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Part XII – Dead Ends & Divergent Paths

Technologies that failed, companies that collapsed, and ideas that arrived too early: the Itanium, OS/2, the Apple Newton, Google Glass, BlackBerry and Bildschirmtext, among some seventy cases. Each article explains why it failed and what, if anything, survived.

  • Dead End: Buying a Computer Industry — Unidata 1973–75, Japan’s Fifth Generation, DARPA’s Strategic Computing and MCC, Britain’s Alvey, and ESPRIT, the one that survived
  • The Lisp Machine Era — when specialized hardware failed
  • Early Networking Failures — Token Ring, ATM, OSI, NetWare: protocols that lost to TCP/IP
  • Project Cybersyn: Chile’s Cybernetic Dream — Stafford Beer’s telex-and-mainframe economy for Allende’s Chile, destroyed in the 1973 coup
  • OGAS: The Soviet Internet That Never Was — Glushkov’s 1962 plan to network the planned economy, killed by the bureaucracies it would have made transparent
  • Setun: The Ternary Computer — the only computer built in series on base 3, killed by a planning ministry that had decided computers were binary
  • Dead End: OS/2 — the better Windows that Microsoft abandoned to ship Windows 95
  • Dead End: Taligent — Apple’s Pink, always two years away, became an Apple-IBM-HP company; $100 million later it shipped C++ frameworks for AIX, and its Unicode code lives on in Java and ICU
  • Dead End: Flash and the Plugin Web — the creative soul of the early web, ended by four pages from Steve Jobs
  • Dead End: Google Glass and Wearables — “Glasshole” and why consumer AR still doesn’t work despite solved tech
  • Dead End: VRML and the First Metaverse — the 3D internet of 1994, buried by 56k modems and no killer app
  • Dead End: Second Life — real currency, IBM offices, a Reuters journalist — and no mass platform
  • Dead End: Microsoft’s Mobile Failures — Windows CE, Pocket PC, Windows Phone, Nokia, $7.2B lost
  • Dead End: Google+ — Circles was better than Facebook’s model. Network effects didn’t care.
  • Dead End: Gopher — the pre-web protocol that was winning until one licensing announcement handed the internet to the web
  • Dead End: The Intel iAPX 432 — the object-oriented “micromainframe” that ran at a quarter the speed of Intel’s own stopgap, the 8086
  • Dead End: The Cryotron — Dudley Buck’s superconducting switch, his unexplained death at 32, and why liquid helium lost to silicon
  • Dead End: IBM Stretch — promised 100 times the 704 in 1956, delivered about a third of that in 1961, was withdrawn from sale at a loss, and handed the System/360 its byte, interrupts and memory protection
  • Dead End: Magnetic Bubble Memory — Bobeck’s garnet bubbles were to replace the disk; three US makers quit in 1981, and Konami’s arcade cartridges had to warm up before every game
  • Dead End: ILLIAC IV — 256 processors planned, 64 built, $8M to $31M, driven off campus by protests, three years to make it work at NASA Ames
  • Dead End: Intel Itanium — EPIC architecture and a decade of work made irrelevant by AMD’s x86-64
  • Dead End: Intel NetBurst — the Pentium 4’s 31-stage bet on 10 GHz, stopped at 3.8 GHz by heat; Intel’s next generation came from a Haifa laptop chip descended from the Pentium III
  • Dead End: The Transputer — £211M of British public money on a chip that networked with four wires and ran occam; twenty years early for multicore, and its core ended up in satellite TV boxes
  • Dead End: Sun Microsystems — right about the future, unable to survive until it arrived
  • Dead End: Silicon Graphics — Jurassic Park, the N64 chip, and OpenGL; destroyed by $300 graphics cards its own alumni designed, its campus now the Googleplex
  • Dead End: Omnibus Computer Graphics — bought Digital Productions and Robert Abel in 1986, closed all three studios on 13 April 1987; its PRISMS code became Houdini
  • Dead End: BeOS — pervasive multithreading, 64-bit journaling FS, sub-millisecond audio, and the Apple negotiation that brought Jobs back
  • Dead End: The Amiga — preemptive multitasking, 4096 colors, four-channel audio in 1985, destroyed by its owner
  • Dead End: Verbmobil — 168.6 million marks for a German/English/Japanese speech interpreter; its own 2000 evaluation crowned the statistical engine over the grammars
  • Dead End: The Semantic Web — Berners-Lee’s machine-readable web: OWL, RDF, SPARQL — LLMs arrived before the ontologies did
  • Dead End: Google Wave — technically brilliant, impossible to explain, shut down 14 months after launch
  • Dead End: Google Reader — the RSS reader a generation lived in; shut down in 2013 and taught the web that Google kills what you love
  • Killed by Google: The Product Graveyard — the 2011 spring cleans, 307 headstones with a median life of four years, launch-promo-abandon, the bricked Revolv hub, goo.gl links, and the base rate that sank Stadia
  • Dead End: PointCast and Push Technology — the 1997 Wired cover that told you to kiss your browser goodbye; killed by its own bandwidth appetite, its idea reborn as RSS
  • Dead End: BlackBerry — 50% US enterprise market share (2009) to under 1% (2016)
  • Dead End: Symbian — 73% of the smartphone market in 2006, dead four years after the iPhone redefined the product
  • Dead End: Maemo and MeeGo — Nokia’s Linux platform, from the phoneless 770 tablet (2005) to the N9, cancelled before it shipped (2011)
  • Dead End: Encarta — the CD-ROM encyclopedia built from the one Britannica spurned, killed the print industry, then was killed by free Wikipedia
  • Britannica and the CD-ROM Encyclopedias — 2,300 door-to-door salesmen, Grolier’s 1985 disc, Compton’s multimedia and its revoked patent, the $995 Britannica CD, revenue halved by 1996, and a free website that crashed
  • Dead End: Iridium — 66 satellites, $5 billion, bankrupt nine months after launch; the constellation Motorola meant to burn up now flies as critical infrastructure
  • Dead End: Teledesic, Globalstar and the First Satellite Internet — Gates and McCaw’s 840-satellite Internet-in-the-Sky, Globalstar’s bent pipes, four bankruptcies in three years, then Apple’s SOS, Amazon’s $11.57 billion and Starlink
  • Dead End: Pebble — set the Kickstarter record, shipped a smartwatch before Apple, got squeezed out by the phone platforms, then reanimated when Google open-sourced its OS in 2025
  • Dead End: Skype — made a verb of itself, then was owned by companies that didn’t want it; lost the 2020 video-call boom to Zoom, shut down by Microsoft in 2025 after 22 years
  • Dead End: Yahoo! — turned down Google for $1M, rejected Microsoft’s $44.6B offer, sold to Verizon for $4.48B
  • Dead End: Vine — invented short-form video, killed by Twitter in 2016; TikTok turned the format into $400B
  • Dead End: Web3 and NFTs — Bored Apes, $69M Beeple, Terra/Luna collapse, FTX fraud
  • Dead End: IBM Watson Health — a quiz-show win sold to cancer hospitals; $62.1M at MD Anderson on a $2.4M contract, “unsafe and incorrect” recommendations, $4B in, $1B out
  • Dead End: Google Stadia — cloud gaming that technically worked, shut down before shipping a game
  • Dead End: Apple Newton — “Egg Freckles,” killed by Jobs in 1998; its ARM chips and engineers built the iPhone
  • Dead End: The Apple Pippin — Apple’s $599 game console: Bandai built it, 42,000 people bought it, Jobs buried it
  • Dead End: The Vectrex — the only home console with a built-in vector display; its screen freed it from the TV and priced it out of the 1983 crash
  • Dead End: The Mac Clones — Apple collected a $50 royalty on machines that replaced its own $500-margin Macs; Jobs paid $100M to end it
  • Dead End: Microsoft Bob and Clippy — sincere attempts to humanize computing; enduring jokes
  • Dead End: WAP and the Mobile Web — WML and per-kilobyte billing, built for 1997 constraints destroyed by the iPhone
  • Dead End: MMS, the Picture Message with a Toll Booth — per-photo billing on a 300 kB corset, killed by WhatsApp; Germany switched it off in 2026
  • Dead End: Token Ring — IBM’s technically superior LAN protocol defeated by cheaper Ethernet cable
  • Dead End: Centronics — the 1970 casino-printer company whose parallel plug outlived it by decades; standardized as IEEE 1284 in 1994, two years before USB, while its maker sold housewares
  • Dead End: Short Cases — RealPlayer’s 85% of streaming undone by spyware, the netbook, the $699.99 3DO, Microsoft Tay’s sixteen hours, Data General’s Eagle built for a dying market, and fluidic logic that computed with air
  • Dead End: Osborne — invented the portable computer, went from two employees to $73M in a year, and gave business schools a cautionary tale it probably did not earn
  • Dead End: Wang Labs — the company that was word processing: $3B a year, then bankrupt when the PC turned its machine into a $300 program
  • Dead End: WordPerfect — owned the legal market, mocked Windows, from $1.4B to $124M in two years
  • Dead End: Palm and the PDA — invented the pocket computer category; Apple and Google built what came next
  • Dead End: HD-DVD — Toshiba conceded in 46 days, then streaming made the winner’s prize irrelevant
  • Dead End: Sony ATRAC and MagicGate — the Walkman company’s copy-protected players, three check-outs per song, and the 2007 surrender to MP3 and drag and drop
  • Dead End: Google Buzz — auto-connected private contacts to a public social network on launch day; FTC investigation, $8.5M settlement
  • Dead End: Orkut — Google’s social network launched two weeks before Facebook, ruled Brazil and India, and was shut down in 2014
  • Dead End: Bildschirmtext — the Bundespost’s pay-per-page online service: 60,000 users instead of a million, outclassed by free Minitel terminals, and hacked for 134,634.88 DM by the CCC
  • Videotex: Prestel, Minitel and the Viewdata Era — Fedida’s Viewdata, a million sets forecast and 95,000 reached, Telidon and Viewtron, the free Minitel and its Kiosque billing, and the Duke of Edinburgh’s hacked mailbox
  • Dead End: General Magic — the 1990 Apple spin-off that designed the smartphone fifteen years early; its alumni built the iPhone, Android, and eBay