Why are our government companies copycats?
May 1st, 2009 1:06 by ogrimThe Norwegian postal service is a state owned limited company (Wikipedia tells me) and our state is the main shareholder in the largest company in the oil and gass industry, Statoil. Or StatoilHydro as it now is called after the merge with Norsk Hydro. No worries, they will change their name back to Statoil again by 2010.
Anyhow, does anyone know how these companies come to be such copycats?
Posten
Posten changed their logo from this good, old fashioned post horn

to this new, trendy, thingamablob

that totally looks like a Pokéball

and the Death Star somehow combined

Statoil
Statoil on the other hand have gone from a modern and iconic design

to a rather boring, and simple font during the merge

and now they are going to use this

which totally looks like the mobile phone plan, djuice

and even more like the old fashioned Norwegian domestic crafts guild
Summary
A noteworthy observation is that Posten goes from old fashioned to modern, while Statoil seems to go from modern to old fashined. What gives?
The idea for this post came from this tweet from Rygh


November 7th, 2009 at 11:58 am
[...] thieving websites. Recently I discovered some sites hot-linking to the old Statoil logo featured in this post. I decided to replace the Statoil logo with a funny picture that would make no sense in the [...]