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I ran across an interesting article in CIO today titled “Dearly Departed: Companies and Products That Didn't Deserve to Die”

Just last week I was waxing somewhat nostalgic for Bluestone, IMHO one of the best application servers on the market, which was acquired and killed off by HP. Perhaps there was a nostalia bug (maybe that beautiful full orange moon this month) but I couldn’t resist seeing what CIO had come up with.A couple of interesting points:

The article states that the cause of death of Ashton-Tate was “dBase IV and failed innovation by litigation”. I have clear memories of those times. Sybase, Microsoft and Ashton-Tate had created a partnership to bring forth SQLServer, a client/server database to compete with Oracle. I was running the Client/Server Group of the Boston Computer Society at the time, and organized the debut of SQL Server on the east coast. Over 100 people came that night. But it was absolutely incomprehensible that Ashton-Tate, which also debuted dBase IV at that meeting, did not design it to work as a front end development tool for SQLServer. What were they thinking? I remember having discussions with them saying this was a critical error, they should have delayed the launch. It never did, and the company died – I would say it was a form of suicide.

Then there was Word Perfect, cause of death listed as “a badly executed Windows port was the beginning of the end”. Actually it was more of a case of betting on the wrong horse. I was a very loyal Word Perfect user, but when Windows came out, the company wrote to all their users saying they did not intend to create a Windows version – they were betting on OS2, which was clearly a superior operating system. They were right about the technical superiority of OS2, but wrong about the market. It took them a very long time to capitulate. By that time I had long since converted to Word, which was a somewhat painful process, but clearly the right decision.

There are 17 pages to this, and each page covers one company with a short form on each, but you’re invited to write in and share your own opinions of who else belongs on the list. Enjoy the trip down memory lane.

Posted by bethgb at 10:33 AM in Industry Trends | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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