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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?"
I gave up trying to read what promised (I'd thought) to be an interesting article. Guess I fell for the hook. Guess I haven't been to the CIO web site for a while. Guess I didn't remember the signal to noise ration for their pages (about 10dB). Guess I'll not finish their article. Guess which web site I'm never going back to.
The meat of their article is spread across at least 19 pages, each page of which contains probably less than 100 words text. WTH? Each page of which contains 2K lines, and about 100K of text (this obviously doesn't incorporate the image load and javascript execution tax you pay for each newly loaded page). I gave up even trying to finish the article after seven pages of waiting on a semi-slow connection.
Guess I'll wait for the readers' reviews.
Each day the internet gets a little less interesting, a little less fun. I fully anticipate the day web pages are 100% ads, nothing else (we're close!).
Borland, DEC and Amiga are the ones that really stand out for me.
I remember opening up the giant box of Borland C++ v3 floppy disks and wondering what the hell I got myself into. I still have the box, except the floppies were imaged onto CDs. A well-done, not-perfect product. Borland was very helpful whenever I had questions.
The DEC Alpha was a great CPU. I remembering running across one at an auction, and picking it up, running home and dropping NT 3.51 on it. Solid design, built like a tank. DEC made some interesting innovative products (and yes, they did make the DEC Rainbow, which my college standardized on for, oh, about six months before it died a quick death).
The best on the list is the Amiga. One exceptional system, designed from the ground up as a top-notch computing, video and music machine. I still have a 2000HD with a Toaster, a couple of 500s, a 1000 and a 3000. There are some tasks that PCs can't touch the Amiga, even years later. Several Spanish TV stations in South America use Amigas as their main titling platform. An Amiga with Lightwave and a toaster is a formidable video production studio, even to this day. Too bad Commodore was such a poorly-run company, they did all they could to kill the Ami. At least some Euro folks have kept up with the platform, porting Linux and developing new stuff.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Sega Dreamcast, anyone?
Thank the Sony PR machine for that one, folks.
The Amiga was actually the direct descendent of the Atari 400/800 - it was a 16 bit Motorola 68000 system with graphics a lot of PCs still don't have today. Jay Miner was the genius behind the hardware, Dale Luck and Jim McRazz did the bulk of the OS. I can't remember why it didn't stay in Atari but it didn't. They trie to go it alone for a while then Commodore picked them up.
If you look at comp.sys.amiga in the day complaints about hos Commodore was screwing it up were commonplace.
In fact there was one version of the bootstrap code that is you held down certain keys while it was booting it said something like "We built it, they fucked it up"
The Amiga was so cool it hurt.
Need Mercedes parts ?
But it's well known that writing top-N lists is the easiest way to get your article on Digg and pull in the ad revenue. The masses demand easy to digest, light on content top-N articles.
DEC failed for several basic reasons, but primarily it was due to a lack of marketing muscle.
Ken Olsen had a pet theory that having several rival projects solving the same problem
would produce an optimum solution that would then take the market by storm. To a certain
degree, he was right, and DEC had many elegant solutions for a while. The problem was that
competition evolved, and each competitor zeroed in on a particular product space, and
DEC wasn't prepared to articulate what made its product(s) better than its competitors'.
Ken Olsen didn't seem to realize that sometimes you needed to actually make an effort
to show off a product to prospective customers and explain how your product was better
than the competition's. Just taking orders when the phone rang wasn't enough...
Hence, Sun was able (particularly after it hired away several senior engineering managers
and other talent from DEC) to eat DEC's workstation business. HP and IBM went after the
server business. Others grabbed the other business, such as datacomm/networking.
This, combined with an institutional hatred for anything that wasn't Invented Here (meaning
stuff like UNIX, TCP/IP, etc.), meant that the VAX/VMS mindset continued to control product
conception, design, development and deployment well after it should have been apparent that
a more generic mindset (i.e., multiple architectures and operating systems) should have prevailed.
The VMS folks did NOT like it when internal benchmarking showed that Digital UNIX ran
~10% faster on the VAX8600 (and 8650) than on VMS. The same thing happened under Digital UNIX
and Alpha, too. Neither of which was made common knowledge on the street, of course.
Compaq's purchase of DEC was a joke from the very beginning. The phrase "Industry Standard
Platform" was uttered with a heavy German accent from Day 0 throughout the hallowed halls of DEC,
yet the Houstonians still scratched their heads in amazement that DEC was able to sell its
products with a double-digit markup (and gross profit margin) and not just 6% (on a good day
with a tailwind, which is what they were used to). But, obviously, it was more important to
shut down profitable, smooth running manufacturing operations in Salem, NH (an hour from the
engineering nexi of Nashua and Maynard/Marlboro) and Burlington, VT, so as to subsidize the
much more expensive operations out in Compton, CA which specialized in hiring contract workers
that worked for 2-3 months, then were released and replaced with more contract workers who
needed to be trained how to build the company's products. Productivity was abysmal, of course,
but that didn't matter to Houston, of course. Software Engineering was a complete mystery
to Houston as well - if it didn't run on Windows, it didn't exist, right?
Robert Palmer's dalliances didn't help, either, and caused product innovation to generally
nosedive. The fun was gone, there was no incentive, and no one in management gave a damn
one way or the other.
So, yeah, DEC imploded, due to a severe lack of leadership at the technical, marketing and
corporate levels.
"And much as it pains some, IE4 was a far superior browser to NS4. "
NS4 *eventually* was fine, but it took a long time to get there.
But really, the height of the browser wars was the 3 version of both, and in that regard, Netscape blew away IE3. And in terms of long-term survival, Netscape had the right idea (groupware), they just took long to get there. Note that Google is trying a similar path; they're just being careful how they engage MS, always doing it on their terms, not MS. For this reason alone, it's clear Google is run by brighter management than Netscape.
Don't forget, IE4 was combined in a way to put a lot of "push" access (that was big at the time) so that the active desktop would simply team with advertisements for Disney and a few other companies. It slowed the PC down so as to be useless so people turned it off. The concept was correct; it just came out about 8 years too early and was proprietary (RSS anyone?). If you fire up Windows 98 (the original) in VMWare, unfortunately the effect is gone because the companies who provided the push content no longer do it.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I do remember that era very well, but the desktop PC was the harbinger of things to come. I remember well the VAX, the PDP series, they were the reference through the late 70's and early 80's. But the PC was a signal that pure processing power was not going to be enough to distinguish yourself from the pack. The PC epitomized the idea that a single hardware standard could be a powerful driver for software innovation. Companies like Sun, Apple, and IBM "got it" and they prospered. But DEC saw the idea, and it scared Ken so much that he campaigned against small PC's. His vision was a mini computer and you would "share time". He didn't "get it".
DEC had a lot of great ideas and great technology, but I always felt that at a certain point they forgot what made their hardware and software a standard, and they ignored the reality that the landscape changed around them. Despite overwhelming evidence all around them.
That's why I said DEC went out of their way to fail.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you