5 ms·

It won't be long until you say Blackberry phone and people will say "What?" This company will be a case study in how deep in the sand you can stick your head.

It won't be long until you say Blackberry phone and people will say "What?" This company will be a case study in how deep in the sand you can stick your head. You'd think they'd have studied the spectacular downfall of Palm, and prior to that, Iomega, when trying to chart their own course.

moron4hire 13y ago
It's corporate schizophrenia. So few corporations avoid it. The only ones I can think of in technology are IBM and Motorola. They seem to have been able to reinvent themselves enough times to avoid crapping out entirely. Sure, they aren't the biggest in their fields, but maybe that all consuming pursuit to be the biggest is part of the downfall of other companies.
- astrodust 13y ago
  Motorola actually died, it just limped along in the mobile space until that part was acquired by Google. Motorola off-loaded their CPU manufacturing, that's now Freescale Semiconductor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_Semiconductor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_Semiconductor), and ditched their PC business. They're still losing money in mobile so it's likely they would've cratered before long.
cmsimike 13y ago
Any further information on Iomega's downfall? I used them for their Zipdisks and would love to see read happened. I'm also interested in the downfall of Palm.
- xsmasher 13y ago
  Zipdisks were overtaken by CD-R tech, which started out expensive ($2000+ writers, but with $100 readers in most machines) but quickly became too cheap for zip to compete (almost every CD-ROM drive was also a writer by the time DVD took over.)
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    Actually, I would expect the more likely killer to be USB thumb drives. No need to invest money or space in a drive at all, so they were usable even on your friend's or your university's or your employer's computers. The disc-based systems were woefully fragmented with a lot of confusion over R version RW and + versus - and CD versus DVD. It was more convenient to rewrite data than CDRW (how often do you need to permanently store data? Rewriting is the better use case). And the media was small enough that you thought nothing of taking it everywhere with you (like your keys and wallet). Plus, I would wager that USB thumb drives are more reliable than CDs, given the propensity for cheap CDs to delaminate or get scratched up versus the numerous thumb drives sent through the washing machine in pants pockets and still came out working.
    - itsameta4 13y ago
      True, but USB sticks didn't become very popular until well after Iomega had stopped being relevant.
- jimbosis 13y ago
  The effusive Thom Holwerda of OSNews wrote up a quite long telling (55 pg in the PDF version) of the Palm story not too long ago. http://www.osnews.com/story/26838/Palm_I_m_ready_to_wallow_now http://www.osnews.com/story/26838/Palm_I_m_ready_to_wallow_n... Note that you can read the whole thing on the website. The TOC is after his plug for purchasing the PDF. And someone in the know commented that some of the Android developers are people from the Palm world. http://www.osnews.com/story/26861/Additional_insights_into_Palm_OS_6_Cobalt_ http://www.osnews.com/story/26861/Additional_insights_into_P...
- astrodust 13y ago
  Iomega completely disrupted the removable bulk storage market held by SyQuest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syquest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syquest), rendering their rival virtually irrelevant within a few years. That massive success and complete market domination led to a sense of complacency, and when CD-R and CD-R+W emerged, with 650MB of storage on very inexpensive non-proprietary media, Iomega was slow to react. The first CD-R burners were VCR-sized devices that required a lot of expertise to operate. They cost $15,000 and ran single-speed burning on to media that cost $15-20 a piece. This quickly changed, and within a few years the price of media had plunged below a dollar a unit, and 4x and 8x burners were available for a few hundred bucks. Long after CD-R had displaced Zip disks, Iomega produced a line of mediocre CD-R devices. They didn't succeed, as an internal burner could be purchased for as little as $25 and Iomega's external version was around $300 so as not to cannibalize sales of their flagship Jaz drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega_Jaz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega_Jaz), a product that ultimately went nowhere and had near zero adoption. The other thing that hit at about the same time was the internet. With only dial-up speeds people were forced to use removable media to transfer large files, and Iomega offered a cost-effective solution for that problem at the time. As soon as speeds increased and people could send large amounts of data without having to "sneaker-net" it over, the need for these things was largely eliminated.

moron4hire 13y ago

It's corporate schizophrenia. So few corporations avoid it. The only ones I can think of in technology are IBM and Motorola. They seem to have been able to reinvent themselves enough times to avoid crapping out entirely. Sure, they aren't the biggest in their fields, but maybe that all consuming pursuit to be the biggest is part of the downfall of other companies.

astrodust 13y ago
Motorola actually died, it just limped along in the mobile space until that part was acquired by Google. Motorola off-loaded their CPU manufacturing, that's now Freescale Semiconductor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_Semiconductor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_Semiconductor), and ditched their PC business. They're still losing money in mobile so it's likely they would've cratered before long.

cmsimike 13y ago

Any further information on Iomega's downfall? I used them for their Zipdisks and would love to see read happened. I'm also interested in the downfall of Palm.

xsmasher 13y ago
Zipdisks were overtaken by CD-R tech, which started out expensive ($2000+ writers, but with $100 readers in most machines) but quickly became too cheap for zip to compete (almost every CD-ROM drive was also a writer by the time DVD took over.)
- moron4hire 13y ago
  Actually, I would expect the more likely killer to be USB thumb drives. No need to invest money or space in a drive at all, so they were usable even on your friend's or your university's or your employer's computers. The disc-based systems were woefully fragmented with a lot of confusion over R version RW and + versus - and CD versus DVD. It was more convenient to rewrite data than CDRW (how often do you need to permanently store data? Rewriting is the better use case). And the media was small enough that you thought nothing of taking it everywhere with you (like your keys and wallet). Plus, I would wager that USB thumb drives are more reliable than CDs, given the propensity for cheap CDs to delaminate or get scratched up versus the numerous thumb drives sent through the washing machine in pants pockets and still came out working.
  - itsameta4 13y ago
    True, but USB sticks didn't become very popular until well after Iomega had stopped being relevant.
jimbosis 13y ago
The effusive Thom Holwerda of OSNews wrote up a quite long telling (55 pg in the PDF version) of the Palm story not too long ago. http://www.osnews.com/story/26838/Palm_I_m_ready_to_wallow_now http://www.osnews.com/story/26838/Palm_I_m_ready_to_wallow_n... Note that you can read the whole thing on the website. The TOC is after his plug for purchasing the PDF. And someone in the know commented that some of the Android developers are people from the Palm world. http://www.osnews.com/story/26861/Additional_insights_into_Palm_OS_6_Cobalt_ http://www.osnews.com/story/26861/Additional_insights_into_P...
astrodust 13y ago
Iomega completely disrupted the removable bulk storage market held by SyQuest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syquest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syquest), rendering their rival virtually irrelevant within a few years. That massive success and complete market domination led to a sense of complacency, and when CD-R and CD-R+W emerged, with 650MB of storage on very inexpensive non-proprietary media, Iomega was slow to react. The first CD-R burners were VCR-sized devices that required a lot of expertise to operate. They cost $15,000 and ran single-speed burning on to media that cost $15-20 a piece. This quickly changed, and within a few years the price of media had plunged below a dollar a unit, and 4x and 8x burners were available for a few hundred bucks. Long after CD-R had displaced Zip disks, Iomega produced a line of mediocre CD-R devices. They didn't succeed, as an internal burner could be purchased for as little as $25 and Iomega's external version was around $300 so as not to cannibalize sales of their flagship Jaz drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega_Jaz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega_Jaz), a product that ultimately went nowhere and had near zero adoption. The other thing that hit at about the same time was the internet. With only dial-up speeds people were forced to use removable media to transfer large files, and Iomega offered a cost-effective solution for that problem at the time. As soon as speeds increased and people could send large amounts of data without having to "sneaker-net" it over, the need for these things was largely eliminated.