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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.
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/
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
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