Dave Bailey, of Computing, recently presented the The top 10 software brands from a study conducted by marketing analyst group Brand Finance. This is an interesting article with some well known brands such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo taking their expected place in the list – but also some surprising names such as SAP, Cisco (a software brand?), and Norton made it into the list. Norton is especially surprising as it was swallowed up by Symantec some time ago.

This leads me to think which companies may not quite have made it into a top 10 list of software brands:

Facebook – No MySpace either – is social media a software brand?

Apple – Perhaps known as a hardware brand?

Twitter – Possibly as Twitter has only recently become the phenomenon it is.

HP – Everywhere I go I seem to find HP hardware but are they known for their software?

Nintendo – Is the company behind Wii and DS really the well known brand we think it is?

IBM – IBM used to dominate lists like this – where are they now?

AOL – Times have definitely changed for AOL

Skype – Skype are still ticking along but need to really move up a gear

YouTube – Hands up anyone who has never seen a YouTube video?

Adobe – Almost everyone uses an Adobe product somewhere – don’t they?

LucasArts – Some of the best games ever have come out of LucasArts

The brands above are simply ones which popped into my head, when thinking about well known software brands. There are probably quite a few others including SalesForce.com, CodeMasters, Nokia, Eidos, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Sage, Corel and Sony,

Which software brands would you have included?

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