I think the page author is trying to show the current logo and the oldest logo, including going back to when companies were known by different names (a few of them are like that anyway).
The cool animation at the top of the page over-sells what this site is providing by a factor of 1000. I was expecting some type of neat morphing between various logos over time.
Which is very interesting for traditional companies. The gradual changes over decades tell a story of changing company size, globalization, technologies and cultures.
It's a little weird seeing these arranged not by year of inception since the use of branding and style have changed era to era. It's neat to see something like Shell change so little but that's not surprising when Oculus is largely unchanged.
The Canon one is interesting. The logo made it clear the name come from a buddhist deity, which is not clear in the new one giving the romanization used is different from the most common one (Kannon).
I freaked the hell out when it did (I'M BEING PHISHED!). I probably saw it the same day it went live, because I was developing an e-commerce checkout flow at the time.
I'm not a fan of these kinds of hilarious-in-hindsight juxtapositions since it gives the impression that "hey, the logos of old companies sucked, so you don't need a good logo to succeed!"
If you'd like to see the evolution of the actual startups themselves, check out a project I've been working on for about a year ... it now has over 500 startups listed on the site:
http://www.startuptimelines.org/
I thought this would be about the logo of the Unicorn web server. Not much here, really, but Airbnb's name makes a lot more sense now that I've seen it spelled out ("Airbed & Breakfast").
Its interesting how Volkswagen was a modified swastika, yet their current logo pays homage to their old one in shape. Honestly if I was them I would have gone an entirely different direction.
I doubt its a modified swastika any more than Columbia Sportswear logo[0] is a modified swastika.
In 1937 the Nazis were already well established in Germany, and WW2 hadn't started yet. I would think that if it was meant to be a swastika, they wouldn't have to allude to it, they would just use it. Ferdinand Porsche[1] (founder VW) was even a member of the Nazi party and SS and worked closely with the SS and received awards from them (though also characterized an a apolitical person, it sort of looks like he had no problems "going along to get along" in matters of furthering his engineering). There is a real story of VW, Porsche, and Nazis, but it's not clear that this logo[3] is part of it.
Apple's logo had a differently proportioned apple. Microsoft had a 90s logo. Google had a 2000s logo. Etc etc.
Also, did you know that Canon is named after Guanyin, aka Avalokiteśvara the Buddhist bodhisattva?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanyin