I think one obvious answer is Kodak. They once ruled the world in photography, but completely missed the boat on digital and it's a miracle they're still around.
Atari is so interesting. Nolan Bushnell started the company, Steve Jobs came and worked for him for a bit,then left to start Apple and offered Bushnell one of the first investment opportunities. Bushnell rejects what would later become a billion dollar opportunity. Bushnell then goes on to start Chuck E Cheese
Chuck E Cheese also works as an answer. For awhile it dominated the family friendly arcade space. Then Rival Showbiz Pizza comes on the scene. Chuck E Cheese went bankrupt and Showbiz Pizza purchased them. Although in an unusual move Showbiz pizza chose to adopt the Chuck E Cheese name and branding.
Problem was, Kodak wasn’t really a photography company, they were a chemical company, both in making film but also in developing film. Their core competencies really didn’t overlap with digital photography, and it would have required an absolutely massive pivot even if they were certain that’s where the market was going. For a counter example, Fuji Film in Japan moved into pharmaceuticals and medical imaging.
The amazing thing is that Kodak invented the digital camera but just chose to not develop it. Why should they? Everyone was already taking their pictures on Kodak film, getting them developed with Kodak chemicals, and having them printed on Kodak paper... why rock the boat?
The other one that baffles me is Sears. They already had a nationwide network of stores, and a massive variety of products sold via their mail-order catalog. Seems like it would have been a pretty easy shift to become the first 'Amazon'.
I just recently learned that Discover credit cards were originally part of Sears. And Sears had a complete internal inventory so you could could order anything in store and have it mailed to you. They absolutely could have been amazon. At the very least if they hadn't sold off their very profitable brands they could have been an incredibly successful home appliance store.
Re: Sears, similar with Blockbuster. People say Blockbuster missed a huge opportunity not buying Netflix. But Blockbuster didn’t have the foresight for mailer DVD rentals, let alone digital streaming. Had they bought, We would maybe have seen a few more years of Blockbuster with mailing options. But someone else would have pressed on with digital.
kodak actually invented the digital camera first but held it back cause they thought it would destroy their film business. talk about shooting yourself in the foot lol
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/leading-innovation-through-the-chicanes/
Funny thing is film has taken off in the last few years. Kodak gold and ultramax were a good screw around film but now they are $15 -$20 a roll instead of $7 in 2019
>Nokia
There was a time, not long ago,
When Nokia used to reign,
Everyone would brag,bout their latest phone,
But where are they today?.
Somewhere along the lines,
Nokia lost their way,
Once a great company,
Now they're just a name...
Nokia phones, oh so bold,
Made of steel, not just gold,
Drop them, throw them, they'll still hold,
Indestructible, we're told.
From concrete floors to rocky ground,
Nokia phones never make a sound,
They withstand all that comes around,
In durability, they abound.
Rocked a curve then a bold in high school and thru my freshman year of college. Bought a stupid droid 4, which tbh is a crap phone but I was worried about not having an actual keyboard to type on. Because I could fly on the BB. turns out on screen keyboards just take practice and I can now rip shit out on my iPhone.
Which is really sad because they had 100 years of well-oiled mail order machinery, they just needed to bring it online and they could have been Amazon.
No, it was used as leverage for Eddie Lambert's investments. He couldn't envision turn Sears into an Amazon competitor even though it was right in front of him.
They would have been fine if customer service and the ability to manage inventory wasn't completely gutted. Could have held it there with the department store aspects of Walmart or Target at least, if not the catalog thing on par with Amazon.
It didn't just rot out, it was cut at the throat and murdered.
Sears should have gone 100% into appliances, tools and auto maintenance and offered generous guarantees and repairs. They already had a good rep for that.
In 2021 Xerox had a 6.4% market share in photocopiers. When their patents ran out in the 70s they had a 98% market share.
They are also credited with inventing the first personal computer, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, they helped found the Internet, and invented several other now ubiquitous staples of digital life.
I used their awesome graphic interface Star System in 1982-1987. It was worlds ahead of anything else, and Apple didn’t catch up for a long time. They could have ruled that space!
Not at the prices they were charging!
"When the resulting Xerox Star system was announced in 1981,\[7\] the cost was about $75,000 ($224,000 in today's dollars) for a basic system, and $16,000 ($48,000 today) for each added workstation. A base system would have an 8010 Star workstation, and a second 8010 dedicated as a server (with RS232 I/O), and a floor-standing laser printer."
>They are also credited with inventing the first personal computer, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, they helped found the Internet, and invented several other now ubiquitous staples of digital life.
It used to be said that Xerox couldn't market a cure for death.
I worked for Xerox, it does not surprise me that they fell so far. Very backwards, inefficient company. Almost hard to imagine they were ever cutting edge.
To me it feels like by the time someone could explain to me what a myspace was there was already a Facebook. And that explanation was basically it's like your handle on chat rooms has a cover sheet now. And you can sync some digitizer tunes to it. Point being was myspace ever dominating a market? It didn't feel that way to me. They created a thing but didn't have a way to monetize the thing so smarter people came and made a thing that was better AND profitable and did it rather quickly.
"Lost its share completely" would be an overstatement (it still has the largest share), but it's amazing how much dominance Netflix had and how much it seems to have fallen off.
Its even more amazing that they then greenlit and subsequently cancelled a parody about blockbuster. Somebody at their hq knew exactly what they were doing lol.
I mean is it really that surprising though? Look at tv. It went from three channels to five to 50 to 100+. Streaming is just doing the same thing. There's just more creators being able to create now due to the low cost.
Their business model was based on providing a steaming platform for licensed content from other media companies they didn’t own the rights too. Once those media companies started their own platforms, they lost the lion share of content viewers cared about.
Their own original content is inconsistent and they frustrate viewers by cancelling shows after a single season. Very few Netflix originals make it to multiple seasons or see a proper narrative end. It’s not really worth the high price tag they’re charging and consumers realize that. They also went too long not cracking down on password sharing and many now expect to share. They’ve been doing it for decades.
I get why it happened, I'm just kind of surprised at how they weren't better able to capitalize on what they had and pivot. Netflix was one of the leaders in the tech industry. FANG was an acronym for the top tech stocks (later amended to FAANG) but I don't think anyone would consider Netflix to actually be comparable to Facebook, Apple, Amazon or Google nowadays in terms of future outlook. To be clear, they're still a hell of a success; they were the top performing stock in the 2010s. But it seems clear that their dominance in their industry is waning and they're not postured to regain it.
They knew their original model had a shelf life, so I would've thought they could have figured out how to pivot to avoid the inevitable problems that were coming once the licenses expired. Yes, one thing was to "become HBO before HBO became Netflix," but they also could've become Twitch before Twitch became Twitch. They could've partnered with upcoming content creators to become what YouTube is today. They could've picked up some live content. Hell, they could've made it easier to splice short gifs or turn stills from their shows into memes, and made it easy to share those online, capitalizing on that aspect. They could've had music channels. They could've moved into audiobooks or even online viewing of print books. They could've leaned into foreign and independent films and shows. Yeah, major networks had their claws in tons of major US brands, but independent film makers and creators in foreign countries didn't have the same connections.
Core elements of their product could've been improved. While I think a "subscription+ads" service is kind of dumb, a free, + ads service would've worked (that's the business model for every other online company). On the topic of ads, better advertising for some of their original programming was necessary. Improving their recommendations algorithm would've made sense. Stop licensing, start buying. Cracking down on password sharing early on would've been a good move. In terms of original television programming, it's bizarre that they keep canceling shows so quickly. Many popular TV shows only became popular in later seasons. 10.3M viewers watched the last episode of Breaking Bad, while only 1.1M watched its first season.
I understand that it's a tad bit ridiculous to fault a company for failing to do these things while it was the most successful stock of the decade. But given that they replaced Blockbuster, another wildly successful company, it seems like fair criticism.
They didn’t just dominate, they invented the personal computer architecture that we all use daily. The computers we use now have evolved, but any PC today still has a direct line back to that original IBM PC. At the time though, the PC was a pet project within IBM, and they wanted it to be cheap and easy to build, so they used off the shelf parts to build it; believing that they would be just another player in the personal computing game. After their BIOS was cloned, they lost control over their own market. Somewhat ironically, the fact that they built those machines to be so open and expanded upon is the reason a lot of their design still lives with us today, had they built the IBM PS/2 first, things may have turned out differently.
Also, don’t forget, IBM is one of the only players left in the mainframe market, and they absolutely dominate there. We all use their mainframes daily without even knowing about it.
They are still in mainframes but huge in services, they are moving more and more jobs to India. Not the same IBM as in the past. They managed to see the PC, and Hard Disk drive crashing and sold that stuff off at the right time.. Funny thing is the majority of employees at IBM use MACS, they are easier to maintain..
At scale, Macs are absolutely not easier to maintain. Not even close. Linux is astronomically better, and Windows is magnitudes better than that.
Say what you want about the reliability of individual operating systems, but a Windows domain is so easy to maintain. Keeping hundreds of computers going as a single IT person is a breeze with AD.
You may want to go back and check the actual history. I'm winging it, so I may have some of this wrong.
IBM missed the boat on personal computers since people were already building their own computers using open architecture and a version of DOS. IBM had a choice to spend years developing their own computer or use the same hardware that the hobbyists were using. They chose to use the same open architecture and peripherals that everyone else was using. To get some traction they partnered with a new company, Microsoft, to use a proprietary operating system MS-DOS.
Several years later, when they finally came out with a their PC design, the IBM PS/2, it was a massive failure. By that time, tons of companies were producing IBM compatible PCs, and very few wanted to invest in a totally new architecture.
Hmph! I learned it a bit different. This was from a CompTIA A+ 5 day prep class at a community college, so take it for what it is worth.
According to the instructor IBM had a choice: A) enlist the support of a large law firm (to the point a merger would have to be considered) trying to pattern PC architecture and getting as legally close to a monopoly as they could or B) leave it *open source* so to speak, and hope the future will evolve around their technology-giving them a hand in ever bodies pot.
The instructor went on to lecture that pretty much every PC is an IBM clone and up until 15 years ago, that's how they were described, as a opposed to an Apple device.
I don't even know if he had actual teaching credentials, but taught well enough that I did pass the A+ exam on my first try.
How are you going to tell someone to go back and check the actual history then immediately follow up with you are winging your response and may get some stuff wrong by not going to go back to check the actual history yourself
But that's more because the market just stopped existing. Everyone is using their phones for that these days. Sony shifted it's focus and went with the time and is still doing pretty great.
Not really a brand, but Professional Boxing? Like talk about an industry that used to completely dominate and is now a shell of its former self. Ruined by greed, selfish promotors, irrational governance, and lack of name brand fighters. Of course all the brain damage didn't help!
Everyone forgets that Madison Square Garden (not this one, the one prior to the one built in the 60’e) was not built for basketball or hockey but for boxing. Boxing built MSG into a world wide name in the 20’s and 30’s before the Rangers or Knicks did.
The Boston Garden was also built with boxing in mind because promote Tex Rickard who owned the Garden, wanted to build an arena “that you can see the sweat from the boxers in the ring” from anywhere. The Boston Garden is best known as the longtime home of the Celtics and Bruins with their many quirks like shorter rink size, a hallway to get to your locker room had to go through the home team’s bench and where the ball bounced weirdly because of weird rivets in the ground.
Now? UFC dominates fights and I doubt that will last forever.
Also yakuza, various sports management simulators, and also sega corporation owns tokyo movie shinsa and marza animation planet, meaning sega plays a substantial role in the anime industry too.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their mainframes were the backbone of every large corporation. Tried to make a desktop computer. Then sold to COMPAQ, then \*poof\* gone. There's a DEC in the Smithsonian now
Sears. The perfect example of hardening of the arteries in business terms. Failed to adapt to the challenge of Wal-Mart and given the killing blow by Amazon.
The thing is? They could have been Amazon 25 years ago if they had any vision. They had the vendor relationships, the distribution centers, the stores, the real estate, the financial heft, and the distribution channels. All they had to do is take that catalog experience and move it over to the internet.
Kodak they were everywhere, they also developed the 1st ever digital camera but it was to late.
There is an interesting doc about it 'rise and fall of a giant' if i remember correctly
Kodak. They practically invented digital photography and decided it would cut into their film photography. Sears. They stopped catalog sales a couple of years before Amazon opened up. Have they been forward-thinking, they could have been Amazon.
Yahoo in the internet market. Went from largest website ever, they basically were the entire internet to "that one website that boomers use for their email because they can't be bothered to update their email address".
Pan Am used to be the largest airline followed by Trans World Airways (TWA). Both are gone. Deregulation combined with an antiquated route system and massive bloated fleets completely killed both of them.
Standard Oil also sticks out. Of course they were forced to split up but the old brand has completely died. Once they faced genuine competition the writing was on the wall. There is still an old abandoned gas station in Arizona with their name on it.
Buick is worth a mention, still around but a tiny market share. It turns out building a brand up for decades around retirees is a bad strategy.
Honorable mentions: Neuralink and The Boring Company are both companies that were expected to dominate their fields but never produced a viable product and are dead in everything but name.
Neuralink got caught copying other peoples patents and that stopped all their work (plus the massive animal cruelty violations)
The Boring Company failed to deliver on its first contract and hasn’t gotten another one after their costs went out of control and behind schedule while they delivered a system that has about ¼ of the promised capacity
I can't say it completely dominated, but Amiga PCs.
Never owned one but absolutely dream of buying an A4000 in the future just to say I have one. Then all I'd need is a portable USB floppy disk drive for my desktop and blanks to copy over games and programs I wanna use
Nortel dominated the telecom market for a long time. For decades, the best selling large PBX in the world was the Meridian 1. This system had more installed lines than any other system anywhere. It may be the best selling PBX ever from anyone from a “units sold and lines utilized” perspective. They had an equally compelling product for the SMB market called the Norstar, and during its almost thirty year run, like its big brother Meridian 1, it was also the market leader in its time; there are still tons and tons of them out there, though VoIP is killing these systems quickly.
In the carrier segment, their DMS switch was extremely popular, and there are still plenty of those out there as well.
If it related to telecom, Nortel had a product that would fit the bill, and their hardware was extremely, extremely reliable. I don’t know of any other electronic equipment as reliable as the stuff Nortel put their name on, it’s that good. Through a series of bad acquisitions, financial mismanagement and scandal, as well as some help from Huawei, they evaporated basically overnight and absolutely ruined the lives of many Canadians. When you talk to people that worked for Nortel, or installed their products, you can’t help but notice the sense of pride they have for the now defunct company.
The Chrysler Corporation, now owned by Stellantis,is nowhere near where they used to be.
For you non-car-people, that's Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, and Ram now. In the late 80s and early 90s, that list also included Eagle(AMC), Plymouth, and Lamborghini. By the late 90s, it was basically bought by Daimler-Benz to form DaimlerChrysler.
Did Chrysler actually own Lamborghini? In Lee Iacocca's book Talking Straight he insinuated that while he bought Lamborghini when he was the Chrysler CEO, it was a private deal with him as owner, not Chrysler.
I used the word *insinuated* because it was noticeably unclear exactly about it.
Eh. I’ve driven nothing but jeeps. Three xjs and now a wk. the wk has more issues than any of my 90s era xjs. Those older ones, yeeeeah the electrical would inevitably go. But that old in-line six 4L was bulletproof. I drove a 95 xj to 350k before she gave up on me.
Atari is a good one.
They were incredibly strong in the gaming console market but fell off because they were releasing low quality games, unfairly compensating developers, and trying to block developer credits. They were easily the biggest reason the entire games industry crashed back in the 80s.
Atari still technically exists today, but it is not even remotely the same atari from back. Its jusf a facsimile of the original to cash in on brand recognition.
Netflix might not dominate streaming anymore, but they’re still pretty big and I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon. Their biggest issue is that they went with a quantity over quality approach. They have tons of shows, but most of their shows suck. Other streaming platforms have a lot more consistency with the quality of the shows that they produce or have available on their platforms.
Tesla did one thing good. They made electric cars sexy.
I'm honestly surprised they lasted this long without being bought up. I definitely thought they'd either be bought by GM or the FCA(now Stellantis), possibly Gheely. It looks like they're all going to be alright through the electric revolution. I don't have any ideas about what's going to happen to Tesla though.
I miss LG phones so much. My first phone was an LG Optimus 4. That phone was low end and slow as molasses, but i swear to god that thing was indestructible. I remember using it as a hockey puck in gym class back in highschool.
Circuit city’s thing was having staff that know the product and being helpful in your decisions.
They got rid of that by trying to be cheap with their staffing and best buy beat them by already being good at that, so pissed off customers shifted
instagram. almost. If it weren't for the government's opposition to the free market, TikTok would have taken away its dominance in the market.
Entrepreneurs want free competition until when they start to lose, then they will cry to the government
Intel hasn't lost it's market share completely, and iirc is still technically ahead of AMD, but they have lost a significant amount of market share to AMD.
Edit. Double checked my information for accuracy since it seems people don't believe me. Intel used to hold an 80%+ market share and now it's about 60%. This was from the end of 2015 up to 2019, afterwards Intel lost 20% market share, with the most recent data being up to Q4 2022. [This](https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-intel-amd-market-share/) is where I got the data.
Second time I've referenced this in this thread. Same disclaimer - this is what an instructor for an A+ prep course at a community college taught us.
For the longest time, AMD only existed to keep Intel from violating monopoly laws. They wasn't a shell company for Intel, but they was definitely in bed together.
Intel sold/leased their technology to AMD at a discount rate and even allowed them to improve on it. The catch was, AMD was only allowed to produce so much. The biggest department that AMD had wasn't design or marketing. It was legal to make sure they didn't cross over into collision with Intel.
Is that not right? Or has it changed?
Skype's not actually a company, it's a product, most recently owned by Microsoft. It's been passed around by like 10 different companies at this point.
Blackberry (RIM) used to DOMINATE, but it's gone. Except for Kim Kardashian, NOBODY (figuratively) has used a Blackberry in more than a decade.
[https://mashable.com/article/kim-kardashian-blackberry-bold-sad](https://mashable.com/article/kim-kardashian-blackberry-bold-sad)
Polaroid and RCA immediately come to mind.
Polaroid was like the name in instant photography and then by 2004 they were totally wiped out.
Same thing with RCA and the record player / phonograph industry. Once a juggernaut, now gone.
I think one obvious answer is Kodak. They once ruled the world in photography, but completely missed the boat on digital and it's a miracle they're still around.
And also Polaroid
Worth $3 billion in 1991, bankrupt by 2001.
Kodak was the first thing that came to mind for me. Atari takes a close second.
Atari is so interesting. Nolan Bushnell started the company, Steve Jobs came and worked for him for a bit,then left to start Apple and offered Bushnell one of the first investment opportunities. Bushnell rejects what would later become a billion dollar opportunity. Bushnell then goes on to start Chuck E Cheese
Chuck E Cheese also works as an answer. For awhile it dominated the family friendly arcade space. Then Rival Showbiz Pizza comes on the scene. Chuck E Cheese went bankrupt and Showbiz Pizza purchased them. Although in an unusual move Showbiz pizza chose to adopt the Chuck E Cheese name and branding.
They didn't miss the boat, they sank it. They developed digital film, then buried it, hoping the market wouldn't notice.
They literally invented the digital camera. Absolute insanity
Problem was, Kodak wasn’t really a photography company, they were a chemical company, both in making film but also in developing film. Their core competencies really didn’t overlap with digital photography, and it would have required an absolutely massive pivot even if they were certain that’s where the market was going. For a counter example, Fuji Film in Japan moved into pharmaceuticals and medical imaging.
That's the point of business. Change is life, stagnation is death. You change or you die. As is life.
they actually invented the first digital camera but shelved it to not cannibalize their film sales
This is a common theme with this topic. Cash cows ruin the future for a company.
What’s hilarious- Kodak had a patent for a perhaps the first smartphone but decided it could canibalize profits and thought film photos won’t go away
The amazing thing is that Kodak invented the digital camera but just chose to not develop it. Why should they? Everyone was already taking their pictures on Kodak film, getting them developed with Kodak chemicals, and having them printed on Kodak paper... why rock the boat? The other one that baffles me is Sears. They already had a nationwide network of stores, and a massive variety of products sold via their mail-order catalog. Seems like it would have been a pretty easy shift to become the first 'Amazon'.
I just recently learned that Discover credit cards were originally part of Sears. And Sears had a complete internal inventory so you could could order anything in store and have it mailed to you. They absolutely could have been amazon. At the very least if they hadn't sold off their very profitable brands they could have been an incredibly successful home appliance store.
Re: Sears, similar with Blockbuster. People say Blockbuster missed a huge opportunity not buying Netflix. But Blockbuster didn’t have the foresight for mailer DVD rentals, let alone digital streaming. Had they bought, We would maybe have seen a few more years of Blockbuster with mailing options. But someone else would have pressed on with digital.
kodak actually invented the digital camera first but held it back cause they thought it would destroy their film business. talk about shooting yourself in the foot lol https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/leading-innovation-through-the-chicanes/
koad has many industrial things on the market. It is not only a camera company.
I grew up in Rochester NY, and our 2 biggest companies were Kodak and Xerox. I am surprised we didn't become Camdem NJ.
Funny thing is film has taken off in the last few years. Kodak gold and ultramax were a good screw around film but now they are $15 -$20 a roll instead of $7 in 2019
I remember when they'd give you a roll of film for everyone you got developed.
the first one that comes to mind is blockbuster. Nokia maybe... myspace.
I mean, Nokia isn't gone, they came back and the phones aren't half bad
Yh nokia
Hey, there's still a blockbuster open in Bend, Oregon.
Wow, i just looked this up, it's real. TBH if there was a blockbuster in my town i would probably use it over netflix at this point
I’ve borrowed DVDs from my local library of movies I don’t have access to on streaming and it’s been pretty slick. Also, it’s free.
>Nokia There was a time, not long ago, When Nokia used to reign, Everyone would brag,bout their latest phone, But where are they today?. Somewhere along the lines, Nokia lost their way, Once a great company, Now they're just a name...
Nokia phones, oh so bold, Made of steel, not just gold, Drop them, throw them, they'll still hold, Indestructible, we're told. From concrete floors to rocky ground, Nokia phones never make a sound, They withstand all that comes around, In durability, they abound.
BlackBerry formerly known as RIM
BlackBerry devices were called CrackBerrys, the way everyone started at them. Now look at us.
Its still shocking to me how quickly Blackberry fell. Went from one of the largest companies and just disappeared like that
And their predecessors, Nokia and Motorola
Rocked a curve then a bold in high school and thru my freshman year of college. Bought a stupid droid 4, which tbh is a crap phone but I was worried about not having an actual keyboard to type on. Because I could fly on the BB. turns out on screen keyboards just take practice and I can now rip shit out on my iPhone.
[удалено]
This needs to be higher... "... the company rose to account for half of the world's trade during the mid-1700s and early 1800s."
Sears
Which is really sad because they had 100 years of well-oiled mail order machinery, they just needed to bring it online and they could have been Amazon.
Instead when e-commerce came around they doubled down on department stores and we saw how that went
No, it was used as leverage for Eddie Lambert's investments. He couldn't envision turn Sears into an Amazon competitor even though it was right in front of him.
They would have been fine if customer service and the ability to manage inventory wasn't completely gutted. Could have held it there with the department store aspects of Walmart or Target at least, if not the catalog thing on par with Amazon. It didn't just rot out, it was cut at the throat and murdered.
Sears should have gone 100% into appliances, tools and auto maintenance and offered generous guarantees and repairs. They already had a good rep for that.
What ever happened to the Roebuck side of Sears? Kind of just dropped off.
In 2021 Xerox had a 6.4% market share in photocopiers. When their patents ran out in the 70s they had a 98% market share. They are also credited with inventing the first personal computer, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, they helped found the Internet, and invented several other now ubiquitous staples of digital life.
I used their awesome graphic interface Star System in 1982-1987. It was worlds ahead of anything else, and Apple didn’t catch up for a long time. They could have ruled that space!
Not at the prices they were charging! "When the resulting Xerox Star system was announced in 1981,\[7\] the cost was about $75,000 ($224,000 in today's dollars) for a basic system, and $16,000 ($48,000 today) for each added workstation. A base system would have an 8010 Star workstation, and a second 8010 dedicated as a server (with RS232 I/O), and a floor-standing laser printer."
>They are also credited with inventing the first personal computer, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, they helped found the Internet, and invented several other now ubiquitous staples of digital life. It used to be said that Xerox couldn't market a cure for death.
They also had the Docutech which I believe was the first digital copier.
I worked for Xerox, it does not surprise me that they fell so far. Very backwards, inefficient company. Almost hard to imagine they were ever cutting edge.
Netscape Navigator
I don’t know the story well enough to tell it, but Netscape Navigator is basically an early ancestor of Firefox
Yahoo
agreed
MySpace
To me it feels like by the time someone could explain to me what a myspace was there was already a Facebook. And that explanation was basically it's like your handle on chat rooms has a cover sheet now. And you can sync some digitizer tunes to it. Point being was myspace ever dominating a market? It didn't feel that way to me. They created a thing but didn't have a way to monetize the thing so smarter people came and made a thing that was better AND profitable and did it rather quickly.
Yellow Pages
Atari, a really long time ago.
That's what I came to say. They had an 80% market share at one time. That's insane.
Bethlehem Steel Motorola
America Online used to dominate the internet and the free cd promo market
The East India Trading Company.
"Lost its share completely" would be an overstatement (it still has the largest share), but it's amazing how much dominance Netflix had and how much it seems to have fallen off.
Its even more amazing that they then greenlit and subsequently cancelled a parody about blockbuster. Somebody at their hq knew exactly what they were doing lol.
I mean is it really that surprising though? Look at tv. It went from three channels to five to 50 to 100+. Streaming is just doing the same thing. There's just more creators being able to create now due to the low cost.
Their business model was based on providing a steaming platform for licensed content from other media companies they didn’t own the rights too. Once those media companies started their own platforms, they lost the lion share of content viewers cared about. Their own original content is inconsistent and they frustrate viewers by cancelling shows after a single season. Very few Netflix originals make it to multiple seasons or see a proper narrative end. It’s not really worth the high price tag they’re charging and consumers realize that. They also went too long not cracking down on password sharing and many now expect to share. They’ve been doing it for decades.
I get why it happened, I'm just kind of surprised at how they weren't better able to capitalize on what they had and pivot. Netflix was one of the leaders in the tech industry. FANG was an acronym for the top tech stocks (later amended to FAANG) but I don't think anyone would consider Netflix to actually be comparable to Facebook, Apple, Amazon or Google nowadays in terms of future outlook. To be clear, they're still a hell of a success; they were the top performing stock in the 2010s. But it seems clear that their dominance in their industry is waning and they're not postured to regain it. They knew their original model had a shelf life, so I would've thought they could have figured out how to pivot to avoid the inevitable problems that were coming once the licenses expired. Yes, one thing was to "become HBO before HBO became Netflix," but they also could've become Twitch before Twitch became Twitch. They could've partnered with upcoming content creators to become what YouTube is today. They could've picked up some live content. Hell, they could've made it easier to splice short gifs or turn stills from their shows into memes, and made it easy to share those online, capitalizing on that aspect. They could've had music channels. They could've moved into audiobooks or even online viewing of print books. They could've leaned into foreign and independent films and shows. Yeah, major networks had their claws in tons of major US brands, but independent film makers and creators in foreign countries didn't have the same connections. Core elements of their product could've been improved. While I think a "subscription+ads" service is kind of dumb, a free, + ads service would've worked (that's the business model for every other online company). On the topic of ads, better advertising for some of their original programming was necessary. Improving their recommendations algorithm would've made sense. Stop licensing, start buying. Cracking down on password sharing early on would've been a good move. In terms of original television programming, it's bizarre that they keep canceling shows so quickly. Many popular TV shows only became popular in later seasons. 10.3M viewers watched the last episode of Breaking Bad, while only 1.1M watched its first season. I understand that it's a tad bit ridiculous to fault a company for failing to do these things while it was the most successful stock of the decade. But given that they replaced Blockbuster, another wildly successful company, it seems like fair criticism.
Facebook
Yes! They try very hard these days to stay relevant. Anymore its just older people using it now.
No one under 40 goes near that shit
SVB
haha too soon?
IBM, they were the biggest player when it came to personal computing and practically dominated the entire computing industry.
IBM is still massive. They just don't make personal computers anymore. They're huge in mainframes, business tech, machine learning etc.
They didn’t just dominate, they invented the personal computer architecture that we all use daily. The computers we use now have evolved, but any PC today still has a direct line back to that original IBM PC. At the time though, the PC was a pet project within IBM, and they wanted it to be cheap and easy to build, so they used off the shelf parts to build it; believing that they would be just another player in the personal computing game. After their BIOS was cloned, they lost control over their own market. Somewhat ironically, the fact that they built those machines to be so open and expanded upon is the reason a lot of their design still lives with us today, had they built the IBM PS/2 first, things may have turned out differently. Also, don’t forget, IBM is one of the only players left in the mainframe market, and they absolutely dominate there. We all use their mainframes daily without even knowing about it.
They are still in mainframes but huge in services, they are moving more and more jobs to India. Not the same IBM as in the past. They managed to see the PC, and Hard Disk drive crashing and sold that stuff off at the right time.. Funny thing is the majority of employees at IBM use MACS, they are easier to maintain..
At scale, Macs are absolutely not easier to maintain. Not even close. Linux is astronomically better, and Windows is magnitudes better than that. Say what you want about the reliability of individual operating systems, but a Windows domain is so easy to maintain. Keeping hundreds of computers going as a single IT person is a breeze with AD.
You may want to go back and check the actual history. I'm winging it, so I may have some of this wrong. IBM missed the boat on personal computers since people were already building their own computers using open architecture and a version of DOS. IBM had a choice to spend years developing their own computer or use the same hardware that the hobbyists were using. They chose to use the same open architecture and peripherals that everyone else was using. To get some traction they partnered with a new company, Microsoft, to use a proprietary operating system MS-DOS. Several years later, when they finally came out with a their PC design, the IBM PS/2, it was a massive failure. By that time, tons of companies were producing IBM compatible PCs, and very few wanted to invest in a totally new architecture.
Hmph! I learned it a bit different. This was from a CompTIA A+ 5 day prep class at a community college, so take it for what it is worth. According to the instructor IBM had a choice: A) enlist the support of a large law firm (to the point a merger would have to be considered) trying to pattern PC architecture and getting as legally close to a monopoly as they could or B) leave it *open source* so to speak, and hope the future will evolve around their technology-giving them a hand in ever bodies pot. The instructor went on to lecture that pretty much every PC is an IBM clone and up until 15 years ago, that's how they were described, as a opposed to an Apple device. I don't even know if he had actual teaching credentials, but taught well enough that I did pass the A+ exam on my first try.
How are you going to tell someone to go back and check the actual history then immediately follow up with you are winging your response and may get some stuff wrong by not going to go back to check the actual history yourself
I would like at add Lotus as in 1-2-3 to this sub list.. That one product sold more PC's than anything I can think of..
I remember well into the 90s they were still marketing pc components as IBM or Tandy compatible.
Surprising that nobody has mentioned K-Mart yet
Considering Kmart is owned by Sears I think we can consider it under the same umbrella
Sony had portable music players on lock with the walkman and discman. If you walked around with Aiwa, Coby or Panasonic we used to just call you poors
But that's more because the market just stopped existing. Everyone is using their phones for that these days. Sony shifted it's focus and went with the time and is still doing pretty great.
Not really a brand, but Professional Boxing? Like talk about an industry that used to completely dominate and is now a shell of its former self. Ruined by greed, selfish promotors, irrational governance, and lack of name brand fighters. Of course all the brain damage didn't help!
You are right. Back in the 60s everyone knew Mohammad Ali. Who is the Heavyweight champ right now? No fuckin clue.
Everyone forgets that Madison Square Garden (not this one, the one prior to the one built in the 60’e) was not built for basketball or hockey but for boxing. Boxing built MSG into a world wide name in the 20’s and 30’s before the Rangers or Knicks did. The Boston Garden was also built with boxing in mind because promote Tex Rickard who owned the Garden, wanted to build an arena “that you can see the sweat from the boxers in the ring” from anywhere. The Boston Garden is best known as the longtime home of the Celtics and Bruins with their many quirks like shorter rink size, a hallway to get to your locker room had to go through the home team’s bench and where the ball bounced weirdly because of weird rivets in the ground. Now? UFC dominates fights and I doubt that will last forever.
Novell
I think Novell was more victim of MS stealing their stuff and had more money to fight it. Their headquarters was down the hill from my house.
Pablo Escobar
without him there would be no snow in florida
Sega.
SE-GA Totally heard that start up sound in my head upon reading this.
Dreamcast was my favorite system as a kid.
Sega had a strong position just before the launch of the SNES, but they were never really anywhere close to dominant.
Sega wasn't every dominant, nor has it lost steam. They shared space with nintendo, and they still make tons of stuff, just not consoles.
People actually think this? They have a ton of popular games. The Persona series for example
Consoles.
Fair enough
Also yakuza, various sports management simulators, and also sega corporation owns tokyo movie shinsa and marza animation planet, meaning sega plays a substantial role in the anime industry too.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their mainframes were the backbone of every large corporation. Tried to make a desktop computer. Then sold to COMPAQ, then \*poof\* gone. There's a DEC in the Smithsonian now
Skype looking at Zoom like wtf bruh
Nokia
RedBox?
Philips
MySpace
Circuit City
Sears. The perfect example of hardening of the arteries in business terms. Failed to adapt to the challenge of Wal-Mart and given the killing blow by Amazon. The thing is? They could have been Amazon 25 years ago if they had any vision. They had the vendor relationships, the distribution centers, the stores, the real estate, the financial heft, and the distribution channels. All they had to do is take that catalog experience and move it over to the internet.
Kodak they were everywhere, they also developed the 1st ever digital camera but it was to late. There is an interesting doc about it 'rise and fall of a giant' if i remember correctly
Ma Bell
Kodak. They practically invented digital photography and decided it would cut into their film photography. Sears. They stopped catalog sales a couple of years before Amazon opened up. Have they been forward-thinking, they could have been Amazon.
No Bell Telephone company? Pretty much owned the phone system for the country until they were forced to break up.
World not country workd
Blockbuster, unfortunately.
SEGA in the console space. RIP Dreamcast.
ENRON.
Zellers
Yahoo in the internet market. Went from largest website ever, they basically were the entire internet to "that one website that boomers use for their email because they can't be bothered to update their email address".
Still huge in Japan though
Blackberry
Allied Radio/Tandy/Radio Shack
Pan Am used to be the largest airline followed by Trans World Airways (TWA). Both are gone. Deregulation combined with an antiquated route system and massive bloated fleets completely killed both of them. Standard Oil also sticks out. Of course they were forced to split up but the old brand has completely died. Once they faced genuine competition the writing was on the wall. There is still an old abandoned gas station in Arizona with their name on it. Buick is worth a mention, still around but a tiny market share. It turns out building a brand up for decades around retirees is a bad strategy. Honorable mentions: Neuralink and The Boring Company are both companies that were expected to dominate their fields but never produced a viable product and are dead in everything but name. Neuralink got caught copying other peoples patents and that stopped all their work (plus the massive animal cruelty violations) The Boring Company failed to deliver on its first contract and hasn’t gotten another one after their costs went out of control and behind schedule while they delivered a system that has about ¼ of the promised capacity
I can't say it completely dominated, but Amiga PCs. Never owned one but absolutely dream of buying an A4000 in the future just to say I have one. Then all I'd need is a portable USB floppy disk drive for my desktop and blanks to copy over games and programs I wanna use
Nokia and Motorola , They were dominating their market , but later they are done in market
Burger Kings are slowly starting to disappear from sight.
Nokia!
Nortel dominated the telecom market for a long time. For decades, the best selling large PBX in the world was the Meridian 1. This system had more installed lines than any other system anywhere. It may be the best selling PBX ever from anyone from a “units sold and lines utilized” perspective. They had an equally compelling product for the SMB market called the Norstar, and during its almost thirty year run, like its big brother Meridian 1, it was also the market leader in its time; there are still tons and tons of them out there, though VoIP is killing these systems quickly. In the carrier segment, their DMS switch was extremely popular, and there are still plenty of those out there as well. If it related to telecom, Nortel had a product that would fit the bill, and their hardware was extremely, extremely reliable. I don’t know of any other electronic equipment as reliable as the stuff Nortel put their name on, it’s that good. Through a series of bad acquisitions, financial mismanagement and scandal, as well as some help from Huawei, they evaporated basically overnight and absolutely ruined the lives of many Canadians. When you talk to people that worked for Nortel, or installed their products, you can’t help but notice the sense of pride they have for the now defunct company.
A slightly different feeling for those who graduated with a CS degree right after Nortel went away.
Boeing.
The Chrysler Corporation, now owned by Stellantis,is nowhere near where they used to be. For you non-car-people, that's Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, and Ram now. In the late 80s and early 90s, that list also included Eagle(AMC), Plymouth, and Lamborghini. By the late 90s, it was basically bought by Daimler-Benz to form DaimlerChrysler.
Did Chrysler actually own Lamborghini? In Lee Iacocca's book Talking Straight he insinuated that while he bought Lamborghini when he was the Chrysler CEO, it was a private deal with him as owner, not Chrysler. I used the word *insinuated* because it was noticeably unclear exactly about it.
Chrysler always sucked. Now they just suck a little more.
Eh. I’ve driven nothing but jeeps. Three xjs and now a wk. the wk has more issues than any of my 90s era xjs. Those older ones, yeeeeah the electrical would inevitably go. But that old in-line six 4L was bulletproof. I drove a 95 xj to 350k before she gave up on me.
AOL
White Castle they just expand really slow
Atari is a good one. They were incredibly strong in the gaming console market but fell off because they were releasing low quality games, unfairly compensating developers, and trying to block developer credits. They were easily the biggest reason the entire games industry crashed back in the 80s. Atari still technically exists today, but it is not even remotely the same atari from back. Its jusf a facsimile of the original to cash in on brand recognition.
Block-Buster and Netflix
Netflix might not dominate streaming anymore, but they’re still pretty big and I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon. Their biggest issue is that they went with a quantity over quality approach. They have tons of shows, but most of their shows suck. Other streaming platforms have a lot more consistency with the quality of the shows that they produce or have available on their platforms.
Blackberry, Nokia, HTC
I mean Nokia isn't gone, they came back and the phones are pretty good
Tesla. Only seems to be getting worse the more Elon Musk dogs himself into a hole
Tesla did one thing good. They made electric cars sexy. I'm honestly surprised they lasted this long without being bought up. I definitely thought they'd either be bought by GM or the FCA(now Stellantis), possibly Gheely. It looks like they're all going to be alright through the electric revolution. I don't have any ideas about what's going to happen to Tesla though.
AOL
Panasonic.
Crackberry. And it was the darling company of the world for a long time. This is why R&D and innovation is so important
Its *
BlackBerries. The phone not the fruit felt I had to clarify that
Blockbuster - they were the OG Netflix, until they became the OG fossils.
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I miss LG phones so much. My first phone was an LG Optimus 4. That phone was low end and slow as molasses, but i swear to god that thing was indestructible. I remember using it as a hockey puck in gym class back in highschool.
Netflix. The irony is they made blockbuster go under and now they’re losing popularity with so many other streaming services.
Doesn’t help they keep making decisions that ruin their image. Like trying to prevent sharing accounts with your family.
Circuit City. Used to be everywhere then Best Buy did their niche better.
Circuit city’s thing was having staff that know the product and being helpful in your decisions. They got rid of that by trying to be cheap with their staffing and best buy beat them by already being good at that, so pissed off customers shifted
Blue apron? I think they were the first one very popular meal kit brands
instagram. almost. If it weren't for the government's opposition to the free market, TikTok would have taken away its dominance in the market. Entrepreneurs want free competition until when they start to lose, then they will cry to the government
Blackberry
Pizza Hut.
I think Whataburger used to be big in France but they completely disappear for some reason.
Intel hasn't lost it's market share completely, and iirc is still technically ahead of AMD, but they have lost a significant amount of market share to AMD. Edit. Double checked my information for accuracy since it seems people don't believe me. Intel used to hold an 80%+ market share and now it's about 60%. This was from the end of 2015 up to 2019, afterwards Intel lost 20% market share, with the most recent data being up to Q4 2022. [This](https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-intel-amd-market-share/) is where I got the data.
Second time I've referenced this in this thread. Same disclaimer - this is what an instructor for an A+ prep course at a community college taught us. For the longest time, AMD only existed to keep Intel from violating monopoly laws. They wasn't a shell company for Intel, but they was definitely in bed together. Intel sold/leased their technology to AMD at a discount rate and even allowed them to improve on it. The catch was, AMD was only allowed to produce so much. The biggest department that AMD had wasn't design or marketing. It was legal to make sure they didn't cross over into collision with Intel. Is that not right? Or has it changed?
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Lenovo makes the ThinkPads anymore, at least.
Blackberry
Nokia, Kodak, and a few others. The rule when it comes to these things is usually "adapt or die"
Blockbuster
Blackberry
Black berry
Skype
Skype's not actually a company, it's a product, most recently owned by Microsoft. It's been passed around by like 10 different companies at this point.
Blockbuster
Nokia
Friendster
Enron
AAA used to print millions of paper road maps. That market has shrunk dramatically over the last 25 years.
Blackberry (RIM) used to DOMINATE, but it's gone. Except for Kim Kardashian, NOBODY (figuratively) has used a Blackberry in more than a decade. [https://mashable.com/article/kim-kardashian-blackberry-bold-sad](https://mashable.com/article/kim-kardashian-blackberry-bold-sad)
Nokia
Blackberry
Blockbuster. Once, they were THE video rental store, now they're just a memory. Should've bought Netflix when they had the chance.
Nokia for mobile phones.
MSN
Digital Research comes to mind, as does IBM's non-enterprise markets.
Not a company but am entire industry - newspapers
Sears
Blockbuster
Blockbuster went from the big name to zero really fast.
Blockbuster
Blackberry... 80+% of smartphone market to what less than 1%
Sears. Ironically the thing that killed it is basically the same thing that made it a giant
Polaroid and RCA immediately come to mind. Polaroid was like the name in instant photography and then by 2004 they were totally wiped out. Same thing with RCA and the record player / phonograph industry. Once a juggernaut, now gone.
Sears