The Mystery of the Corporate 5 Note Tune

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Remember the 3 seconds music tone of INTEL that chirped so famously on TV ads across the world? It played once every 5 minutes somewhere in the world.

Now Cisco's selected a new musical logo. Cisco was quite chuffed  as apparently it takes 18 months to compose an adequate five-note tune and Cisco completed this in six months. Whew!
Cisco is in a touchy-feely corporate mood these days, although it fires execs who can’t do touchy-feely without blinking. Which would indicate a source of musical inspiration for their music could be the song: You Have to be Cruel to Be Kind.

Instead Cisco let 12,000 employees fill out surveys last summer with suggestions for the logo. Some even created tunes of their own. After a small group of finalists were picked, the employees voted on them.

Given Cisco’s track record with notes, we think they could have saved a lot of fuss and recorded the sound of the cash register ringing in the bills.