04-09-2007, 01:00 AM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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Yet Another List of Technologies - Things That Eventually Vanished
Well, we've seen articles of 21 technological flops and and the best 50 tech products. What about products that came on strong and then disappeared as quickly as they came, or their creators just couldn't keep the product relevant and the company largely disappeared? I am not talking about things like the floppy drive, as that just was surpassed by newer better technology. I am thinking about things like the Netscape Browser, once king of the hill and was utterly crushed out of existence, or the Commodore Computing, that never could repeat the success of the Commodore 64. Here is my brief list:
*Netscape Browser - the first browser for the masses, based on Mosaic. It simply didn't survive the combined onslaught by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and the poor decisions by AOL after acquiring the company.
*Commodore Computing - The Commodore 64 was the first computer for home users to have real penetration into the market, but it was the last big product for Commodore. The 128 never took off and all subsequent products were relegated to niche status.
*PalmOS - You knew this would be in the list. Not the first mobile device on the market, but this is the one that established it, so effectively that even today, people think PDA and Palm Pilot are synonymous. However, The only thing left of PalmOS is a 5 year old platform being held together with spit and bailing wire to ineffectively keep up with today's mobile computing needs.
*Iomega's Zip Drive - Back in the day when the biggest portable media was a 1.44MB 3.5" floppy, Iomega came out with the Zip Drive, a disk that held 100MB of data. It was later increased to 250MB and 750MB sizes, but by then, CD-R's were becoming popular and far cheaper per MB. Iomega tried to keep its portable storage technology relevant with the 1GB Jazz drive, but it never took off. They are still in business, but they have nothing special and their stock price is a mere 3% of what it was in its heyday in the mid 90's.
*Big Online Service Companies - Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL - Compuserve really got the ball rolling with online access. Their IT support forums were critical to many users and developers trying to get the most out of their software, plus they had online stock market information, shopping and dozens of other features in one place, something unheard of at the time. Prodigy came a bit later and was moderately successful for the home user, then AOL came along and trounced them both, only to be relegated to an also ran by cheap broadband service from local phone and cable companies. In the mid-90's, most people needed these services to get online, avoiding tedious modem configurations, SLIP configurations and logon scripts. Now, you just plug your DSL/Cable modem into your PC's ethernet port and you have the whole internet available. No one seems to care about AOL's proprietary offerings anymore, turning AOL into just another service provider.
*Lotus 1-2-3 - This was the spreadsheet in the 80's and early 90's. Not using Lotus 1-2-3 back then was like not using a petroleum powered car today - it is possible, but not easy to do. It was available on a number of platforms, including DOS, Windows, OS/2, Unix and even IBM mainframes. They finally got a decent Windows version out with Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows version 4, but by then, it was too late. Their first version for Windows was an embarrassment, and V4 still didn't have a real programming language. Microsoft's Excel, on the other hand, had excellent Windows versions and included Visual Basic for Applications in 1993, a full 4 years before Lotus added LotusScript to its first 32 bit version of 1-2-3, called 1-2-3 97. By then, it was too late. Office 97 was out and development for 1-2-3 slowed and has almost completely stopped. IBM now owns it and you can find it on their web site, but I suspect the only reason IBM continues to fool with it and the rest of the SmartSuite package is to mollify a few of their key corporate customers that still use it.
*WordPerfect - Another example of the king of a product category. WordPerfect was the de facto standard word processor, especially in legal firms. In fact, today, there are still law firms that use WordPerfect for DOS because they have so many templates set up they have no desire to invest money in to convert to any Windows product. For the rest of the world though, they were too slow to embrace Windows and Microsoft Word took over as part of the Office suite of applications.
*Ashton Tate's DBIII - See Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect above. :wink:
So, that is my quick list of flash-in-the-pans, but I am sure I missed a few. What products or companies can you think of that were the absolute king of the hill for their market and were pushed aside by something else, unable to stay relevant?
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04-09-2007, 04:11 AM
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Theorist
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 267
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How about the original Atari - arcade games like PONG and then the Atari 2600? The Atari name exists today, but it is not the same company.
Ed, your list brings back some memories. I used Lotus 1-2-3 for a long time. I used Sideways to print large spreadsheets on a dot-matrix printer. After using WordPerfect for DOS for a long while, I switched to Lotus AmiPro, which I still think was superior to WordPerfect for Windows and Microsoft Word. Eventually, I had to get on the Office bandwagon, when my company chose it as their standard.
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04-09-2007, 04:37 AM
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Sage
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 740
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Re: Yet Another List of Technologies - Things That Eventually Vanished
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Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry
... *WordPerfect - Another example of the king of a product category. WordPerfect was the de facto standard word processor, especially in legal firms. In fact, today, there are still law firms that use WordPerfect for DOS because they have so many templates set up they have no desire to invest money in to convert to any Windows product. For the rest of the world though, they were too slow to embrace Windows and Microsoft Word took over as part of the Office suite of applications.
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This isn't entirely accurate. I used to be a WPDOS instructor, and the problems wasn't that they were too slow to embrace the technology; they didn't understand it. They had trouble with the paradigm shift. They embrace it; or at least tried to. They just didn't get it.
Their original forey into Windows was a HUGE flop. It never made it out of Orem. The original "release" of WPWin (the one that many saw on the shelves) was actually a complete rewrite. The original version was nothing more than WPDOS in a Windows wrapper. The version that WAS released implemented more of the Windows 3.x standards, but it was still more of a DOS program with a coat of paint than a Windows app.
Just my $.02 of useless knowledge... 
__________________
Kind Regards,
Christopher Spera
Gear Diary Review Team
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04-09-2007, 05:03 AM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 1
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How about Wordstar, and while whe are at it CP/M
Yes before word, there was wordperfect, but before wordperfect there was wordstar, whichi ran on CP/M machines -- no mouse in those days everything was done with keystroke combinations. Old fashioned touch typists loved Wordstar, because you could fly without having to take your fingers off of the keys.
I'm not sure if Wordstar ever ran on MSDOS, we ran it on a CP/M machine. CP/M was a nifty little opeating system for controlling z80 era processors. CP/M preceeded MSDOS. In fact there is a famous story (maybe urban legend) about the developer of CP/M missing a meeting with IBM causing Big Blue to contract with Microsoft to supply MSDOS for there firs PC's, and well, the rest is history -- talk about being a day late, and dollar short!
P.S. Hey Chris Spera, good to see you, miss you from the old PDAPhoneHome i700 forum.
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04-09-2007, 05:39 AM
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Thinker
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 318
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How about the Sega Dreamcast? It was so far ahead of its time, it even ran a stripped down version of Windows CE for some basic web browsing with the dial-up modem. If I remember right, the graphics were far superior the the Playstation and N64. It even ran Quake III Arena. At first, a simple modem was used to dial in to "sega-net" or whatever it was, but they later replaced/added an Ethernet adapter to it for broadband. "Sega-net" itself should have taken off. Once again, if my memory is correct, Xbox Live! wasn't even in the works.
It sported two memory card slots on the controllers, and the memory cards themselves had little gameboy sized games that had something to do with the game on the console.
Its hard for me to remember (I'm 18, and I've never owned a console. Dont worry, Xbox 360 coming as soon as i buy my motorcycle), but man, it just seemed like it was so much more than anything else out there.
I apologize if any of my information is incorrect, its just so difficult to remember. As a kid, i was definitely in awe when my uncle fired up Sonic Adventure on his big-screen.
Why didn't the Dreamcast make it?
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04-09-2007, 06:44 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 102
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There was also Digital with a wonderfull operating system VMS and an excellent processor Alpha. Everything vanished in Compaq which vanished also in HP.
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04-09-2007, 08:20 AM
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Thoughts Media Review Team
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 749
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...and as a former employee, I should add "what about Wang Laboratories? Great word procesor, a competitor to DEC in mini-frames, a leader in imase processing. Lost it all when they thought they could sell a proprietary PC.
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04-09-2007, 10:22 AM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by jgrnt1
How about the original Atari - arcade games like PONG and then the Atari 2600? The Atari name exists today, but it is not the same company.
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Yeah, the 2600 and Atari is a perfect example of someone that created a market, dominated, then virtually vanished. The 5200 was cool, but it never took off and Atari never really found their way after that.
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04-09-2007, 10:43 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 171
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Re: Yet Another List of Technologies - Things That Eventually Vanished
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Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry
*Lotus 1-2-3 - This was the spreadsheet in the 80's and early 90's. Not using Lotus 1-2-3 back then was like not using a petroleum powered car today - it is possible, but not easy to do. It was available on a number of platforms, including DOS, Windows, OS/2, Unix and even IBM mainframes. They finally got a decent Windows version out with Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows version 4, but by then, it was too late. Their first version for Windows was an embarrassment, and V4 still didn't have a real programming language. Microsoft's Excel, on the other hand, had excellent Windows versions and included Visual Basic for Applications in 1993, a full 4 years before Lotus added LotusScript to its first 32 bit version of 1-2-3, called 1-2-3 97. By then, it was too late. Office 97 was out and development for 1-2-3 slowed and has almost completely stopped.
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Although there was Lotus Improv which manywho used it would say was ahead of it's time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv.
The main reason 123 died and with it went Lotus' domination of the office market was't that Excel was better but that Improv was too advanced for the user base. By the time Lotus realised it wasn't going to sell, Excel had improved over 123 and the "war" was done.
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04-09-2007, 11:20 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 110
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You obviously did not see Commodore Amiga nor SGI machines in graphic animation. Still in use in TV studios, Windows PC are not even close ;-)
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