News
M&A Sessions
Impact Awards
Pipeline 2025
MSP Index
Reports
Events
Resources
Advertise

Business Managed IT Services Cloud

Collaboration Data Centre Digital

Distribution Hardware Mobility

Networking Printing Security

Servers & Storage Services Storage

Telco

End of support for Windows 10 State of AI 2024 Public Sector Tech Report

State of data State of Security 2024 State of the MSP 2024

Kickstarter 2024 Cloud Covered State of Diversity

State of Sustainability 2023

Channel Leaders Golf Day Benchmark Security Awards MSP Index Roadshow

Channel Meets 2025 Pipeline 2025 Impact Awards

Fast50

Photos Channel TV Focal Points

Partner Content Partner Hubs Partner Stories

Media Hub Boardroom Impact Whitepapers

News

Business Managed IT Services Cloud Collaboration Data Centre Digital Distribution Hardware Mobility Networking Printing Security Servers & Storage Services Storage Telco

M&A Sessions Impact Awards Pipeline 2025 MSP Index Reports

End of support for Windows 10 State of AI 2024 Public Sector Tech Report State of data State of Security 2024 State of the MSP 2024 Kickstarter 2024 Cloud Covered State of Diversity State of Sustainability 2023

Events

Channel Leaders Golf Day Benchmark Security Awards MSP Index Roadshow Channel Meets 2025 Pipeline 2025 Impact Awards Fast50

Resources

Photos Channel TV Focal Points Partner Content Partner Hubs Partner Stories Media Hub Boardroom Impact Whitepapers

Advertise

Log in

Email:

Password:

Remember me | Forgot password?

Don't have an account? Register now!

Home
Galleries
Business
Finance

Photos: Top 10 tech company flops

We count down ten technology companies that had golden opportunities - and threw them away.

0 Comments

1 of 12

Ten tech firms that blew it

Technology is an unforgiving business. Companies that appear to have unassailable leads in their market one minute can find themselves fearfully looking in the rear-view mirror the next. In this feature, we’re focusing on the companies that contributed to their own downfall, with one or a series of catastrophic decisions that wreaked irreparable damage to their business.

Our top ten spans smartphones, servers, storage and more. We also profile one firm that managed to bounce back from near-oblivion.

Friends United

Friends Reunited not only pioneered social networking but, miraculously, found a way to make people pay. Set up in 2000 by husband and wife team Steve and Julie Pankhurst, Friends Reunited was based on the premise of looking up old school friends. The genius of Friends Reunited’s business model was charging users if they wanted to contact old school mates.

However, once you’d handed over your fiver and shared a few reminiscent emails there was no incentive to go back. No status updates, no applications, none of the things that allowed Facebook to come along and steal Friends Reunited’s dinner money a few short years later.

Friends Reunited eventually dropped the fee in 2008, but by then all life had been sucked out of the site.

Sun Microsystems

Sun’s early sales success was partially responsible for its downfall. It sold oodles of its systems to startups and web firms during the boom of the 1990s, leading a glut of second-hand equipment in the market after the bust. Sun continued to focus on systems based on its own Sparc architecture while x86 was taking off, leaving it trailing behind in the enterprise space.

Despite the ensuing sales troubles, Sun managed to stay innovative, buying and open-sourcing the productivity suite that became known as OpenOffice, creating Java and even offering utility computing systems a year before Amazon unveiled its own cloud product. None of that could hold off the inevitable, however, and Sun’s value slid to $3 billion in 2008.

AOL

In the early years of the Internet, AOL became synonymous with instant web access. The company was by far the biggest internet provider in the US and had more than 35 million subscribers globally, leaving it rich enough to shell out a stunning $147 billion to buy Time Warner in 2001.

AOL may have had access to a vast wealth of Time Warner video content, but remarkably it failed to migrate its customers to broadband to enable them to enjoy it. A decade on, the tables have turned. Time Warner has spun off AOL, and the firm is now a punchline for jokes about people who don’t quite understand the internet.

Dec Alpha

Alpha was a revolutionary CPU architecture. Designed by DEC and launched in 1992, it was intended as a workstation and server platform that would remain stable for decades, through successive generations. On paper, Alpha was brilliant. Unfortunately, although the product was sound, the strategy wasn’t.

Almost as soon as Alpha processors appeared, businesses began to move away from workstations and multi-user servers in favour of increasingly cheap and capable Windows PCs. Microsoft shifted its focus to this market and began to phase out support for Alpha, leaving the platform – and its its manufacturer – to serve a shrinking niche market. DEC faltered, and ended up being bought by HP, which halted development of Alpha processors in 2004.

Real Networks

At one point, you could barely watch a video or listen to a music clip online without needing RealPlayer on your PC. However, Real Networks ultimately managed to throw itself onto the pyre of smouldering tech failures by irritating the hell out of its own customers.

RealPlayer had a habit of installing itself as your default media player for every media file type under the sun, even when you hadn’t asked it to. The player also spewed out more pop-ups than a dodgy porn site. And it was at the centre of a privacy storm in 1999, when the Real Jukebox software was found to be phoning home with details of songs its users were listening to, forcing the company into a hasty patch. Today, RealPlayer has shrunk into – frankly deserved – obscurity.

Palm

Back at the turn of the century, Palm was perfectly placed to make the transition from PDAs to smartphones. So what went wrong?

The internal turmoil at Palm HQ certainly didn’t help. 3Com’s takeover prompted Palm founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky to leave the company. The decision to spin off Palm OS as a discrete company – separating the software side from the hardware division – was equally catastrophic, creating unnecessary upheaval at a time when more nimble rivals such as RIM’s BlackBerry were emerging and defining the early smartphone market.

In the end, Palm OS was run into the ground to such an extent that the company was forced to abandon it altogether and bet the house on webOS and the Palm Pre.

QuarkXPress

QuarkXPress was the first publishing application with the power to replace traditional layout and typesetting methods completely – and it ran on a modest desktop computer. Publishers small and large leapt at it. Within ten years of its launch in 1987, it had reportedly cemented a 90% share of the booming desktop publishing market.

Although Quark’s success came quickly, the software itself evolved at a glacial pace. In those ten years it gained a mere handful of new features – and missed some important ones, including the ability to produce PDFs. While Quark had been taking its users for granted, Adobe had been perfecting its own DTP package. Today, Quark’s market share has plummeted to around 25%: its glory days are behind it.

Nokia

Well before the Apple iPhone arrived, Nokia not only had the largest slice of market share and a reputation for building high-quality handsets, it also had the idea for touchscreen phones. Nokia showed off a prototype of a web-enabled touchscreen device as far back as 2004, but it canned the idea because of high development costs. Nokia had even latched onto the idea of mobile apps before Apple made them a worldwide phenomenon.

Imagine an alternative tech world in which Nokia released the first touchscreen smartphone and popularised the app store. That thought must bring tears of regret to Nokia’s shareholders, employees and the Symbian community. Instead of dominating the mobile market, Nokia was forced to cut a deal with Microsoft to survive.

Iomega

In the days before external hard disks were affordable, Iomega dominated the external storage scene. In 1998, the Zip drive claimed 87% of the “high-capacity” disk market (back then, this meant 100MB.) Yet Iomega’s grasp on the external storage market wasn’t to last. The infamous “click of death” – where misaligned heads caused Zip disks to all-too-audibly fail – severely dented Iomega’s reputation for reliability.

Its rigid adherence to its expensive, proprietary storage format was ultimately its undoing. In 2008, Iomega – whose share price had fallen from a from a high of over $100 to $3.60 – was bought by storage giant EMC. Its days as a household name are now over.

Yahoo!

Yahoo didn’t just blow it once – the firm arguably missed a hatful of opportunities to save itself, including deals-that-nearly-were with Google and Facebook (today, these firms are woth $184 billion and $50 billion, respectively.)

But possibly the biggest Yahoo misstep – for its shareholders, at least – was turning down Microsoft. After three years of acquisition talks, Yahoo dodged a $44 billion deal, and a subsequent offer of $20 billion for its search business. (It eventually signed on for a ten-year search partnership.) Yahoo is now valued at half of Microsoft’s buy-out offer, and is focusing on ad sales: a significant fall from grace.

Apple: the comeback king

If any of the surviving companies in our top ten are short on belief that they can still turn it around, they should look no further than Apple. The company has gone from the brink of bankruptcy to the biggest tech company in the world, thanks to the success of the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Apple came perilously close to going out of business. After Steve Jobs was ousted in 1985, the firm stumbled through a series of missteps, and its more expensive machines couldn’t keep up with cheaper PCs and clones.

In 1997, however, Steve Jobs strolled onto the stage at MacWorld Expo as interim CEO, with $150 million in backing from Microsoft. Jobs quickly set about rebuilding the company he helped found. Sometimes there is a happy ending.

Ten tech firms that blew it

Novigi acquires Iress’ superannuation consulting and managed services business

Home Affairs seeks IT support provider for 19,000 staff

Roboyo deploys Appian GenAI for Queensland insurance invoices

Partner Content

Secure, integrated platforms enable MSPs to focus bringing powerful solutions to customers

How NinjaOne Is Supporting The Channel As It Builds An Innovative Global Partner Program

Tech For Good program gives purpose and strong business outcomes

Build cybersecurity capability with award winning Fortinet training from Ingram Micro

Ingram Micro Ushers in the Age of Ultra

Events

techpartner.news MSP index - Brisbane

techpartner.news Channel Leader List / Golf day

techpartner.news Pipeline Conference 2025

Integrate Expo 2025

Security Exhibition & Conference 2025

Most popular tech stories

Digital Nation announces finalists for its inaugural Digital Nation Awards

Afterpay rebuilds marketing ops with new CDP and data stack

Westpac hires CBA's data chief to lead AI, data and digital

Lawyers face sanctions for citing fake cases with AI

Orica to set new workforce systems live in Australia in July
Woolworths' CSO is Optus-bound

Health signs $33m networks deal with Optus

Rio Tinto AI tool aids defect elimination in rail operations

Hackers abuse modified Salesforce app to steal data, extort companies

icare signs $29m cloud renewal with AWS
Blackberry celebrates "giant step forward"

The three steps to industrial IoT success

How IBM aims to protect food supplies using IoT, blockchain and agritech

Photos: IoT Impact 2023 brings together data-enabled productivity, sustainability and trust opportunities

Axis Communications opens experience centre in Sydney tech hub

OTHER TECH SITES: Digital Nation | IoT Hub | iTnews

All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in any form without prior authorisation.
Your use of this website constitutes acceptance of nextmedia's Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Log in

Don't have an account? Register now!

Email:

Password:

Remember me | Forgot your password?

Photos: Top 10 tech company flops

We count down ten technology companies that had golden opportunities - and threw them away.

Ten tech firms that blew it

Friends United

Sun Microsystems

AOL

Dec Alpha

Real Networks

Palm

QuarkXPress

Nokia

Iomega

Yahoo!

Apple: the comeback king

Ten tech firms that blew it

Related articles

Novigi acquires Iress’ superannuation consulting and managed services business

Home Affairs seeks IT support provider for 19,000 staff

Roboyo deploys Appian GenAI for Queensland insurance invoices

Most popular tech stories

Digital Nation announces finalists for its inaugural Digital Nation Awards

Afterpay rebuilds marketing ops with new CDP and data stack

Westpac hires CBA's data chief to lead AI, data and digital

Lawyers face sanctions for citing fake cases with AI

Orica to set new workforce systems live in Australia in July

Woolworths' CSO is Optus-bound

Health signs $33m networks deal with Optus

Rio Tinto AI tool aids defect elimination in rail operations

Hackers abuse modified Salesforce app to steal data, extort companies

icare signs $29m cloud renewal with AWS

Blackberry celebrates "giant step forward"

The three steps to industrial IoT success

How IBM aims to protect food supplies using IoT, blockchain and agritech

Photos: IoT Impact 2023 brings together data-enabled productivity, sustainability and trust opportunities

Axis Communications opens experience centre in Sydney tech hub

Log in