Top 10 technology also-rans

Below is a list, compiled by regular contributors Iain Thomson and Shaun Nichols, of those IT innovations that despite being full of potential, fell under the bulldozer.

Some were cruelly robbed of their advantage, others threw it away with bad management.

Honourable mention: Betamax

Iain Thomson: Betamax is a case history in how technological battles are fought and lost. It also reveals a lot about Sony's corporate culture.

In the 1970s, the concept of home video was just beginning to take off. Sony, one of the leaders in the field created the Betamax format for home video and graciously said the rest of the industry could use it, for a small fee. JVC and others politely told Sony where it could stick its format and created VHS to compete.

This has been a long term problem with Sony. It wants to own storage formats and get paid by the rest of the industry. Betamax was an early example of this, but MemoryStick and Blu-ray show that the instinct runs deep.

Now on the face of it Betamax should have swept the market. It launched first, had the backing of one of the biggest names in entertainment and the picture quality was superior to VHS. It was loved by the broadcast community but in the home market it failed to take off.

The most telling reason was probably the capacity. To watch Betamax videos at their best resolution each tape would only record an hour of film. For home recorders this wasn't much of a problem, but for Hollywood it was a major issue.

Secondly the public didn't play ball – most home video players were rented rather than bought and JVC had good retail connections. Finally, and some say crucially, the porn industry went for VHS and guess what a lot of the early video viewers wanted to watch?

So Betamax was relegated to the dustbin of history.

Shaun Nichols: As an American born in the 1980s, I didn't even know what Betamax was until The Simpsons made a joke about it. Still, the story of Betamax remains a poignant example of why the industry needs cooperation.

As Iain noted, Sony's arrogance was the big reason for the failure of Betamax. Rather than get everyone on the same page and compete at the hardware feature level, Sony tried to squeeze everyone in the industry and sell a proprietary format. It was the original victory for open standards.

Years later, Sony learned its lesson. When the battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD erupted, the company immediately built up a coalition of its peers and courted the studios. As we will see later on in the list, the outcome was decidedly better for the company.

Honourable mention- Gateway

Shaun Nichols: It's not dead yet by any means, but Gateway was once a promising firm that now languishes behind fellow vendors such as Dell and HP.

Back in the mid and late 1990s, Gateway was a known presence both on desktops and TV sets around the world. The company was a major player in the exploding PC market and its signature cow-patterned boxes were prominently displayed through countless ads.

Unfortunately, when the dot-com bubble burst and the economy slumped, PC sales slowed and Gateway took a big hit. The company is now owned by once-rival Acer.

Iain Thomson: For a brief period in the 1990s, Gateway looked like a game changer. It had the order-to-buy model that Dell perfected, the great PR and, most importantly for consumers, those boxes with the Holstein cow markings on them. At a time when the average consumer was getting used to buying a PC this was the friendly face of the industry that they could understand.

In a way gateway was the Apple of the PC world. It stressed approachability as its selling point and initially sold on it's country image as a computer company that understood that you didn't need to be a techie to buy a PC. But then it tried to get all 'Silicon Valley' and lost its soul.

You can still buy a Gateway PC today, but it's not the same. Now Acer owns Gateway and its folksy image is little more than a marketing plan. A sad end to a great early mover in the PC industry.

10. AltaVista

Shaun Nichols: Yet another promising name from the internet boom that never quite made it out was search engine AltaVista. Once considered to be one of the better search engines on the web, AltaVista is now an afterthought.

In the early days of the internet there were no mammoth search engines. Yahoo was growing, but it had nowhere near the coverage that it does now. To deal with this, many users became accustomed to using more than one search engine.

Unfortunately, however, as engines and indexes grew users became accustomed to using a single engine, and as Google, Yahoo and MSN grew, engines such as AltaVista and Hotbot were unable to keep up. The company was finally sold in 2003 for a pittance.

Iain Thomson: Trying to find what you were after on the internet was originally a massive pain.

Back in the early 1990s you had to know precisely what you were looking for in order to find it. I had an address book full of hastily scribbled URLs passed on from people I'd met and if you misspelled something you were stuck.

Then search engines came along and life was a little more simple. Sites like AltaVista made life a little easier and navigating the huge amounts of data became less of a chore. But then Google came along.

Google basically wiped the floor with the competition, not because of advertising or clever marketing campaigns, but because it was so good that people not only told their friends but raved about it until the word of mouth was so good market momentum was built.

9. BeOS

Iain Thomson: I can vividly remember the first time I saw the BeOS in action and it blew me away. To see a standard PC running multiple video streams without stuttering was a revelation and I gave the operating system rave reviews.

But Be failed on a number of counts. First off it lacked support for the kind of applications that the business community wanted. It was too focused on a narrow subset of computing operations which, while important, didn't make for a compelling business case for your average accounts department.

But I suspect in truth the real reason for BeOS' fall from grace was that the company wasn't really interested in selling a full operating system. Rather than all that costly business of developing the system, the plan was most likely to sell the operating system to Apple, or maybe Microsoft, and retire.

As such BeOS failed but it is still to be found among the user groups who still support and use it just because it's a good bit of software. For techies quality is always important, even if it doesn't go mainstream.

Shaun Nichols: Apple users should all know the story of BeOS and its role in Macintosh history.

In the late 1990s Apple was hurting in the market and looking for a shot in the arm. The flagship Macintosh line was sputtering, largely because the MacOS, once considered a cutting edge operating system, was showing its age big time.

The stability and performance issues of the OS had become glaring weaknesses and a complete overhaul was necessary to carry the Mac into the 21st century.

Rather than start completely from scratch, Apple CEO Gil Amelio went out looking to acquire a startup firm with an innovative OS to power the Mac. His first choice was Be, a company which seemed to fit the bill in every way. A powerful, sophisticated OS, Be also had a slick interface many considered even better than even the MacOS.

The two companies entered talks, at which point Be made the mistake of lifetime. Chief executive Jean-Louis Gasse overestimated the value of the company and broke off talks. A dejected Apple looked elsewhere for its OS, and deposed founder Steve Jobs gladly obliged. Apple purchased NeXT and Jobs returned to the throne in Cupertino.

8. HD DVD

Shaun Nichols: Talk about going from riches to rags overnight. The HD DVD format was a medium that literally died out in the course of one day.

I remember the day quite well, as it was on the eve of CES 2008. Sony and Toshiba had for years been locked in a struggle for control over the next generation optical disc market. Both the Sony Blu-ray format and the Toshiba HD DVD format were looking to be named as the successor to conventional DVDs.

Both sides had amassed backers from the biggest names in the computing world. Firms such as Sun and Microsoft chose sides and advocating one format or the other.

The only parties of any real importance, however, were the studios. Both camps courted the major movie studios and distributors in hopes of getting a commitment one way or the other. Everyone knew that as soon as the major studios committed to a format, the battle would be over.

On January 7 2008, the battle was decided. Warner Brothers announced that it would exclusively ship Blu-ray discs. The fallout was immediate and devastating. Within hours nearly everyone had declared the battle over, and Toshiba, which had planned a major consumer offensive at CES, cancelled nearly all of its planned events for the show.

Iain Thomson: As we saw with Betamax, Sony does like to own its standards. After seeing JVC earn billions in licensing fees for videos Sony went all out to dominate the new DVD standard.

I actually bet money on HD DVD winning the fight. HD DVD should have won – it was a cheaper hack and looked technically superior.

However, I'm tempted to add Blu-ray to the also-rans. Sony won this war, but hadn't realised the battle had been lost. Blu-ray sales have been disappointing because no-one really wants to buy solid media any more. Sony has spent billions on this fight but we all want to download our media now.

If you've got a decent internet connection, who needs to have a physical form of media? HD DVD may be a lost technology but I suspect Sony may find it's wasted its money on the fight.

7. OS/2

Iain Thomson: OS/2 was a great example of IBM hubris at a time when it was getting beaten like a red-headed stepchild.

IBM realised that it had let a huge cash cow slip through its fingers by outsourcing the PC operating system to Microsoft. So it decided to develop its own operating system to compete - but it went to Microsoft to do it.

I suspect Gates had to excuse himself from meetings for quite a while because of a giggling fit when the proposal came through. It's not many chief executives who get asked to design their competitor and it's a measure of IBM's mindset that it thought it could get away with it.

OS/2 had huge potential and some very nice software but it was doomed from the outset. After huge delays and software incompatibilities, the operating system failed to inspire and IBM took on the project itself, and watched it wither.

Shaun Nichols: Some would remark that asking Microsoft to make one OS for you is a bad idea, let alone two.

As history would have us believed, Microsoft originally approached OS/2 as a sort of successor to Windows. First built as a command-line system, it was later given a GUI billed as a better alternative.

The problem, however, was likely that Microsoft realised it could get more done when it didn't have to meet IBM's every whim. The company took a big step forward with Windows 3.0 and rather than be tied to IBM and its hardware, Microsoft opted to license Windows out to PC vendors who bundled and pre-installed it onto their systems.

IBM was then left with a promising OS, but not much knowledge of how to advance or market it beyond their own systems. Like many enterprise operating systems, OS/2 lingered for decades as on embedded systems, but it has more or less been retired.

6. Digital Equipment Corporation

Shaun Nichols: Today the name Digital Equipment Corporation, or " Digital" as it was commonly known, is a fairly obscure reference. The company founded in the late 1950s managed to stay alive well into the 1990s, though without the fanfare and grand legacy of other vendors from that period.

Unfortunately, it was not to be for DEC. While vendors such as HP, Intel and IBM emerged from the early days of computing to become industry icons, DEC faded into obscurity and was eventually dismantled.

Iain Thomson: DEC was important for many reasons, but for methe key one is that it inspired a geek called Steve Wozniak to get involved in computers.

The wonderful wizard of Woz got obsessed with DEC hardware, as it was the computer of its age. While too expensive for many, the DEC systems opened the way for the computer revolution by making system design open to all.

Talk to Woz about the DEC systems and his eyes grow misty. He saw the designs and programs that could be done on such a machine and his mind went wild. He wrote an entire operating system longhand based on his experience with DEC systems.

DEC also gave a start to a chap called Bill Gates. His school was so wealthy that it bought access to a DEC system and gave him the programming skills he needed to build Microsoft.

Read on for 5-1...