Historic IT flameouts listed

Betmax had 2 probs, 1 machines wear out, 2. sony stopped smaller format production, concentrating MY Betamax technology into 3/4" format on NEWSCAMERAS, where variable spool axies, making smaller cassette., are More Critical. Also those moving spindles are just another breakage point, NOT Well tolerated.

BIG5 Cost $300 million for DR. Wollcotts Mediciene Show. Still awaiting BRD Formatt on USBSS.

drashek

I was so delighted to learn that A-hole (AOL) has been swirling about in the most tragic death spiral of the 21st Century. I wish they were #1 because they have been such jerks. Palm may not have appreciated soon enough the need to integrate phone with PDA but they never frosted me over like A-Hole.

All i have ever seen on your "sister site" is a bunch of stupid top 10 lists and all of your articles mirrored. It's as though that site doesn't exist for any reason other than to generate ad traffic revenue from people looking for stuff on a search engine and managing to get 5 copies of your stories on mirror sites.

LOAD OF CRAP. All you are doing is clogging the internet with more garbage and making it harder to find relevant information on things.

I read another article on AOLs death.

I remember fighting them on behalf of several customers trying to explain problems from their computers and aol would kick them off it would seem like just because the mood struck them.

I just made it a point after awhile to compare aol to that of inner city slum and pressed the point home.

Also worked for gateway ironically enough while doing this and gateway deserves their death as well trying to shove used equipment onto people who had a doa new one and wanted it replaced.

I still have my cow i rescued from the trash bin when they were sued because some dumbass kid bit off the head and swallowed it.

I told my tech buddies at the time this cow will last longer than this company will if they keep crapping on their customers.

*pats harry on the head*
MUhahahahhahaaa.

In case you haven't guessed it yet i do not feel sorry in the least for either of them dying a horrible death.

Your company would of been great ted if you wern't such a dick. Enjoy :)

How about 3DFX ? They were jobbed by NVIDIA

Palm, at one point, had the market sewn up. They failed to capitalise on it multiple times and wasted years trying to write new operating systems. They deserve to die.

BeOS, on the other hand, never made it in the first place. Its support for video codecs was inconsistent - coming from OS/2 I was less than impressed when OS/2 was already capable of running multiple video streams and had been for years. You don't want to install an OS and find it stuttering on clips you can play perfectly elsewhere. The network stack was (is) utter shit and don't even talk about the graphics drivers, OpenGL support, printer support etc.. About the only thing that was vaguely impressive was audio.

OS/2 probably does belong on the list, but not for the reasons stated. At one point IBM was making serious inroads, but mucked up - partly because of Microsoft's campaign against it, but mostly because of trying to recapture the hardware/OS market with OS/2 PowerPC and farting around with OpenDoc.

OS/2 deserved to do a lot better, but even if it had won over Windows 95 and NT 4 it would have had to have a serious redesign. OS/2 was fast, but parts of its design were archaic : the kernel and windowing would have needed serious surgery to bring it up to a modern standard.

If OS/2 had won and spent its time refining x86 instead of failing with PowerPC, things probably wouldn't be too different. We'd all be running OS/2, and parts of the interface might be a bit better/different, but the end result would probably be fairly similar.

They had the market sewn up for a while and failed repeatedly.. An integrated graphics/3D acceleration board that's inferior to your discrete 3D acceleration board is never a good idea.

The horror is that they did this not once, but twice. The Voodoo Rush wasn't as good as the standard Voodoo, and neither was the Banshee as good as the Voodoo 2. They were completely outmanoeuvred by Nvidia, yet this could have been avoided.

Let's not forget Itanic, which was prognosticated to take over the computing world by Intel and then soundly rejected (but only after it succeeded in eliminating competitors PA-RISC, Alpha, and MIPS).

And while AMD is not completely dead, it has remained a financially marginal player. It began to surge with the introduction of Opteron, but Intel succeeded in dirty dealing to keep it from penetrating too far into the mainstream of enterprise computing.