When I was cutting my teeth as a cub reporter with Electronic News 25 years ago, one of the companies they set me loose on was Tektronix, the big instrument manufacturer in suburban Portland, Oregon.
It was with some nostalgia that I saw the news that Tektronix — or Tek, as most people in the industry know it — is being acquired by Danaher, which similarly swallowed up Fluke nine years ago. Danaher is best known for manufacturing the Craftsman tools sold by Sears.
Tek isn’t well known as a corporation, but it enormously helped put the Portland area on the map for the high-tech industry, as its former employees started dozens of companies and Intel moved into the neighborhood in a big way.
While churning out oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other instruments for engineers around the world, Tek developed ground-breaking technology. On the same day the news of the $2.85B Danaher acquisition broke, Tek announced that it would receive its seventh Emmy, for its contributions to MPEG-2 video technology. To my knowledge, the only company with more technical Emmy awards is Ampex, with 12.
Tektronix has had its stumbles, of course. The company struggled mightily in the 1980s to enter the computer-aided engineering software market, acquiring a firm, CAE Systems, for $75M. The product line flopped and two years later Tek sold it to Mentor Graphics — a company started by former Tek managers and engineers — for a fire-sale price of $5M. Tek had to deal with pressure from big shareholder George Soros in 1992 to break up the company (he didn’t get his way and cashed out) and then did break itself up in 2000, selling its printing and imaging product lines to Xerox to focus on the test and measurement business. In terms of sales, Tek is smaller than it was 20 years ago. It employed 24,000 in 1981; today, it employs about 4,500.
Danaher will likely keep Tek as a stand-alone entity, as it did with Fluke, but ownership from afar will doubtless change things at the Tektronix campus.
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