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Dearly Departed — Companies and Products That Didn't Make It
Esther Schindler writes "Some products just didn't deserve to die. But they did, because the companies made bad business decisions. Dearly Departed, revisits several favorites — from minicomputers to software utilities — and mourns the best and brightest that died an untimely death. What companies or products would you add? Which of them deserved to go?"
Quick list for those who don't care to click through one per page for 19 pages:
DEC, Tandem, Apollo, Borland, Amiga, Commodore, Ashton-Tate, Fox, Central Point Software, Quarterdeck, Gould, Infocom, Sequent, Poquet,
Taligent, Word Perfect, Lotus, and Compuserve are the "dearly departed"
I can't comment much on the PC-heavy end of the list, but DEC stands out to me as the one
which least deserved to die. DEC Western Research Lab was a fantastic place with a great deal of innovation and freedom, and
watching it shrivel and die was painful.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Avoids the 19-page ad-laden version:
http://www.cio.com/article/print/125263
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Webvan had a good idea. But they mismanaged their expansion. They got something like 3% market share in 30 cities; when what they needed was 30% market share in 3 cities. The delivery costs of low-density deliveries were killing them.
Safeway offers something that seems similar now, but they do it by having people pick from the shelves of their retail stores. Because the stock on hand there is thin, the online system can't reserve or even see the shelf stock, and they don't do back-orders, they tend to deliver orders with missing items.
Find the "Printable Version" button on the first page. Condenses everything into one page.
Most of these "news" sites have one.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Try the spectacular failures of the SegaCD, 32X, and Saturn that preceded it. They dug themselves into a giant hole - both financially and in the minds of gamers - that was damn near impossible to dig out of.
Interestingly enough, some of the nifty features of the Alpha (primarily the bus) were inherited by the Athlon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon Apparently one of the engineers from the Alpha project joined AMD just as Alpha was shutting down.
When Ken Olsen made his famous comment in 1977, it set the tone for DEC to ensure it quickly lost relevance in the computer world. And when DEC did finally come out with PC's, they were proprietary at a time when the proprietary designs were slowly losing out to the IBM PC.
By the time the Alpha chip was released, the company was already doing very poorly. By the time Robert Palmer took over, it was not clear to anyone at the time that DEC would ever again be relevant. I don't know if he was the right man for the job or not, but he basically started parceling out bits of DEC to whoever would buy it. My experience is you can't cut your way to profitability, and when Compaq bought DEC, it was never clear to anyone why they would be interested. I believe DEC took out Compaq on it's way to the bottom.
I find it amusing now that Ken Olsen tries to claim that he was not anti-PC. My personal opinion was the Ken Olsen was anti-PC because it was pretty clear that cheap boxes would soon be as powerful as the "minis" that DEC had for sale. He knew he'd eventually be squeezed from the bottom end by PC's and there was no place to grow on the top end.
My only reminder of DEC is a copy of Digital Unix with all the manuals in the original box that I keep on a top shelf to remind me of what DEC used to be. Personally, I'm not surprised that DEC failed, I'm more surprised how little time it took they basically went from being the #2 computer maker to irrelevance in 5 years and then they were gone 5 years later.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Back on topic, companies I am sad to have seen go include:
Speaking of deficient memories...
Windows NT 4.0 came with IE2. Windows 95 OSR2 came with IE3.0.
Windows 98, with IE4, was just the first time IE wasn't complete and total crap. Mind you, it was still crap, but not significantly enough worse than Netscape 4 to make people buy a CD, or wait two hour for the damn thing to download. Bundling + Bandwidth limitations killed Netscape.
The company was heading down the wrong path, no question, but they were dead before any version of IE was even competitive. By the time IE v5 came out, Netscape was roadkill, swirling the drain.
It does amaze me what poor memories people have in general, and your "correction" is no exception.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There's a great on-line book on the rise and fall of Wordperfect by Pete Peterson: http://www.fitnesoft.com/AlmostPerfect/
Almost Perfect is a rollicking good read, with something for everyone in it.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
No, and your comment is disturbing. Microsoft has a past history of denying PC Users access to the competition. Spyglass for OS2/MAC/Unix was killed after Microsoft bought them and rebranded it Internet Explorer. So were all the Non-DOS/Windows Sub-Logic games (Flight Sim). Visio used to work perfect under OS2 until Microsoft bought them.
Please remember who your dealing with. The text below is all recorded trial evidence, not speculation.
While DRI and Novell were placing their hopes in DR DOS, IBM tried to end the Microsoft monopoly with OS/2. IBM started selling OS/2 in competition with Windows 3.0 in 1990. Microsoft worked hard to keep Windows applications from running acceptably on OS/2 and to prevent the development of OS/2 applications. Besides holding back technical information needed to make Windows applications work on OS/2, Microsoft prohibited users of its software-development tools and otherwise freely redistributable software modules from using them for any operating system but Windows. The lack of applications alone would have doomed OS/2, but Microsofts attack on IBMs PC business was even more damaging. In October 1994, Microsoft proposed a new Windows license that raised the royalty IBM paid to $75 per machine for Windows 95 from the $9 IBM had paid for Windows 3.1. Because IBM sold between 5 million and 6 million PCs per year, these basic terms would have raised IBMs royalty payments to Microsoft from around $40 million to $330 million a year. IBM could reduce the royalty if it agreed to Microsofts demands to "adopt Windows 95 as the standard operating system for IBM" and ensure that "Windows 95 is the only OS mentioned in advertisement." This meant nothing less than killing OS/2 to get a lower price on Windows. In July, IBM bought Lotus Development. IBM planned to bundle Lotus SmartSuite on its PCs and sell SmartSuite to other manufacturers in competition with Microsoft Office. Three days later, Microsoft completely cut off negotiations for Windows 95. Microsoft later demanded that IBM not ship SmartSuite for six months or a year as a condition to resuming Windows 95 negotiations.
Microsoft was trying to kill OS/2 while Jackson was reviewing the proposed DoJ-Microsoft settlement. On Aug. 8, 1995, the DoJ announced it would not block shipment of Windows 95. On Aug. 21, Jackson approved the settlement. Microsoft was still refusing to license Windows 95 to IBM. With the settlement in place and the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars in lost PC sales without Windows 95, IBM caved in 15 minutes before Windows 95 was announced. Microsofts Mark Baber had asked IBMs Garry Norris, "Where else are you going to go? This is the only game in town." IBM ended up paying $47 a copy for Windows 95. At the previous rate, IBM would have paid around $120 million to $200 million in royalties from 1996 to 1998, but the new terms exacted a price of $998 million and made IBMs PC prices uncompetitive with other major vendors. Ultimately, IBM had to kill either OS/2 or the PC business it had founded.
Full text, http://reactor-core.org/in-microsoft-we-trust.htm
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
I still think that the idea is valid, and if it were done right, would be a multibillion-dollar industry.
In the UK, online grocery shopping is *huge*. All of the biggest supermarkets now offer a nationwide service, including Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury. Hugely useful and certainly saved my life when the baby was young ;-)
Is there really no US nationwide online grocery network? Wow.