Dearly Departed — Companies and Products That Didn't Make It 462
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?"
after seven pages (Score:5, Insightful)
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!).
Divx. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ryan Fenton
Borland, DEC and Amiga (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
i got one (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank the Sony PR machine for that one, folks.
Re:quick summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed I did. Every system had/has its quirks, and it's not fair to compare the VMS environment to modern ones. DEC produced a great deal of interesting things, and if that is your biggest beef with them, that's pretty minor in the scheme of things.
BeOS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:quick summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:quick summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:quick summary (Score:3, Insightful)
s/WordStar/QEdit?g;
For when plain ascii is "good enough".
WordStar really did have a big influence - everyone copied their keyboard shortcuts - Borland, QuickEdit, MultiEdit, etc.
Re:Netscape? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. Netscape had gotten high on the "groupware" hype, and by the time they shipped (nay, shoved out the door) NS4 the company was in deep trouble because it had gone from building a browser to trying to be a client platform for internet communications or whatever. Lofty goals, incredibly bad execution. Any company that loses sight of is core competency becomes a prime candidate for extinction.
People suffer from amazingly deficient long-term memory when it comes to this topic. Netscape was dead long before Microsoft shipped Windows 98, which was the first version of the OS to include IE. And much as it pains some, IE4 was a far superior browser to NS4. The vulnerabilities and ActiveX fiasco would come much later, but are irrelevant to Netscape's fate - as is the bundling itself.
Re:I'm drowning in page hits! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:DEC did their best to fail (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Netscape? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:quick summary (Score:3, Insightful)
I will. It's for the same reason Scholastic changed the title for the first Harry Potter from "The Philosopher's Stone" to "The Sorcerer's Stone" - Americans are just too dumb. We'd probably get confused and think it was an Indiana Jones sequel.
Re:Netscape? (Score:3, Insightful)
And back in the Netscape vs IE days, we are talking dialup networking. Getting pre-loaded was a massive advantage and thinking that many would tie up the line for hours downloading the Netscape suite is silly thinking. Sure, if Netscape had a very small/fast browser it would have made THAT fight easier but the fact is/was, Microsoft leveraged its monopoly in desktop OS's to block a software application vendors product because it carried the threat of being a platform for developers to build on. That's right, the very thing you say was Netscapes downfall is what Microsoft attacked it for.
Back then, I ran OS/2 so both IBM Web Explorer and IBMs port of Netscape ran pretty darn fast and probably mostly due to the multi-threading ability of OS/2.
LoB
Re:DEC did their best to fail (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:DEC did their best (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Netscape? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not completely. I ran an ISP at the time (1996 or so), and even when IE 3.0 came out (I still have two of the "I downloaded!" glow-in-the-dark T-shirts!), Netscape was better. We would have loved to continue including it on on our setup disks for our customers.
But here's the thing: even though Netscape was available for free download, they got greedy - they wanted to charge us, as the ISP, $20 per copy, purchasable only in lots of 1000, to provide it to our customers. And then, if our customers called Netscape support lines for help, they would gladly provide it - then charge us for doing so.
So at first, our install disks included a utility that would download Netscape. Then IE 3.0 came out, was totally free, and even had the IEAK which allowed us to pre-set bookmarks, brand it, etc. It also supported a sign-up server allowing us to just distribute the disks with "insert this disk to sign up!" on them, and it would connect up to our systems and walk the users through creating their accounts, after I wrote some custom C code. This was HUGE for us. No more stopping into the office to sign up, no more paperwork.
So we went to IE and told Netscape to go Cheney themselves. As a result, every one of our users started out their online life with IE. And even though I'm no Microsoft fan, I don't feel bad about that, based on Netscape's behavior.
Re:Obvious one: Acorn Computers (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, one of the high schools I attended used Acorn computers exclusively and I found them immensely frustrating to use, but that's a perception that is very likely influenced by the fact that I grew up using Apple.