Xantrex is the company people dump on the most, and largely with good reason. They should be an MBA case study of how an acquiring company can ruin a good product line, and how a company can become know for their worst product and behavior, even though they have had some good products along the way.
Here's their history, as best I can remember as a customer along the way...
First there was Heart Interface. I think they were one of the first inverter companies with products that were widely used in vehicles and boats. My first off-grid inverter was a Freedom 10, 1kw MSW inverter/charger. These were very solid products.
Xantrex bought Heart Interface and continued selling the Freedom product line for a long time - perhaps even still today.
Trace was another early company and they made a full line of inverters, including the first widely used pure sine wave inverter, the SW series. These were very robust systems and widely used in marine, vehicles, and off-grid applications. Lots are still in service today. I ran a house on one for several years, and still have the retired SW4024 in my shop waiting to be reused somewhere else.
Xantrex bought Trace, and continued to sell the SW, but there was some sort of a spat between Xantrex and the core Trace team, and the Trace guys all left. Under Xantrex's ownership, the UL standard for grid-tied anti-islanding came into force, and the SW didn't comply, so Trace had to make some firmware modifications. They obtained UL compliance, but screwed up a bunch of other things at the same time. This was the first indication that Xantrex didn't understand the product they were selling and trying to maintain. Then they came out with the SW+ series, and it was basically a belly flop.
In parallel, I think under new management, Xantrex went on an acquisition binge and bought up pretty much every consumer inverter company out there. Names like ProSine come to mind, and I think (but am not sure) this was the inverter that caused everyone so much trouble. It was sine wave, 1-2kw, small, and inexpensive. I had one of these in a boat and it was a POS.
At this point, Xantrex seemed to be a company with a corner on the market, a ton of products, but nobody home in engineering. So when anything went wrong, all they could do was replace products, deny any problems, and try to make customers go away, which they did.
Again in parallel, let's go back to Trace and the exodus of that team from Xantrex. They left and formed Outback, names because their office was out behind the Xantrex office. And they produced the FX line of sine wave inverters. I recently learned from an industry insider that "FX" stands for "Fu$@ck Xantrex". Outback continues to have outstanding products, though they are products designed by engineers, for engineers, i.e. very complex and difficult to understand. But once set up, they just keep on working. We have a pair of FX inverters on our boat today.
In the midst of all the crap coming out of Xantrex, around 2005-2006 they kicked out a new high-end product line called the XW series. It consisted of inverters, solar chargers, generator controllers, and control panels, all networked with a canbus, and working as a system. I installed one to replace our Trace SW back in 2007, and it hasn't missed a beat in the last 10 years. It's a really outstanding system. How this came out of Xantrex is a mystery, but it did.
Not long after the XW line came out, and probably coupled with the beating that Xantrex was taking over their other products, they sold to Schneider Electric. The Xantrex name remained with the consumer products, and Schneider rebranded the XW series as the Schneider Conext product line.
So there you have it - probably way more than you ever wanted to know. But the bottom line is that at least historically, not everything with the Xantrex name on it is crap.