Dearly Departed: Companies and Products That Didn't Deserve to Die

Some products just didn't deserve to die. But they did, because the companies made bad business decisions. We revisit several of our favorites--from minicomputers to software utilities--and mourn the best and brightest that died an untimely death.

Elegance and ease wasn't enough

Company: Apollo
Born: 1980
Died: 1989 (acquired by HP)
Cause of Death: Market consolidation
Founder: William Poduska (also cofounder of Prime)
Most well-known product(s): Apollo workstations
Why we miss them: Elegant design and easy to administer. But at least the products survived for a while and injected their DNA into HP's workstations.
Lasting image/quote: "It was the most schizophrenic operating system I ever dealt with. The Unix market was really fragmented then and the argument between the SysV and BSD flavors was going strong.Apollo decided to have the best of both worlds and implemented most everything both ways." -Rene Churchill, former Apollo user.

Next: Turbo ran out of gas ...>>

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