Noble IT failures

Several weeks ago in this space, I was waxing nostalgic about products like XyWrite and DEC Alpha, which — despite having topflight technology — failed to hold market share. I closed my May 31 column with an invitation to e-mail me nominations of superior technologies that lost out to lesser products.

Boy, did you respond. Because the e-mails were so interesting, opinionated, and informed, I’d like to present a handful of them here.

A few candidates rose to the top of the pile by virtue of sheer repetition. The company most often singled out as having dominated without benefit of the best technology was Microsoft. Professor Bill Bauldry, chairperson of the math department at Appalachian State University, was perhaps most eloquent in expressing a common sentiment: “I have a single word for you: Windows.”

Indeed, according to readers, Windows has played the heavy in multiple scenarios, having gotten the better of Linux, Mac OS, and GeoWorks — a powerful, if bygone, GUI. But Microsoft didn’t just squash OS competitors. Readers cited a litany of lovable losers, including Paradox and dBase, vanquished by Access; Netscape Navigator, still in Internet Explorer’s imposing shadow; and WordPerfect and WordStar, victims of Microsoft Word.

Reader Tom Lundin, who throws “Mozilla Firefox vs. Internet Explorer,” as well as “my ISP vs. AOL” into the mix, offers the following explanation: “Generally speaking, underdog products are the preference of power users and tech geeks, for whom productivity matters greatly. Everyone else uses what is convenient and good enough.”

Following up on that logic, Ethernet must have been “convenient and good enough.” After all, it took down Token Ring, which reader Marc Thornsbury calls a “bulletproof network at a time when leaving the terminator off the end of your thin Ethernet bus would bring your network down and a failing ARCnet … adapter could lock your systems up faster than you could say, ‘coaxial.’ ”

Intel’s x86 architecture was another target of readers. The way Hewlett-Packard Software Engineer Phil Walker explains it, “Intel was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1980-81. Their own engineers recognized that the x86 architecture was not competitive [with the Motorola 68000]. They survived for one reason: IBM bought 15 percent of their stock and simultaneously established the x86 as an industry standard.”

The most commonly cited example was the Commodore Amiga. As Tony Pitman, owner of Shatalmic, puts it, “The Amiga was one of a kind. At the time, it had the only truly pre-emptive multitasking OS and was the first to use multiple processors — the main CPU and five supporting specialized processors — in the same box. Here’s to lost technology.”

Long may these products live — at least in our memories.