly what Philips/Signify has been doing since 2016.
Have you participated on the wOOx invention????
Philips working culture wasn’t adapted to the change required for a lot of these industries. With the Asian companies (and work culture) competing in the same industries (except health care), Philips lost already based on their dedication. Philips was very much an innovation push companies where it invents things in labs and push it to market, where you summed up the biggest losses. The conglomerate concept just didn’t work anymore. Having smaller companies like signify and nxp was the right approach for profitability, but not for the long term Philips (shareholders). As a shell (as you mentioned) Philips just didn’t add value to these businesses anymore. It’s just another industry giant that experiences changes in industries when centre of gravity moves from one continent to another… this happened with computers (ibm), mobile phones (Nokia) and will happen with EVs (American and European car makers). Currently it also affects the previous electronic giants in Korea and Japan vs Chinese. Each company and continent or country need to rediscover what it’s best for their environment. ASML is expanding in the area where Philips used to be huge, for the Dutch economy it was a win, just not for Philips itself.
I started working as an engineer in France in a Philips R&D center which was sold. So I was an engineer at Philips for less than a year 😂. In the same year, they also sold their music business which was the world leader and was later renamed Universal Music. Management believed that the era of large conglomerates was coming to an end. Samsung was much smaller than Philips and Sony at that time but came out on top. Especially since Nokia was also run by the same kind of arrogant pricks.
there probably corruption, they sold their prolific business to a people who bribe them..
Nokia was ruined by Microsoft managers in Nokia which later buys Nokia for low amount of money but Nokia never was big after that
Best earbuds I ever had were made by Philips. Completely flat frequency profile, durable cable, comfortable and secure in the ear. Their marketing was crap though. They sold them for 20 bucks and people were buying Beats by Dre or Skull Candy for a few times that price, and they were TERRIBLE.
What is the name of them?
what model?
@@Sergio_Loureiro Philips SHE3595 or similar
Worked as an intern at Philips Healthcare for half a year. Management acted as your best friend until you started to disagree with them on something. I could either do as I told or get out. Great example of how toxic a work environment can be.
Where are the other 8 of the 10 druggies? Like I think youd be able to find out.
They still sell "Energy savers and LED Blubs" in my country and their Steam Irons are pretty popular here. They lost cuz of declining quality, high prices and rise of 100's of local brands.
Reminds me of the story of RCA. Also once a powerful tech conglomerate, that fell into irrelevancy after a series of failed products resulting from mismanagement and corporate politics.
not to mention GE buying them and stealing all the money and then selling the company piece by piece. insane the US gov let that happen but it was the 80s
ret@rds
It's actually crazy like as a guy who lives in a small African country, Botswana, we didn't really have much tech like we were raised to know brand names and just see their adverts on TV...
Philips is actually so engranded in my childhood along the like likes of Sony or Samsung it's actually crazy they aren't really a thing from about a couple years ago like they did TV's and batteries but I assume their battery business is going alright but it's actually crazy to undertate just how big of a company they were, literally a household name 😶
I have a Philips headphone which i purchased in 2013 still working. Sad to see it in this state.
My dad had a radio which worked for around 20+ year with carbon zinc battery.
They are still producing the absolutely best TVs in the world. I have the older verson ot their flagship THE ONE 7354,but when I had the chace to exoerience the new one serie 8837,I was stunned... Absolute perfection for that money.
@@stefanlukic7272 they are not, or POLED OLED supremacy is taken by Samsung and Sony, and their mainetance policy is very poor, if TV has issues there is no authorized centers in Europe to fix those, so, nothing in return for the value....
@@stefanlukic7272 my dad bought two years ago a new philips tv and it's amazing! The quality is great. Recently I watched tv from samsung, and the picture was jittery. Just ugly. I'm not a tech person, but I am an artist and can notice details very much
@@franfinesim Yeah,very true. My friend gave a huge amount of money for one LG,but it had so bad picture, no matter what I tried in set up... Philips series "The ONE",Is absolutely unbeatable! I have the model from three years ago 7534,and one important detail,it has 1700 PPI(pixel per inch),that in my opignion also contributes in picture quality,natural colours,eye relaxing picture... On my influence,my son in Germany bought the next generation 8545,who has 2100 PPI, and 20 percent richer colour stating by factory,and it was true! And this year je bought the actual model from "The ONE"series,8837 with 2400 PPI,and 120Hz refresh rate. Not to mention what a beauty this is! It Is also important to choose models with VA panels instead of those with IPS,and those are the 50,58 and 65",since 43,55 and 70" and above has IPS. The company TP Vision responsible for panels made exellent job,and in combination with famous Philips procesor,they deliver magic.
Wasn't expecting an Asianometry-level analysis, very well done!
Haha, same thought
Europeometry!
I get that similar vibe lol, in a good sense though
China is taking over with LG and Samsung, and it is very sad. We have no research and innovation in Europe anymore :( :(
I've never even heard of Asianometry or this channel until a couple days ago when I got one of Asianometry's videos suggested on the front page, and today this video popped up on the recommended. Looks like the algorithm agrees with you on this one.
It’s going to be so weird one day not seeing Philips products around. My name is Phil and ever since I was a kid in the early 2000s I saw those “me”-branded products around, joking about how I’m still waiting for royalty checks. They will be missed
I have a family member who used to work at Philips in Bangladesh back in late 90's. He also shared the same concerns as many others here that is mismanagement of the company and the leadership not being qualified enough. It's a shame!
As early as 1979, Philips and Sony set up a joint task force of engineers to design the new digital audio disc. Many decisions were made in the year to follow - such as the disc diameter. The original target storage capacity for a CD was one hour of audio content, and a disc diameter of 115 millimeters was sufficient for this, however both parties extended the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. In June 1980, the new standard was proposed by Philips and Sony as the "Red Book" containing all the technical specification for all CD and CD
Legend has it, that the diameter of the hole in the middle was taken from the diameter of the Dutch guilder coin of 10 cents (called "dubbeltje")....one of the engineers took it from his wallet and proposed it...
The CEO of Sony back that time was not some MBA but a music graduate, started his career as an opera singer before joining Sony.
don't forget the audio cassette, which was also invented by Philips.
To add - the track pitch/distance was taken from Philips (Magnavox in the US) DiscoVision, then LaserVision and then after Pioneer took up the pile of noodles it was rebranded as "LaserDisc". Not to forget "CD Video" (the golden Laserdisc). Philips also came up with the same PCM as Sony did (Sony even offered PCM processors to use their Betamax VCRs as audio recorders).
Sony added the laser diode to be able to make CD players compact and with a long life (the HeNe-Laser tubes wore out, the Laser diodes rather not).
Philips learned its lessons together with IBM (ah you need a dust-free room to press LaserVision discs? - In the DiscoVision era, 2 out of 3 produced discs would not play because of dust particles molded inside).
So yeah. That's it.
@@PascalGienger Also, the Laserdisc was internally named "VLP" and the idea was to call the thing we now know as a CD "ALP"...
They had a marketing slogal about 25 years ago "Let's make things better". Made me think at the time, were they making bad products up to that moment in time?
i found a old philips radio, it was of my grandfather.............I cleaned it a little and plugged it in and it worked like a charm. I was amazed to see this kind of reliability.
it is atleast 30 yr old for those who are wondering
Radios are basic machines you could plug in a radio from the 50's and it should function with minor refurbishment.
I worked there for 1.5 years. Internally it is a open and amazing workplace. Reason it is failing is thinking way too much as a volunteer company than profit driven business. And definitely some old folks making bad decision. In general, it is full of innovative and talented people. I hope this company will rise again and continue its‘ legacy.
What do you mean by volunteer driven company? Thanks
Besides some minor errors, this is a good description of what happened to Philips over the last 30-40 years. One glaring omission is that Philips also had a Philips record company and later they owned Polygram and Mercury. But like everything that was successful or had potential, it was sold to UMG and then did even better than when it was part of Philips.
And of course the same happened with other divisions. Philips invented plumbicon TV cameras, but the division was first joint ventured with, then sold to Bosch (BTS). Hearing instruments was sold to Beltone. Fluke now makes the measuring instruments that Philips used to make. Etc etc etc
Am I missing something? Philips is quite big still and defo hasn’t stopped making electronics?? I literally have one of their new Ambilight TVs sat in my living room.
Yeah, seems like you missed watching the video. The TV, despite having a Philips logo, isn't actually made by Philips. As I said in the video, the company Philips sold its TV business together with the right to use their logo to a random company
My grandfather worked at Philips as an engineer in the 60-70's. He would be really sad to know what happened to this company.
Phillips failed because they should have bought in a American CEO. Americans know how to combine creativity and knowing how to make money.
I was born and have grown up in the city where Philips was founded and grew into it's giant size. I have gone to a high school founded by Philips workers and gone to the university that existed mostly because of Philips. I think todays Philips is truly a sad shadow of what it once was. And maybe it's just the opinion of some random guy from the netherlands' tech city but I really do still believe that things really started going downhill for Philips when they decided to move their headquarters from Eindhoven to Amsterdam. Going from a city completely focused on tech to a city far more focused on business in the traditional Dutch sense. Philips was our first big tech company and I think it functioned unlike any of the other more traditional big Dutch companies and trying to run it as if it were Shell or Unilever or ING killed it.
Consultant companies like Accenture, PWC, Deloitte is what killing this companies
Thank you for making this vid. Still after all those failures and mistakes Philips deserves a HUGE RESPECT for propelling and pushing innovations for the societies and people around the world. What they made possible for all of us is amazing and very inspiring!
Yes, it does.
Makes it even harder to accept this company has been gutted by incompetent CEO's who've "restructured' the company for short term bonusses.
I spent some time at the Philips campus in Drachten, where the Philishave, Senseo, vacuum cleaners and Airfryer technology was largely developed and tested. This was back in 2012 and it already struck me as a company that wasn't keeping up. The campus was old, falling apart and generally quite a depressing place. I was there for an IT overhaul, and I was baffled at how primitive and outdated their IT environment was for 2012 standards.
The thing about a growth of the company is directly proportional to about how passionate the employees are about the company.
Great video and it showed the product I worked on.
As someone from The Netherlands I enjoyed this video. Also seeing the Azurion FlexArm as one of the featured medical products. It was the last project I did at Philips and was an honour to help with this technological marvel. We even called in a complete un-Philips project. Removing managers in the project and adding more techs along the way, to get it out the door. Then at the end we still had to wait one year for it to get released. But we were also wondering what technological challenging project would come next, and except for a lot of maintenace, we couldn't think of any.
Which recalls the moral of the Philips story. Gold in their hands, expensive bets and no way to sell them.
Wow, quite a considerable downfall.
The "planned obsolescence" aspect obvious did not become a part of my Philishave. I have been using it for 42 years now, and I know it wasn't new when I started using it. I have no idea how old it really is, and on the back of this, I tried finding out. All I could find was a reference on one site listing it as "vintage".
It will probably out-last me 😁
The planned obsolescence for light bulbs worked differently. Filament bulbs had a trade-off between efficiency and lifespan.
The "planned obsolescence of light bulbs" is a conspiracy myth. There's simply a connection between the strength (and hence lifespan) of the filament, and the light output at a certain wattage. Standardizing the latter automatically resulted on also standardizing the lifespan. So why is this story still told? I think because it's fits very well into a narrative people like.
@@NeovanGoth Indeed. There's one Kodak made incandescent bulb that VWestlife showed in a video that had a lifespan of 10 minutes but was very bright and ran very hot. It was used in photography or something.
I had the opposite fate with PHILIPS products, not lasting very long* but l still love the company and sad to hear of its impending doom.
*Actually, l must add that every new tech product from the 80s 90s 2000s l bought never lasted very long for me. Just my bad luck l suppose.
@@johnkean6852 Or maybe you just can't be bothered to do any maintenence. Modern tech sometimes needs more maintenence.
I wonder whether companies are like animals and plants. Maybe they have a finite lifetime, suffering from the evolution of competitors or internal decay and then dying. Perhaps this is inevitable?
My uncle was a great fan of Philips and I loved their products in the eighties. Video 2000 was simply years ahead. I was also interested to learn about the Philips football team PSV one of the perks of playing for PSV was that players who were offered a football contract were always offered a Philips job as well! Wouldn't happen today :)