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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?"
Seems to be primarily concerned wtih acquisitions that caused the death of companies. What about the acquisition and death of Netscape? I don't think it deserved to die and it was pretty much decided in multiple settlements that Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows destroyed any chance Netscape had.
I've personally never used their old products but, you know, I do use Mozilla and it's derivatives and it's a fine browser. Unfortunate they didn't have a snowflake's chance in hell with Microsoft's actions.
My work here is dung.
That's easy: Webvan.
I loved Webvan. My friends loved Webvan. To this day, I think it was one of the best ideas to come out of the dot-com era, even though it was one of the first companies to go under when the bubble burst.
It is such a shame that they're gone, and the day I heard they were closing up shop (or technically, warehouse, I suppose) was a sad day indeed. Going to the grocery store is such a hassle, and I gladly paid the premium for the convenience.
I still think that the idea is valid, and if it were done right, would be a multibillion-dollar industry. Whoever takes up the cause now, though, would have to fight not only the trials and tribulations of starting a new business, but the legacy of the spectacular failure of Webvan before it.
What a shame. I can't believe that it's been six years since their demise.
I'd like to point out that in this list, there was exactly one company "killed" by Microsoft. Foxpro was acquired by them. More importantly MS is still keeping the project alive after all of this time. Microsoft most certainly is not the company killer that the Slashdot Groupthink make it out to be.
I don't respond to AC's.
which least deserved to die
Really? Have you actually programmed on a DEC system? That was the most abominable IO record access semantics I have ever met in my career. An average homework written in pascal for a CS course consisted of one page of open declaration followed by 5 lines of homework. Totally nuts. Add to that the joke known as the BSD Unix subsystem (your best friend if you want to hack a DEC). Add to that the totally insane file/node/resource naming convention. I had that sorry excuse of an OS pwn3d left right and center anytime I liked. It was done mostly to run rogue or nethack which were prohibited by the club of religious freaks in charge of the computer system (I understood that they constitute a happy sect much later). It ended with getting a pre-expulsion warning and the equivalent of a campus ASBO where I was not allowed to enter a terminal room. No thank you. It deserved to die. Even the really clumsy early PC Unixes were so much better, it was simply unreal.
Borland deserved to die as well. While it had a fantastic DOS/protected mode compiler and runtime it never understood the idea that future will be ruled by resource editors and visual controls. I have had to deal with their visual controls on Mac (yep, Turbo Pascal 1.x for Mac System 8), Windows (both TPW and Dephi) and I have even tried to implement a graphical extension of the Vision stuff. It deserved to die. Anything else aside a rapid application development environment that did not understand the value of ready controls and resources did not belong on the market. Microsoft came with their lame, buggy, but usefull foundation class libs and wiped the floor. No surprise there.
I can continue with the list. Every single one of them had serious technical reasons to depart. While we may have some fond memories of them - good bye and good riddance. Unless you feel masochistic to write an RMS open statement and build a GUI with TPW (or god forbit TP for Mac).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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Acquisition by Symantec killed Central Point Software. The DMCA buried it.
They made Copy ][ Plus for the Apple II series and other similarly named software for other platforms. C2+ was the essential piece of software at my high school, for students and teachers alike, back when copy protection itself was an art form (double spiral tracks on 5.25" floppies), not like the typical, "If this block on the disk is readable, refuse to run," protections of later years. (However, 8.2 was much better than 9.0. For some reason the UI became sluggish.)
Nowadays, such software is completely illegal under the DMCA.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Be, Inc. really epitomizes this for me. They had great ideas and great products, but their dull business moves caused them to die an ugly death.
They did have an uphill struggle - nobody's going to port their major software to a platform without a userbase, but a platform isn't going to get a userbase until it has major software ported to it. Being a late entry to the PC game put them in that chicken/egg scenario and really hurt them.
But surely they could have somehow convinced SOMEONE to port an application to BeOS. They should have poured everything they had into this. Offer Adobe a small percentage of hardware sales if they port Photoshop, for example. Get Corel to bring WordPerfect into the mix so you have a big-name competitor offering a word processor.
Instead they killed the BeBox and from there it was a downward spiral.
Sigh.
Commodore deserved bankruptcy, the Amiga didn't.
Commodore failed to develop the Amiga and didn't know what to do with it. Dithering between marketing it as a business computer or a games machine.
About 6 years after I got my A500 in 1987 they finally released a new chipset, it was a stop gap hack until the long awaited AAA chipset came out. It never did appear due to bankruptcy. Rumour has it that they were still flying the company jet around right to the end.
If AAA had been released when the A3000 came out then the Amiga would have blown the competition away. They intended on having DSPs and 16-bit sound in the A3000 which they removed.
Incompetent management milking the original genius of Jay Miner (RIP), Dale Luck, RJ Mical and others. A600 (A500 in a smaller case with ECS).
Few companies since the dawn of the microcomputer have so thoroughly blown a sure thing. Heck, they called it The Osborne Effect for a reason...
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
Netscape absolutely deserved to die. It is the ABSOLUTE postchild for how not to manage a software group.
The basic management philosophy was that anyone could modify anything at any time for any reason. Nobody owned anything. Did you ever wonder why the actual source code release was over 70MB(!) back in the mid-90's, and wouldn't compile?
While that approach might work when you have a very small crew (under 10), it just doesn't scale. I know one guy who went in as a contractor and he couldn't get his work done because everybody was changing things to meet their own personal project needs, without thinking about a clean way of doing it. He finally had to get his manager to agree to announce that anyone who touched a certain section would be fired if they modified that code until he got his stuff done.
What's sad is that I ran into one of their top managers later on at Agami. Within a year, that guy had destroyed what had been a top engineering group of very talented people, and within 18 months he was canned. Agami has never recovered. A pity, as they used to be Kliener-Perkins' hottest startup (according to KP).
So I would agree that Netscape deserved better. Far, far, better. They didn't deserve their bad management. But with it, they did indeed deserve to die.
Thank $DIETY that they open-sourced it. In many ways, Netscape is a classic example of the extremes of both good and bad.
Yes, I have, and I still miss them. Your problem was that you (apparently) tried to use Unix on them, rather than VMS, and the common language interface (which allowed you to do system calls and fancy string handling in fortran 77). Once you grokked the Orange Wall (and later Grey Wall), VMS was easy to manage, and rock solid. It used funky networking of course (CMUTEK tcp/ip still gives me shudders), but if you had all VAXes, then DECNET was no big deal. Truly a loss, and superior to many of its successors.
I miss my VAXstation and the 11/785.
turbo pascal 2 was also great, but they never cleanly made the transition to the Windows world. I'm sorry to lose the simplicity of TP2 (which would be great now because you'd just link it to other libraries, rather than rely upon Borland's oddball implementations), and there was always the attempt to be different, such as Turbo Prolog.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
"DEC Western Research Lab was a fantastic place with a great deal of innovation and freedom, and
watching it shrivel and die was painful."
What he said. The firewall was born there as well as the www search engine.
About 8 or so years ago a few of us got calls from the white house - Ira Magazner, Clintons senior science advisor wanted to meet with all players in the domain name mess (to stab us in the back it turns out) and Brian Reid was one of those people. He was director of the NSL at DEC ("decwrl").
The day before I got an email saying he couldn't come and that Compaq had bought Dec and he wasn't sure he'd even have a job. I asked how this could even be possible and his reply stuck in my mind quite firmly: "Compaq didn't get enough money to buy Dec by being innovative".
Need Mercedes parts ?
What about Wordstar? Glorious program in the early DOS era before WordPervert evolved into a usable product, ran on DOS or CP/M, excellent formatting controls, and didn't need keyboards with either function keys or arrow keys. You could have run it off an ADM3a.
My college, after trying many arguably superior programs (XYWrite, Final Word, Wordstar), mysteriously settled on WordPerfect, probably because a manager thought something driven by func keys that came with a little keyboard template to remind you of what they did was easier. I never understood how a wordprocessor that constantly required you to removed your hands from the home-row keys was supposed to enhance my writing. Then I discovered that nobody can touch-type anyway, so it wasn't making as much difference as I thought.
I'd still probably rather use emacs and TeX, but that wasn't even a dream on early 80s PCs.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
"Really? Have you actually programmed on a DEC system?"
Candy ass. Real man used to toggle in bootstrap code via bit switches to start up a PDP 11/20. A bit later a few of us were playing with a little thing called "Unix" on 11/45s. A funny languaga called "C" came out of this. I watched as my cubemate wrote a programme now called "gcc".
The elegece of the PDP instruction set made this easy if not easier. I shudder to think where we'd be today if it were not for those machines and I defy anybody to point to a more programmer friendly instruction set on any computer anywhere. I/O wasn't a big deal.
I think your problem may have been Pascal, not Dec hardware. Pascal deseved to die, the PDP's didn't. I can't say I was crazy about vaxen but they did to their job amazingly well. Didn't like VMS either, but Vax ran unix just fine.
pwning an eary unix system wasn't exacly a big deal. Keep in mind back then Unix was not a commercial product it was a research tool used internally in Bell Labs that some Universities had access to. I used it at Waterloo in the 76-77-78 timeframe. I split and went to LA and the advantage of having known C and Unix in the essentially BASIC orientied California computer industry of the day was a god$end.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I miss DEC. I learned how to program with Turbo Pascal & C on a VAX machine when I was a kid on DEC machines in the hospital my dad worked at & would drag me to when he had me for the weekends... And then came along the SPARC Station in his office... was it running Solaris? I can't remember... omg!! That thing was leaps and bounds ahead of anything I use today... Who would have thought that a developer would have had a better environment to work with when he was 8 than when he's 30??
There's a veritable graveyard of dead gaming franchises and companies, but I'm going to vote for my most dearly departed...
MicroProse was an amazing company, devoted to making some ground-breaking combat flight sims as well as genuinely fun games (worms! x-com!). They were bought out by Hasbro, who immediately took them out of the flight sim market. The announcement about the buyout was made on December 7, 1998, a day which will live in infamy.
They also had a brief hold on the MechWarrior series, which after the third sequel fell into a state of consolitis after being sold to Microsoft. Not dead, but dead to me I suppose.
On a 640K XT, Quattro Pro had ~150K more memory to load spreadsheets than the equivalent 1-2-3 of the era. Also, don't forget that Quattro Pro included everything that 1-2-3 didn't. How we've quickly forgotten the bad-old-days of Lotus 1-2-3 r2.2 and having to buy 3rd party plug-ins to... 1) Print sideways with Allways; 2) Use basic VGA 640x480 rendering (pseudo-WYSIWYG instead of 80x25 text); etc. Hell, Quattro Pro/DOS could even embed sounds (not MIDI, but actual sound files) into cells--and it used something similar to RealSound to play them using a PC speaker!
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Funny how their quick slide down coincided with their newfound friendship in Microsoft. DEC all of a sudden become enamored with Microsoft and were telling their customers they need to move to Windows and DEC would be there to help. The trouble was, Windows sucked back then too and once DEC users got going, they were looking for another vendor in hopes of a better experience if not a better price on the systems. I also remember DEC System Engineers being way too bullish on Windows even though it multi-tasked like crap and had reliability issues. The end came fast once they drank the Microsoft Cool-aid.
HP almost had the same fate when they too were trying to force the HP-UX customers of UNIX and onto Microsoft Windows. After one year of that they pulled back and continued supporting HP-UX/UNIX let customer chose what product fit their needs best. They did drop a lot of market share in that one year though and along went larger service contracts.
All those UNIX vendors going nuts for Windows had me wondering why they were ignoring OS/2 since it had great multi-tasking, decent memory footprint and was far far more reliable than Windows. I'd not been exposed to how IBM did business before then but now understand why some of these larger computer vendors backed off from IBM's PC OS product. Of course, it didn't help that later on, when HP caught on to what OS/2 brought to the desktop PC market, Microsoft had enough power over HP to force them to turn off all OS/2 promotions and work. This was around 1994.
DEC, HP, others didn't understand how dangerous Microsoft was to their survival. Just like how IBM effectively killed off Digital Research by licensing MS-DOS along with DR-DOS but pre-loading MS-DOS and reselling DR-DOS at a very high price. The original hardware vendors found their PC OS "partner" soon became a threat to any software they where doing or wanted to do and also became so dependent on Microsoft it allowed Microsoft to actually dictate product development via strong arm tactics.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Greiner's article is pretty lame. If it had a bit of background or insight, it could have been a great read. But it's just a list of companies names with a bare minimum of detail. Not even a decent analysis of why they failed. At least the Slashdot comments give some insight the CIO author was lacking.
Which brings us to DEC:
> 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.
DEC's systems were a large computer surrounded by dumb terminals. They died because Olsen didn't want to know about the PC.
Now remember that 'Network PC' craze of a few years back? Larry Ellison's call for a PC that was so stripped down it was just a prettier dumb terminal. When Ken Olsen heard about the Network PC, he got excited and declared he had been vindicated. The market disagreed. Olsen was an extremely arrogant man. He knew about the PC but didn't want to know about it. He hated Unix with a vengeance, preferring his DEC's own VMS (I used both: VMS truly sucked). He had a chance to form the OSF (Open Software Foundation) to unite Unix vendors, but he was sniping and suspicious. He and IBM Chariman John Akers wouldn't even shake hands in public. Unsurprisingly Microsoft rode all over them.
He claims he was misquoted. His actions suggest otherwise: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp
They had a linux version of CorelDRAW, Word Perfect among other Corel packages using a custom wine-lib to run.
In fact, Adobe had a linux/unix version of Photoshop 5 I believe at one point in time as well.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Ditto.
Dreamcast immediately came to my mind upon reading the summary.
Though the Amiga was well known in the USA, I don't think anyone could dispute a great loss in the UK was the Acorn computer. First the BBC Micro, which drew many of us to IT in the first place and can be credited with making assemble language non-scary, and then the Acorn Archimedes which brought RiscOS in 1989 (which was and remained superior to Windows95 despite over half a decade head start). They booted instantly, were bomb-proof, and encouraged people to tinker under the hood. You could knock up a GUI app in BASIC in minutes, before the idea of VisualBASIC was a gleam in the creators eye. Many of us owe our careers, the idea that IT can be fun and challenging rather than a dull money-making exercise, to Acorn. I just hope that one day in the future Linux will be able to reach the level of UI and productivity that I enjoyed over 15 years ago on my Acorn. (eg note to Beryl developers, can I please hold down my right mouse button on a scroll bar to be able to pan 2-dimensionally at will over a window?). It was to me what I guess the NeXT was to Steve Jobs. RIP Acorn.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Show me a computer today that has independent rez screens that can be layered (pulled down) on the same display.
None?
They chose a video speed bus that killed my eyes until I did a muti-sync monitor.
I leave it up to the reader to google "amiga video toaster"
I went to a MacWord show and they were "selling" the VT. Uh... not really. They were selling a front end serial cable connnected software system that connected to an Amiga. They showed it to me after my badgering.
That was then. This is now. In the day it was hot stuff.
And even today it is hot. See above about mixing rez on the same screen. It cannot be done today.
qz
They actually did two short films. I still have a (VHS) copy of both. They were produced by the self-named 'Midnight Movie Group', I believe. Exactly as the parent mentioned, they would use all the spare cycles on workstations that were sitting idle during the night. This, mind you, included machines spread across two states and several buildings in one (to the user anyway) seamless network. They made a lot of mistakes but they also got so much very right.
I was never a big CompuServe user -- I tried the service once, but it was too expensive and I never got involved in the discussion-forum aspect of it, which if TFA is to be believed, was the main draw (I always wondered what the hell people liked about it). I pretty much stuck with BBSes and the occasional tryst with AOL (hey, they had a good shareware archive) until the local university started handing out SLIP accounts, and after that I pretty much forgot about online services.
I wonder though -- if CompuServe's forums were so active, did they make any effort to archive them at all? I've always thought that the DejaNews/Google Usenet archive is pretty cool; it's the closest thing that the Internet has to a historical record. But I never really thought about the vast amount of stuff that was in online services and even major BBSes. I assume most of it has been lost/deleted over the years (probably wasn't practical to retain much when data storage was in the tens of dollars per MB), but it would be neat if any of it was still out there. Sure, 90% of it is probably garbage, flamewars, and ASCII porn, but there'd undoubtedly be some interesting stuff in there too. (Just like there's some neat gems in the Usenet archives.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in that. Waaaay better than Word in many areas. I now use LaTeX, which is even handier once you get the hang of it.
-- Cheers!
Banyan was a PC networking company - their server ran a tweaked Unix. It was brilliant. Their streettalk directory service was (and maybe still is) WAY better than Netware's bindery or netbios or whatever. Huge networks (I heard tell the US Army had 30,000 servers on it) on then slow WAN comms. We used to have 8 sites with 256K links (fast for those days). We had one centralised menu system that all sites shared. You could authenticate across a WAN, shared services were simple to use, integrated SNA and other gateways, etc, etc. Way ahead of their time.
They crapped out in the mid nineties - bad marketing or maybe MS or Novell just squeezed them. From memory one of those bought the rump of the company after it had just about died. A real loss.
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
That's such a weak defence. Yes, it's a cultural difference: culture v lack of culture, or broad culture v dumb pop culture. If a book called Elementary Astrophysics is renamed New-fangled book-learnin' all 'bout star-gazin', 101 for a given market, you have to ask whether the intended audience is a bit backward, and not make excuses about "cultural differences". This is on a par.
The only sensible defence is to say that ordinary Americans are quite sophisticated, but the publishers and film studios make patronising decisions for them, due to pre-conceived ideas. I'll listen to that, because it's plausible and I want to believe it.
What the OP is referring to is that the Sorcerer's Stone and the Philosopher's Stone are different names for the same thing, neither of which have anything to do with Harry Potter.
Now that's a novel argument! I doubt very much that the OP had it in mind.
Your Google link just shows that websites use the term. An awful lot of them are about Harry Potter, even though you excluded the word "Potter". Many thousands of them don't actually have the two words next to each other. Others are about various magical rocks. A small number curiously use the term to refer to the alchemists' goal. These mostly seem to be references to a book by some fool called Dennis William Hauck. As far as I can see, none of them are historical references to the ancestor of chemistry, but are instead the ramblings of idiots who actually dabble in "alchemy" today on the Internet, in much the same way as will find "druids", "witches" and "Wiccans". I would not expect these black-fingernailed, black-haired, pasty-faced, pierced-tongued adolescents to get the name right.