The General Electric Company, or GE (NYSE: GE) is a multinational American technology and services conglomerate incorporated in the State of New York. In terms of market capitalization, G.E. is the world's second largest company.In 1876, Thomas Alva Edison opened a new laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Out of the laboratory came arguably the most famous invention of all—a practical incandescent electric lamp. By 1890, Edison had organized his various businesses into the Edison General Electric Company. In 1879, Elihu Thomson and Edwin J. Houston formed the rival Thomson-Houston Electric Company. It merged with various companies and was later led by Charles A. Coffin, a former shoe manufacturer from Lynn, Massachusetts. Mergers with competitors and the patent rights owned by each company made them dominant in the electrical industry.
In 1892, these two major companies combined, in a merger arranged by financier J. P. Morgan, to form the General Electric Company, with its headquarters in Schenectady, New York. In 1896, General Electric was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly-formed Dow Jones Industrial Average and still remains after 110 years.General Electric was one of the eight major computer companies through most of the 1960s - with IBM, the largest, called "Snow White" followed by the "Seven Dwarfs": Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, RCA, UNIVAC and GE.
Brand GE
General Electric has one of the most valuable corporate brands in the world. CEO Jeffrey Immelt had the new brand commissioned in 2004, after he took the reins as chairman, to unify the diversified businesses of GE. The brand included a change of the corporate color palette, small modifications to the GE Logo, a new customized font (GE Inspira), and a new slogan, "imagination at work" replacing the longtime slogan "we bring good things to life". The new brand requires many headlines to be lowercased and adds visual "white space" to documents and advertising to promote an open and approachable company. The new brand was designed by Wolff Olins and is used extensively on GE's marketing, literature and website.
GE is an enormous multinational conglomerate headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut. Its New York headquarters are based in 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center, known as the GE Building for the prominent GE logo on the roof. Through its RCA subsidiary it has been associated with the Center since its construction in the 1930s.
The company describes itself as composed of a number of primary business units or "businesses." Each "business" is itself a vast enterprise, many of which would, even as a standalone company, rank in the Fortune 500. The list of GE businesses varies over time as the result of acquisitions, divestitures and reorganizations. General Electric's tax return is the largest return filed in the United States, approximately 24,000 pages when printed out. Electronically, the files were 237 megabytes.
Source: Wikipedia
For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric