If Tech Companies Could Receive Darwin Awards: part 2
To continue our look at technology companies which, if they were people, could have won a Darwin Award, here's the other five. These aren't companies that just plain lost the game fair and square, even if they gave it their best shot. These are companies which should have been winners, but did a really great impression of a lemming heading straight over a cliff.
No.5 GO. This has no relation to Disney's Go.com, even though that's a pretty significant failure of its own. We're talking about GO Corporation. What if it was the beginning of the mobile area, you had just invented pen-based computing, and somebody handed you $75 million USD and said, "Here, make a successful business out of that"? Considering that companies like Dell computers, which started out of a college dorm room, managed to do fine, you'd think a $75 million head-start plus cornering a technology niche would be a can't-fail proposition. But fail they did.
No.4 Atari. What killed it? There was a time when Atari was the leading name in home entertainment systems, and poised to become the home computer leader as well. It wasn't for lack of marketing; anybody older than 30 today can still hear the "Have you played Atari today?" jingle going around in their head. What killed Atari was lack of foresight. They just thought they could stick with their blocky little pixels and ride on their good name forever. Bungling Pac-Man and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial certainly set their place as the old technology company that couldn't think differently fast enough.
No.3 CP/M. The most famous missed call in the history of computing, so much so that there's a lot of urban legends out there about how Gary Kildall was out flying a kite or something when Microsoft called asking to develop the operating system that would become MS-DOS and later, Windows. CP/M in the 1970s was the standard for desktop machines, and the popular applications WordStar and dBase were born on that platform. And then they didn't pay attention for one minute, and whoops, the whole world ditched them for DOS.
No.2 The Xerox Alto. Name any convention used on your computer right now. Graphical display? Mouse pointer? Icons? Ethernet? Text editor? Photo editor? Networked computer games? Every last bit of it was invented at Xerox PARC, by brilliant engineers who were years ahead of their time. So what did Xerox do? It said, "We're a copier company; home computers are just a fad!" and when management was pressured to sell the computer anyway, they sabotaged it by pricing it at about three times what any sane individual would pay for it. And so went Xerox, out of the computer market, with all the goodies that they'd invented being greedily snapped up and copied even today by everybody else.
No.1 Commodore Amiga. How could number-one be anything but what is widely regarded today as the Marilyn Monroe of suicidal tech companies? The Amiga is so romanticized in this day and age, that the passion from its fans could match that for Apple, were it still kicking. Commodore just took their years of success in the computer industry and the product of their engineering excellence and threw it away, plain and simple. No hope remains to see the Amiga ever come back.
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