There are many complaints about "modern" logos being illegible and how it is impossible to guess the purpose of an app from the logo and I do not understand it. There was never a period of time when you could just look at any logo and know what it is. Just to name a few examples here

- Photoshop (used to be an eye, was briefly a feather, now just the word mark PS)

- Foobar2000 (Alien???)

- WinAMP (lightning?)

- Google Chrome (I never figured out what it was supposed to be, just a ball of colors?)

- Microsoft Word (what does W mean?)

- Microsoft PowerPoint (look at the office 2000 version of PowerPoint, it has a pacman in it)

- VLC player (what does a traffic cone have to do with playing video?)

I think if anything has changed now and then, it was not how comprehensible logos became, but how cynical we ended up. We seem to have developed a knee jerk reaction to find anything about "modern tech" to hate on (on a forum owned by the company that funded much of the modern tech nonetheless) and it had colored our perception of how things really were in the past.