Technologies That Failed To Retain Their Dominance

Chennai:  There were technologies that were fervently celebrated by the consumers and dreaded by competitors. They had ruled the tech world like unbeatable lords with bright future. But now their glory is now extinct. Maybe because consumers developed a new taste for better things or they fell to competitors. Read on to know 10 technologies that failed to retain their dominance as compiled by ITWORLD.

Wang word processor

In 1970s Wang Laboratories brought a word processor which stored text on tape that could be replayed, allowing pages to be edited later. It was the only one of its times, and got instant popularity.  By the 1980s, Wang's word processing started focusing more on Office Information System and later it grabbed 80 percent of the world's large corporations.

But the technology didn’t survive till 1992, as the company’s founder An Wang focused more on his rivalry with IBM and refused to explore the possibility of IBM-compatible PCs. Within a few years, more general-purpose machines had made Wang's word processors redundant. The company later on went bankrupt in 1992.

Netscape

Netscape browser was easily the most advanced ones in early 1990s and was therefore an instant success, becoming market leader while still in beta. Its next version added a full mail reader called Netscape Mail, thus transforming Netscape from a mere web browser to an Internet suite. During this period, both the browser and the suite together were known as Netscape Navigator.

It was the browser of choice for 70 to 80 percent of Web surfers. But that advantage literally was wiped out in a remarkable fashion. You had to pay to put Navigator on corporate-owned computers; IE was free to everybody, and Microsoft's work to integrate the browser into its omnipresent OS helped to launch itself into glory. Years passed and in 2012, Netscape saw only single digit market share  and it’s now a subsidiary of AOL.

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, and web services suite that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. Yahoo has been blamed for buying the site and then letting it slip into irrelevance. However the forte of Flickr like file storage, photo album creation, connecting with friends -- were taken on by more general purpose sites. Eventually, Flickr lost the quick-phone-photo market to Instagram.

IBM PC

IBM PC is the progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. Alongside "microcomputer" and "home computer", the term "personal computer" was already in use before 1981. It was used as early as 1972 to characterize Xerox PARC's Alto. However, because of the success of the IBM Personal Computer, the term PC came to mean more specifically a microcomputer compatible with IBM's PC products.

By 1983, they had grabbed a quarter of the market leaving behind Apple. To further increase their market share, IBM built PCs almost entirely out of off-the-shelf parts; its only proprietary aspect, its BIOS, was easily reverse-engineered by rivals who soon began peddling PC clones.

WordPerfect

WordPerfect is a word processing application owned by Corel with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s it was a dominant player in the word processor market. In the glory days of MS-DOS, the word processor to beat was WordPerfect, which spent the '80s leagues ahead of its competition, and managed to pack user-friendliness and power into a text-based environment. Its early popularity was also based partly on its availability for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, including Mac OS, Linux, Apple, Unix, AmigaOS and others.

The WordPerfect did not evolve fast and it took years for a stable Windows version of WordPerfect to appear. When it finally arrived, many of its most beloved keyboard shortcuts were overridden by Windows defaults.

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems old computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services and that created the Java programming language, and the Network File System (NFS). All the disparate products that Sun had put together over the years made it popular in dot com era; everybody wanted to power their new Websites with Java applications, SPARC servers, and Solaris.

The problem was, everyone was buying the stuff with fake bubble money, and they soon discovered they could run x86 Linux servers at a fraction of the cost, and Java, in which Sun had invested so many resources, was free to download. Oracle snapped up the diminished company in 2009.

RIM

The arrival of the first Apple iPhone in 2007 caused much fanfare and speculation that the BlackBerry might have its first serious competition. Boasting a powerful mobile browser, a new touch screen interface, strong multimedia capabilities and a bundled application storefront with many mobile apps, the iPhone was referred to as a "BlackBerry Killer" by some in the media. But RIM engineers insisted that iPhone cannot pull all these things together with any kind of useful battery life. Instead of taking the stock of the situation, they stuck with their obsessions that had kept the BlackBerry on top for years: minimizing power and data usage. With advances in battery tech and 3G networks coming online, these suddenly seemed less relevant, and RIM's hegemony collapsed before it could update its aging operating system.

Myspace

Myspace is a social networking service with a strong music emphasis. Myspace was launched in August 2003 and was the most visited social networking site in the world. In June 2006 it surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009. Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns.

Atari 2600

The Atari 2600 is a video game console released in September 1977. It is credited with popularizing the use of microprocessor-based hardware and ROM cartridges containing game code, instead of having non-microprocessor dedicated hardware with all games built in. It was wildly successful, and during much of the 1980s, "Atari" was a synonym for this model in mainstream media and, by extension, for video games in general.

The popularity did not last for long. Atari's best programmers left due to low pay; other consoles were able to reverse-engineer the system and offer compatibility; and Pac-Man and E.T. proved to be huge flops. Atari would've licensed the Nintendo Entertainment System for the U.S. market, but they passed, giving up their last chance for industry relevance.

Sony Walkman

Walkman is a Sony brand trade name originally used for portable audio cassette players. Though the company is the first one to come up with portable music player, it did not go further to innovate some product like iPod, the Walkman's obvious successor.