the direction some of these are headed in kind of bothers me. they're not the same anymore, and that makes me sad. i hope they'll have a comeback

• mcdonald's (no longer a mecca for kids or a magical place. it's all been uniformized)
• lego (the majority of their products are now movie licensed, meaning no more made up character names or adventures)
• starbucks (the via brew and smaller sized locations are pushing towards rapid pace)
• disney (i'm hoping that the new movie brings that imagination back to disney)
• google (though i don't understand the hype, i think it's pretty interesting that it's gone from just another search engine to the foremost critic of chinese censorship. i think that's pretty cool)