I also question the Sears and Microsoft logos. The thing about Helvetica -- its essential character -- is in its directness and balance and understatedness and

I also question the Sears and Microsoft logos. The thing about Helvetica -- its essential character -- is in its directness and balance and understatedness and purity, modulo a few well-known quirks (e.g. capital R). When you perturb that (rounded terminals for Skype, fucked up "e" and "a" for Evian, block-skew-italic and glyph mods for Microsoft) I feel like you lose the whole point of the typeface. "Based on Helvetica" is not Helvetica.