From 1998 to 2001 I was a programmer for the now defunct Mercator Software. Well, it wasn't always called "Mercator Software"; it used to be called "TSI Software". Shortly after going public they decided to go with a new image. The powers-that-be renamed the company "Mercator Software" after our flagship integration product. An expensive marketing/branding consulting company was hired to come up with a new logo. Our team had a product ready to launch but had to sit idly by waiting for the new logos & icons to arrive. During this downtime I added my first, and to date only, Easter Egg to a program.

Anyway, the new logo arrived and was immediately the subject of much mockery:



After April of 2001 I figured I'd seen the last of that lame green paper airplane. That was until I saw an ad for "Telerik Reports" in Visual Studio magazine. Their product logo looked surprising familiar:



I'm by no means accusing the fine folks at Telerik of ripping-off the old Mercator logo. I'd be genuinely shocked if anyone there even heard of Mercator. What I do think is they hired the same lazy consultants that Mercator used more than five years ago. Their slogan must be "if you have a product, we have a green paper airplane logo for it". If they paid more than 25-cents for this they were royally scammed. If they at least changed the color of the paper airplane and used a different font it would have been 1000x more original:



I think that's a significant improvement. Can I collect my massive consulting fee now?

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