RexTalionis: [www.chezgigi.com image 284x275]
Not a tech company, but it's still sad that it's gone.

They cancelled that show already?

Two Dogs Farking: FTFA: The mid-range market Wang occupied simply dried up.

No fun for Wang when the surroundings dry up.

Looks like Wang should've made an effort to penetrate a younger market segment.

Polaroid... what happened... people worked out that digital was a lot cheaper for taking naked photos of themselves.

Why is subby talking about fruit in the geek tab, I don't...!?!?

Feepit: Looks like Wang should've made an effort to penetrate a younger market segment.

Ugh. I am so tired of Penn State Threads.

impaler: Their lesson for Polaroid/Kodak pretty much applies to all the companies they listed:

Lesson: Watch the trends. These are companies that failed to see an emerging market before it hit them over the head.

That's pretty much what I came here to say. What they all did, to some degree or another, is try to milk their current successful product/market without paying attention to where the market was going. Lotus was probably to lose against Microsoft, though. I'm not sure there was anything they could have done to win, with Microsoft using their OS sales as a conduit to push the Office products to the people.

Good. The hospital I work for provides a Blackberry with unlimited text/data/minutes for free. It's still not worth having this POS Blackberry Bold. It's clunky, has a shiatty browser and the trackball is a horrible idea. I'm getting my iPhone back in service and paying for a plan. I've realized Apple makes a far superior product.

/Here come the Apple haters

RexTalionis: Not a tech company, but it's still sad that it's gone.



The guy responsible is still alive and well in Libya.

Lotus is an interesting one on the list. Smartsuite wasn't THAT bad as far as it went, but it ran afoul of 90's Microsoft and their hidden API calls. I distinctly remember someone writing their own version of Windows 3.1 based solely on the public documentation of what the various API's were supposed to do.

Smartsuite worked fine. Office didn't.

Notes was and is one of the best groupware solutions out there with capabilities Exchange never really had. The Notes databases with various templates and replication settings let me throw up a huge wedge of documentation, all cross-refferenced and indexed with ease, There was always one major exception though: Email. Notes & Domino sucks balls for email, Exchange & Outlook doesn't, turns out E-mail was the thing people wanted not groupware solutions.

U.S Robotics. What happened to them? They were already in decline before the DSL/Cable/v.90 thing. Their modems generally had complete hardware in them, which made them more expensive to buy than a much cheaper win-modem, which used your computers processing power to run the actual device (same as a win-printer). Now in the days of BBS's win-modems were a major pain, but not for connecting to the Internet... so I could save £40+ by buying a cheaper, but seemingly of equal capabilities, device.

RexTalionis: www.chezgigi.com
Not a tech company, but it's still sad that it's gone.

The name is still around.

sarah_t_s: U.S Robotics. What happened to them? They were already in decline before the DSL/Cable/v.90 thing. Their modems generally had complete hardware in them, which made them more expensive to buy than a much cheaper win-modem, which used your computers processing power to run the actual device (same as a win-printer). Now in the days of BBS's win-modems were a major pain, but not for connecting to the Internet... so I could save £40+ by buying a cheaper, but seemingly of equal capabilities, device.

I had forgotten about dialing up a BBS and hoping my modem was compatible.

I miss the Palm shorthand recognition system,.Graffiti. I'd love to have that on my touchscreen POS systems for entering customer names on tabs or searching for partial names of products, rather than calling up an on-screen keyboard.

EvilEgg: It will take a while before Blackberry goes away. Corporate standards are slow to change even if the product is barely useable. Look at SAP Windows for example, I've never encountered a more user hostile piece of software, but it is still going gangbusters.

*kiss*

EvilEgg: It will take a while before Blackberry goes away. Corporate standards are slow to change even if the product is barely useable.

Last I checked, T-Mobile US retail stores still use IE6. Pennies, compared to what's out there, but an example none the less.

DubyaHater: Good. The hospital I work for provides a Blackberry with unlimited text/data/minutes for free. It's still not worth having this POS Blackberry Bold. It's clunky, has a shiatty browser and the trackball is a horrible idea. I'm getting my iPhone back in service and paying for a plan. I've realized Apple makes a far superior product.

/Here come the Apple haters

Try the Blackberry browser from Opera or Bolt. Both are way better than the craptastic preloaded abortion of a browser that comes with the phone.

2wolves: TheSwizz: EvilEgg: It will take a while before Blackberry goes away. Corporate standards are slow to change even if the product is barely useable.

Last I checked, T-Mobile US retail stores still use IE6. Pennies, compared to what's out there, but an example none the less.

Corp IE6 is nothing compared to the Feds. Nothing.

Yep. I have a .pdf reference document I use from a Federal agency. I have to install a Word Perfect font library for it to render properly. In other news, work phone is Blackberry, personal phone is Android.

RexTalionis: [www.chezgigi.com image 284x275]
Not a tech company, but it's still sad that it's gone.

It's a fashion label now. (new window)

2wolves: Corp IE6 is nothing compared to the Feds. Nothing.

This still hasn't changed? I worked in a federal office in 2007. I thought they'd be with the times by now. I don't understand how people get anything done without tabs.

FTFA:
"The company [AOL] earned $191.9 million from subscribers in the third quarter of 2011."

Goddamn. That's a shiatload of coin for a buggy-whip store.

/genuinely surprised

my farrier may have to cut back his hours due to lack of customers, but he won't go out of business. That market may boom again pretty soon.

/props to anyone that knows what a farrier is!

dellsworth1007: my farrier may have to cut back his hours due to lack of customers, but he won't go out of business. That market may boom again pretty soon.

/props to anyone that knows what a farrier is!

Nothing is obscure on Fark. Especially a job description in MMORPGs and Neal Stephenson books.

Is it the author of TFA whose knowledge of the history of technology is woefully shallow and inaccurate, or was it just dumbed down too much for the FoxNews.com readership?

dellsworth1007: /props to anyone that knows what a farrier is!

Not exactly sure myself, but I bet if I ask my next door neighbor at the horse farm, he might be able to point me in the right direction.

/now there's a business for someone with a few spare acres -- they rent out stables for peoples' daughters' horses.

tricycleracer: RexTalionis: [www.chezgigi.com image 284x275]
Not a tech company, but it's still sad that it's gone.

It's a fashion label now. (new window)

And a railroad.



Pan Am Rail (new window)

dellsworth1007: my farrier may have to cut back his hours due to lack of customers, but he won't go out of business. That market may boom again pretty soon.

/props to anyone that knows what a farrier is!


Yes, Mother, I know what a farrier does. He sells furs.

DubyaHater: I've realized Apple makes a far superior product.

The same can be said of Microsoft and it's Windows phone stuff as can RIM and Blackberry. Neither had anything of worth to offer the consumer smartphone market when it finally exploded. Microsoft having vastly deeper pockets than RIM can brute force it's way though the needed design & marketing transition to end up with WP7 and a slow shift in perception of it being "not just for business" in consumers.

RIM could have a phone that had more apps than Apple, was on more handsets than Android, gave a 90% pay out to app developers, printed moneyand gave blowjobs but it'd still sell zero of them because Blackberry = Email in the eyes of consumers.

/Here come the Apple haters

Yes, yes they do.

EvilEgg: It will take a while before Blackberry goes away. Corporate standards are slow to change even if the product is barely useable. Look at SAP for example, I've never encounter a more user hostile piece of software, but it is still going gangbusters.

Switching from a mobile device is infinitely easier than ripping out a multi-million dollar piece of software that runs your entire fark'n company.

/when our carrier service is up in six months - blackberries are history
//we already have the new policy written

sarah_t_s: U.S Robotics. What happened to them?

They moved on to larger things

TheSwizz: Last I checked, T-Mobile US retail stores still use IE6. Pennies, compared to what's out there, but an example none the less.

So what? Its a Point of Sales system. Hell - banks were still using OS/2 for ATMs until 5 years ago. That's entirely different than a white collar workers working at HQ.

/its only become economical in the last year to upgrade IE6 on a corporate machine image - mainly because more and more websites refuse to support it anymore
//we only upgraded six months ago

US Robotics can die in a fire with their whole 'winmodem' thing.

Getting to deal with the latest update bricking Verizon Blackberries the whole company over so I'm getting a kick...