Today during an industry conference call, a Philips employee announced that all Philips Lighting employees have changed their email address to a @lighting.com domain. This is interesting as Philips Lighting has owned this domain for at least 10, if not 20 years.
When EdisonReport first began in 1999, we were anonymous and this worked well as your humble editor was trying to sell ballasts to purchasing agents who worked for companies that we were following. If a company published bad numbers, as Philips did today, I wanted to publish those facts without the risk of losing ballast business. It worked well.
Lighting.com was a popular site, and an early competitor, and I could never find out who ran that site. Philips was the primary suspect but they would never admit this to me. There would be days where Philips would publish bad news, similar to today where they announced a 1.3% drop in sales, which, as of this writing, has resulted in an 8% drop in stock price, and the Lighting.com would publish a headline about how great they were doing. Lighting.com always seemed to put the most positive spin possible on Philips news. In addition, the majority of the ads were for Philips Lighting, so this is why we always suspected that Philips was behind Lighting.com.
Today, the Lighting.com website redirects the user to Lighting.Philips.com, so the ownership of both Lighting.com and EdisonReport are no longer secret and that is refreshing!