by Shane O'Neill

When Tech Titans Fall from Grace

News
May 7, 20137 mins

Here's our list of 14 once-elite tech companies that fell off their pedestals due to unforeseen circumstances, arrogance, ineptitude, or all of the above.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

It’s lonely at the top, and it can also be brief. Throughout tech’s rich history, many a company was king only to slip down the slippery slope to mediocrity or worse. Some might still get up, but for others a comeback just ain’t in the cards.

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun is a once-legendary company with roots that go back to the early ’80s. It invented Java after all! But after being a driving force in business computing up until the dot-com bubble in 2000, Sun stumbled badly after the burst and could never find its footing. Companies stopped buying Sun’s high-end servers and between 2001 and its acquisition by Oracle in 2009, Sun was constantly besieged by revenue losses, layoffs and stock losses.

MySpace

MySpace

Between 2004 and 2007, MySpace was a dominant social networking site for people, companies and musicians and one of the most visited sites in the U.S. But in early 2008, Facebook took over social media and proved quicker to innovate. Since being purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2005 MySpace had become just another Murdoch property. MySpace traffic plummeted and users migrated to Facebook. The company was sold in 2011 and is now owned by Specific Media and Justin Timberlake. Dubbed “New MySpace” the more music-oriented site is hungry for a comeback.

Netscape

Netscape

In the early days of the Internet, Netscape Navigator was the only browser that mattered, with a 90 percent usage share. But it got steamrolled by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the first browser war in the late ’90s — largely because Microsoft shrewdly integrated IE into every copy of Windows. Netscape didn’t stand a chance. But this fall from grace enjoys the sweet taste of redemption. Before Netscape was acquired by AOL in 1998 it handed its open-source code off to non-profit Mozilla Foundation., which used the code to create Firefox, the popular browser used by millions today.

Palm

Palm

Before the smartphone or tablet, there was the PDA (personal digital assistant), and PalmPilot was the king. All-in-one smartphones led by RIM’s BlackBerry killed the PDA in the early 2000’s. However, Palm adapted and over the years released fine smartphones like the Palm Treo, the Centro, and the Pre. It also developed a mobile OS, called WebOS, in 2009 and released it on the Palm Pre. But the Pre’s sales were lackluster and it turned out to be Palm’s last product. The company was bought by HP in 2010 and the Palm brand and WebOS have both been discontinued.

[ A Palm Technology Timeline ]

[ From Palm Pilot to Palm Pre: A Brief History of Palm’s Handhelds ]