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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.
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.
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
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!).
spread across 19 pages DESERVES TO DIE!!!
The old Divx video player is one major example of a product that deserved to die off in the marketplace. Moreover, it certainly deserved to have its name taken by a popular video encoding format. And made into a bit character in a penny arcade.
Ryan Fenton
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
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.
There is nothing
liqbase
wrong with the format
liqbase
Sega Dreamcast, anyone?
Thank the Sony PR machine for that one, folks.
as i have learned from reading slashdot, dilbert, and hanging out in the 'linux community', all non-tech staff at a corporation are useless dead weight, hangers on with dragging knuckles and pea sized brains. if only they could be eliminated, society would become a technological utopia. marketing, sales, management, HR, and so forth, are all worthless wastes of time.
and yet, here you come, now telling me that marketing, sales, and management are somehow 'important' and should be payed 'attention to'?
hogwash. we all know that the perfect corporation would make products that we give away for free, have no management, HR, marketing, sales, or customer service staff, and uhm. yeah. we could all live off our wives or in our parents basement.
i for one, will never abandon the True Software view of reality.
if you get paid.
liqbase
Burma Shave!
liqbase
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!
Amiga
Philadelphia Phillies
Curling in the US
Proper grammar any more
Frosty Paws for dogs
Fried food as a food group
Dvorak as a writer
the Pet Rock
any Stehpen King movie adaption
Babylon 5's 5th season
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
printer-friendly link
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.
Company: Slashdot
Born: 1841
Died: 2007 (purchased by Microsoft)
Cause of Death: After Taco's death, his 6 year-old nephew took over the site. Most of the articles were about farts and dodgeball. Popularity went through the roof, but the kid forgot to renew the domain. Microsoft bought it and turned it into a site where people could post tributes to Windows Genuine Advantage.
Founder: Taco Bell
Most well-known product(s): Ascii art
Why we miss them: Because Digg was just bought by the Microsofties
Lasting image/quote: "Repost"
Some settling may occur during posting.
Their demise remains a sore spot for me. What would Macs be running now if Apple had acquired Be? (Not that OSX is so bad.) On a more financially painful note, I lost what should have been a small fortune when they folded. Palm further squandered the technology after buying the IP at, I believe, about $90M. If only someone had opened the source...
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
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
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
Thank $DIETY that they open-sourced it.
Well, since the $DIETY is involved, hopefully they managed to trim some of the fat from the code.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
There's no karma for a funny up-mod. Which creates a big hole, because if you post something that some people think is funny but some think is stupid, you can lose an infinite amount of karma.
Just took too damn long.
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
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
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
What DEC did best was service. They made IBM and HP look bad. 24/7 2 hour uptime guaranteed.
DEC was totally into the PC market. The Micro-Vax sold like hotcakes. They were not into Intel and Microsoft. For those of you that were around back then, look through the list and see how many good ideas died because of lies from Intel and Microsoft. WordPerfect didn't die because of the sale to Novell or the Microsoft claims of buggy version. What made WP great was perfect-script which allowed WP, much like Excel or AutoCAD, to be modified into a data input front end.
I bet anyone can go through the list and mark every death with a lie campaign by Microsoft or Intel. But we wouldn't waste our time on those two.
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."
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.
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.