Top 10 technology also-rans

Any industry is littered with the corpses of companies that blazed a trail and then stuttered and died. It's happened in most industry sectors, but in IT some of the failures have been profound and yet strangely uplifting.

Shaun and I agonised over this one. We spent a good couple of hours trying out various ideas in our local diner Morty's before we hit on the topic that would be both interesting and fun to write.

It took another hour to build the list; thank goodness for Morty's spaghetti and the forbearance of staff member Rachel, who's a bigger XKCD fan than either of us and knows her onions when it comes to tech.

Any industry is full of also-rans. As an industry sector matures it consolidates, taking the best from the competition and either integrating it or crushing the competition. Adam Smith was only half right; innovation is not only down to the market, but to who can outspend or buy the competition.

So here's a list of those IT innovations that fell under the bulldozer. Some were cruelly robbed of their advantage, others threw it away with bad management. As ever, your comments are appreciated.

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 that 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.

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 hold only 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 in those days, and JVC has good retail connections. Finally, and some say crucially, the porn industry went for VHS and this was what a lot of the early video viewers wanted to watch.

So Betamax was relegated to the dustbin of history, but personally it taught me an important lesson. My dad was one of the first to buy a Betamax recorder, as well as being in the vanguard of eight-track buyers. Now, if dad buys it, I wait to see what the dominant format will be.

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 co-operation.

As Iain noted, Sony's arrogance was the major 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 way behind vendors such as Dell and HP.

Back in the mid and late 1990s Gateway was a presence in 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 dotcom bubble burst and the economy slumped, PC sales slowed and Gateway took a big hit. The company is now owned by former rival Acer and only recently returned to the UK market.

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. 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 its 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. 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 firm 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 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 told their friends and raved about it until market momentum was built.

If you ever want an example of why net neutrality is important this is it. AltaVista, MSN Search or Yahoo would be the dominant search engines now if we didn't have net neutrality, because they would have been able to pay for faster customer access. It's a good thing they didn't have that opportunity, for us and for the industry.

9. BeOS
Iain Thomson: I can vividly remember the first time I saw 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 BeOS 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 that the real reason for its 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 it to Apple, or maybe Microsoft, and retire.

As such BeOS failed, but it is still to be found among the user groups who 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 Mac OS, once considered a cutting edge operating system, was showing its age big time.

The stability and performance issues of Mac 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's chief executive at the time, Gil Amelio, went out looking to acquire a startup firm with an innovative operating system to power the Mac. His first choice was Be, a company which seemed to fit the bill in every way. A powerful, sophisticated operating system, BeOS also had a slick interface many considered even better than Mac OS.

The two companies entered talks, at which point Be made the mistake of a lifetime. Chief executive Jean-Louis Gasse overestimated the value of the company and broke off talks. A dejected Apple looked elsewhere, 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 literally died out in the course of one day. I remember the day 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. Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD-DVD 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 advocated 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 7 January 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. Well, I say money but in fact a pint of Fullers ESB at The Ship in Soho, but the point remains. 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 that 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 that Bill 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 for 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.

And yet I've a sneaking fondness for OS/2. There's still an OS/2 drinking club in London once a week and I met some amazing people there after meeting one of them to exchange some hardware. OS/2 may have gone the way of dust, but it gave me some friendships of infinite value.

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

As history would have us believe, 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 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 to PC vendors which bundled and pre-installed it onto their systems.

IBM was then left with a promising operating system, but not much knowledge of how to advance or market it beyond its own systems. Like many enterprise operating systems, OS/2 lingered for decades 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 first founded in the late 1950s managed to stay alive well into the 1990s, but without the fanfare and legacy of other vendors from that period.

One piece of DEC's history is, however, forever ingrained into the annals of computing history: the PDP 1 computer.

Unveiled in 1960, the PDP 1 became a favourite in labs around the country, particularly at the MIT labs in Boston. Using the PDP, university researchers achieved such milestone achievements as some of the first computer-generated pieces of music and Spacewar!, arguably the first computer game ever.

Unfortunately, it was not be for DEC. Vendors such as HP, Intel and IBM emerged from the early days of computing to become industry icons. But, while the PDP and other computing lines continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, DEC faded into obscurity and was eventually dismantled.

Iain Thomson: DEC was important for many reasons, but for me the 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 Gates the programming skills he needed to build Microsoft.

5. Netscape
Iain Thomson: Netscape basically seeded the internet revolution, but now it's deader than paisley flares with lemon piping.

Netscape was the first company to market a web browser that actually did things people wanted. It made the web accessible to businesses and consumers and was making a tidy profit selling its software. Its IPO is widely seen as the start of the internet boom, but it was broken against the rock of Microsoft.

Bill Gates didn't understand the power of the internet initially, dismissing it as nothing more than a fad. Once he realised his mistake he panicked and went medieval on Netscape. Microsoft gave away its browser for free, essentially destroying Netscape's business model and driving the company into obscurity.

Nevertheless, Netscape got its revenge. The company open sourced its browser and made Mozilla possible. Now Firefox is a huge thorn in Microsoft's side and is causing the boys and girls at Redmond more than a few headaches.

Shaun Nichols: Netscape is the Terry Malloy of the web boom. It could have been a contender, it could have been huge, but instead it was run into the ground in one of the most notorious feuds in tech history.

Riding the vision of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, the browser was the tool of choice for users looking to move beyond the early 'walled garden' ISPs and explore the larger web. The company was dominating the browser market and was poised to become the next giant of the computing world.

Then Microsoft came along. Wanting a piece of the web market, Microsoft decided to exploit its dominance of the PC world and muscle in on Netscape's territory. The company bundled its own browser with Windows, and did what it could to freeze Netscape out of the market.

As is often the case when Microsoft is involved, the better product didn't win. When Netscape folded, tens of millions of users were left with Internet Explorer, at least until Firefox and Safari came along.

4. Seattle Computer Products
Shaun Nichols: This seemed like a good idea when we were constructing the list, but I have to rethink this one a bit. SCP suffered one of the saddest fates in IT history, but it wasn't exactly a major force in the computing world.

In 1980, the upstart SCP licensed off a bit of its software to Microsoft for $25,000. Bill Gates was impressed with the company's new operating system project, and offered to buy the rights to all of SCP's operating system project for $50,000.

A nice payday for SCP at the time, but this was also one of the most pivotal moments in computing history. Microsoft turned round and packaged much of that operating system to IBM as PC DOS. The rest is history. Microsoft became the biggest computer company on the planet and SCP faded away.

Iain Thomson: Was Bill Gates impressed? I doubt it. He was in a hole and SCP provided him with a way out.

Gates had sold IBM on the ability to provide an operating system for its PC line. The fact that he didn't have one is beside the point. Lots of industries sell vapourware for big contracts but it's the follow-through that counts.

My heart goes out to SCP. It got caught in a titanic struggle for the PC and was used badly. The operating system it sold was in large parts a knock-off but, given the size of the fortune Microsoft built from its software, I can understand why it is pissed off at the raw deal it got.

3. Amiga
Iain Thomson: Amiga represented a viable competitor to IBM for the PC market, but came too early and was so badly managed that it's now just a ghost, spoken of whenever techies get together over a few drinks.

But the Amiga was an astonishing piece of kit. Five years after it came out I played games on it and asked loudly why my PC wouldn't do this stuff. The answer was down to hardware.

Amiga developed its own processors that were well suited to certain markets. Unfortunately for the company they were consumer markets and the public wasn't ready to buy computers at a rate that business was. Amiga computers were originally developed as games consoles and it showed, but businesses weren't buying graphics so the company failed to make serious coin.

Amiga also fell into the Apple trap. It wanted total control of the hardware. It was an understandable mistake but it cost the company dear.

Shaun Nichols: Despite developing at breakneck speed, the computer market is one of intense brand loyalty. As anyone who has ever spoken with a Mac or Linux enthusiast will tell you, users develop a passionate following for their computer of choice.

Amiga was just never able to spread far enough and win over enough customers to build a viable base. Users got comfortable with operating their Mac and PC systems at work, and later on when they purchased a home computer they stuck with what they knew.

That doesn't mean that the Amiga was not without its fans. In fact, many advocates of the platform are still around today and they will swear that Amiga systems were light years beyond their competitors and, had the company prevailed, would to this day be far better than anything Apple or Microsoft could produce.

2. AOL
Shaun Nichols: Once the biggest name in the industry and an emerging monolith in the computing world, AOL is now a struggling firm with just 5,000 employees and a cautionary tale for would-be web entrepreneurs.

Born in the 1980s, AOL was one of the first companies to offer a commercial internet service. When the browser developed and the World Wide Web formed in the 1990s, America Online was in a prime position to take advantage of the market, and it did so with a vengeance.

Taking the simplified 'walled garden' approach and an aggressive marketing campaign centred on the mailing of free installation disks and no-cost 30-day trials, AOL became the first online experience for much of the world. Before long the company was the biggest name on the web and a hot commodity in the business world.

In 2000 AOL announced that it would merge with Time Warner. The deal was among the largest ever and is widely considered to mark the high point of the dotcom boom.

In the meantime, however, serious cracks were emerging in AOL's internet façade. The walled garden approach of the company's ISP structure was falling out of favour with an increasingly sophisticated consumer, and the company was behind competing telco and cable operators on its broadband offerings. Before long, AOL's huge customer base eroded and the company shrivelled into a small web content provider.

Iain Thomson: AOL was terrifically important in the growth of the internet, but it lost its way very early.

At the start of the internet age AOL ruled the roost. You couldn't buy a dead tree magazine without getting an AOL disc thrown in free, it seemed. The situation got so bad that one angry punter threatened to dump a million AOL CDs in front of the company's headquarters.

Then came the merger with Time Warner. It's hard to describe the mania that accompanied the internet revolution unless you were there. Time Warner was desperate to get into the internet sphere. AOL had the majority of the internet market and so it looked like a good deal.

But AOL was based on dial-up technology and aimed at users who were clueless and non-commercial. Getting an email from a company with an AOL address in 2000 was a clear sign that you were dealing with amateurs or a spammer.

Once the broadband market matured, AOL's customers realised that any company could provide internet access and didn't charge an arm and a leg for the privilege. AOL lost customers hand over fist and went into defensive mode to try and keep them. The software was incredibly difficult to remove and the marketing grew ever more pervasive, but nothing helped.

If AOL had been smart it would have set up deals with the telecoms companies to transfer its customer base to other ISPs. It didn't, and is now dying a slow death.

1. Palm
Iain Thomson: While it's heartbreaking to write, Palm really does deserve the top spot for taking a market and failing.

I'll be upfront: I really want Palm to succeed. I was an early adopter with the Palm systems which finally brought to life the possibility of handheld computing. It was the device techies wanted, and if the company hadn't lost focus it would have been a giant in the field today.

But it lost its way. It ignored the mobile data market until too late and went through corporate restructuring by splitting off its software division from the hardware, a decision that made sense for certain executives but killed the company. Palm was successful due to its developer community, and the company shrugged them off and reaped the whirlwind.

Sadly this hasn't changed. While the Palm Pre is a wonderful device it was launched too soon and without proper developer support. I'm still considering buying one, but I suspect Palm is doomed by too many wrong decisions and by poor management.

Shaun Nichols: Even if the company does recover and thrive, I think Palm still gets the top spot because it had the industry so tightly by the throat and simply let the market pass it by.

Granted, hindsight is 20/20, but surely Palm had to see that mobile phones were becoming smaller and more powerful, while workers were becoming more mobile and dependant on portable systems. Combining the PDA and mobile phone seems like a painfully obvious conclusion.

Imagine if Palm had in fact moved for the mobile market and sought to integrate phone capabilities into its products. The smartphone landscape would be dramatically different.