As tempted as I am to read into the tea leaves, a logo is a logo is a logo. Or, as the better poet Gertrude Stein once put it, "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

The new logo is way better than the old one. Probably not iconic, but it doesn't have to be as we're not a consumer product (so it doesn't have to capture the public's imagination). The module-makers don't  care what image is on the ROE/TROE as long as the standards are met and the price is cheap.
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Well of course, being a graphic designer, I am going to disagree. But I will make a case. First, let me acknowledge I had submitted a bid to Mr. Mika to design the new POET logo, and he decided to go with someone he had worked with before who was also apparently much less expensive. The cost of what I was proposing was not expensive either by any standard, so there you have that. I had toyed with various designs over a couple years prior to Mr. Mika joining the company and continued to tinker with them over time, as I gained more understanding about what POET was trying to do and how. (I shared a small selection of these with this board in the Photos link as soon as I knew I had not been selected to do the work... my favorites in this group of four are numbers 1 and 3.) I think I might have been able to win the bid had I said I would do it for free... but at any rate, I know that I didn't lose this opportunity based on the quality of my work because Mika never saw any of the POET logos I had done. [Maybe I am just assuaging my mildly hurt feelings to think that my bid was just a formality so that a familiar entity could be leveraged down in price, or to show that the process had been "fair"...]

Back to the case for better design... Plenty of iconic work has been done for some now very familiar tech names - (more here). If POET truly has a groundbreaking tech, what better way to express this (and their confidence in it) to the world? We may not be a consumer-conscious product-company (at this point), but we are certainly trying to be a company that the investment and analyst community will rally behind. Having a strong visual brand identity is important even to this audience. And when POET will eventually break into the mainstream, perhaps that will be the occasion for a redesign, but why not have something that can just be gently tweaked? (compare the old and new logos for Cisco systems.) 

I'm sorry, but the new logo I think, objectively, is mundane and derivative (first thing I thought of when I saw the prism was of course the Dark Side of the Moon album cover). This is not a logo you will want a T-shirt made of. As for the module makers not caring - they won't care in any case - good design or bad. There's no additional cost to us or to them once a logo is designed to include it or not include it – incorporate it or don't incorporate it into the manufacturing process at something like .000000001 cents per unit, your choice – so again, why not have something good? People have a tendency to project their own meaning on things anyway, so why not give them a more potent symbol to launch them on their inevitable way?