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Comment by nickdothutton | Hacker News Reader

Casio is an under leveraged brand. One of the few that could, I think, be taken into more product areas than it is currently. There's brand equity there they are not fully leveraging.

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But why?

Do we really want and need a Casio rice cooker?

And since they're specialists in cheap and reliable watches (and calculators and few more things), what would happen to their brand if the rice cookers were shitty?

This is a somewhat weird: do you judge Sony headphones by how good Sony cameras are, too? Or Samsung phones on how good their TVs are? Because how good a Casio calculator or rice cooker is, is entirely independent of how good their watches are?

This seems to be backwards: you judge a brand based on how all its products perform, and if the balance tips towards "most are shit" then it's a shit brand. A brand making lots of things and only one shit (type of) thing, then it's "they're great! Except for their X, don't buy those".

Well.. yeah. If you bough a samsung phone, and it was full of shitty adware and preinstalled apps, would you expect their tablets, smart tvs and fridges to be any different? And are they?

Yes? And yes? You're asking this like it's a bizarre thing to do, but that's how you think about consumer goods as adult: if you dismiss an entire brand conglomerate because of a single product line, that's an incredibly weird way to think about products.

If Samsung phones are bad, don't buy (another) Samsung phone. But when you need a dish washer, and reviews say that Samsung's is the best bang for your buck, their adware-laden phone has literally nothing to do with the decision to buy the Samsung dish washer. They are completely different products, made by completely different factories with completely different QA processes, and completely different target demographics.

Don't judge brands, judge product lines by brands. Because quite often, the people making one thing have nothing to do with people making another thing, they're completely separate "we can't call them companies on paper but in practice that's exactly what they are", and the owning brand itself has barely anything to do with the products they make, unless it's their major brand-recognition product.

I just want to note here that Samsung refrigerators and dishwashers are absolute shit and should be avoided like the plague. Also, their stoves are pretty crap, too, with a self-clean option that destroys the motherboard and blowers.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that their design and manufacturing issues are not endemic across their entire company. Fish rots from the head, etc.

Much like the other commenter: yep, Samsung's not a good company, making it all the more appropriate to use as example for "judge the company on all its products, not just one".

But if samsung put ads and bloatware on their phones... won't they put them on TVs too?

Oh wait, they do:

https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co5aw4/unrem...

What about on smart fridges?

Oh wait.. they do that too:

https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/yr80x3/my_smar...

Good: you did your research and discovered that Samsung's a mostly shit company. We already knew this of course, that was the whole point of using Samsung as example for "do your homework first, then judge the company".

Samsung is the perfect example actually. Their TVs ship with a weird Android that breaks half of the Vanilla Android features. So do their Phones and Watches.

Recently I got a new dishwasher and wasn't surprised to read that the controls of Samsung dishwashers can be somewhat weird and quality is questionable as well.

Yes, that was the point of using Samsung as example: judge the brand on all their products. Samsung is a terrible company, because all their products are pretty terrible. Not because "their phones are".

I personally would, yes

FWIW, they're also specialists in expensive and reliable ruggedized watches (G-Shock, especially the higher-end variants with compass, GPS etc).

Though not a move into a completely different product area, it's been interesting to see them step up their digital piano game. For a long time it seemed like Casio had a reputation for not making serious keyboards that you could gig on. But they have been churning out really nice keyboards recently - most notably, the Privia line. The ones I've played have a really nice feeling action, pro-level sounds and they're visually quite slick.

I am always attracted to the design of Casio keyboards when I see one at a store somewhere. Then I play them, and realize that many of them (the low end models) still often lack velocity sensing. Both the best and the worst thing about Casio is that they’re stuck in the 90s.

I was shopping around for a digital piano and the Privia does look really nice. I haven't experienced one in person yet and I am a bit scared to buy any keyboard or digital piano without trying the action.

I like the action on the Privias (and the similar CDP360s, which I played recently). My only complaint about the action is that if you're playing at low/practice volumes, you tend to hear a lot of mechanical plastic sound as the keys spring back up. I'm a big fan of Roland's actions. I'd check out the FP30. I also used to practice on a Yamaha P125B and they are great.

Thank you very much for the additional info!

Casio has leveraged the love for the G-Shock with watches like the $4,000 MRGB5000BA-1 as others in that line. Keep in mind that the Casio brand sells everything from instruments to label printers and calculators, which presents a challenge when it comes to targeting e.g. it can't be a luxury watch brand like Rolex because it's too broad (Rolex just sells watches). You also can't narrow the brand focus to watches because you may harm other lucrative business divisions like musical instruments. Casio means many things to many different markets.

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