Microsoft Vista
Topping the list is Microsoft's operating system Vista released worldwide on January 30, 2007. The most recent generation of the company's flagship product operating system, Vista was aimed to improve the security of the most widely used PC operating system in the world.
However, according to most software reviews, the securities features were not much better than the previous versions of Windows. The fact that Vista came with its own list of hardware requirements for the users too acted as a dampener in the operating system's popularity.
Many analysts even claimed that Vista ran slower on PCs than XP. These factors prevented Vista from taking over from its predecessors, according to the magazine. According to research site Net Applications, as of last month Vista's global share of PC operating systems was less than 24 per cent, while Windows XP had 62% and Apple's OS X product had over 9%. http://us.travelchacha.com/
Gateway
One of the most successful PC companies in the US, its sales quadrupled in 1990. By 2004, it was No. 3 in US market share behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell and had 25 per cent of the retail PC business. However, the company's reluctance to enter the laptop business cost it dear. In fact, it is considered one of the main reasons for its downfall. The company failed to gauge technology shift and move top portable computers as fast as its competitors could.
And by 2007 Gateway was in such poor shape that Acer was able to buy it for $710 million. Gateway was also slow in entering the business of selling PCs to enterprises. The company tried to diversify by moving into consumer electronics, but the profit margins were small and this decision only hurt the firm's margins.
A prominent tech research firm wrote when Gateway was sold, "The $710 million price tag is quite a comedown from the mid-1990s, when Gateway and Dell were spoken of in the same breath and commanded mega-billion dollars in market capitalisation."
HD DVD
The year 2008 saw the death of HD-DVD, putting an end to the long-going high-definition format war. At Consumer Electronic Show in January, just hours before the HD-DVD group was due to hold a press conference, Warner Bros film studio announced that it was withdrawing its support for HD-DVD, and instead would be exclusively backing rival format Blu-ray.
Vonage
Vonage is regarded as the grandfather of voice-over-IP (VoIP). However, today the US-based company is hardly a footnote in the growth of the industry which is currently dominated by products from cable companies and free services, says Time.
The company went public on 24 May 2006 at a price of $17 per share, and dropped 23.5 per cent to $13 the following day. The closing price on 15 December 2008 was $1. Lawsuits over some of its intellectual property cost the company millions of dollars.
YouTube
YouTube is the world's largest video sharing site. According to comScore, 99.7 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com in the US during March 2009. However, the fact that the company despite being a no. 1 and huge user base is still struggling to make profit is what makes it a part of the list. http://www.bookmytrip.in/
YouTube was bought by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion. However, according to Time article, "YouTube has not come up with a model to make money by either selling advertising or charging for premium content, even though it has an a enormous audience and library of content."
Compounding the problem is YouTube's considerable expenses, including the cost of bandwidth, content licensing, ad-revenue shares, hardware storage, and sales and marketing, which equal roughly $711 million, landing the video site in the red for this fiscal year.
Sirius XM
Next biggest tech failure of last decade according to Time magazine's listing is Sirius XM (SIRI). Sirius Satellite Radio is a satellite radio service operating in the United States and Canada owned by Sirius XM Radio.
The satellite radio was touted as one of the most successful consumer electronic devices of all time. The service initially planned to run no commercials. One of the two companies that would eventually be the merged Sirius XM, XM Satellite Radio launched its service in September 2001 and by the end of the year had almost 28,000 subscribers. The numbers jumped to about 350,000 by the end of the 2002 and 5.9 million by the end of 2005.
Microsoft Zune
Microsoft's Zune was launched in November 2006 as an rival to Apple iPod which had been in the market since 2001 and dominated the multimedia player and music download business globally.
The software giant managed to get the four largest music labels to sign licensing agreements with the company. However, the company could not manage to excite customers. According to Bloomberg Television, between the launch date and mid-2007 only 1.2 million Zune players were sold. In May 2008, Microsoft said that it had sold two million players since its launch.
The Wall Street Journal reported that revenue from the Zune player was $85 million during the 2008 holiday season compared to $185 million in the same period in 2007. Apple's iPod revenue during the last quarter of 2008 was $3.37 billion.
Palm
Next debacle of the past decade, according to Time is Palm. The company which pioneered smartphones is staring a bleak future at a time when smartphones are hottest property in the gadget world.
Palm produced both a portable wireless device and an operating system for portable hardware devices and desktops. The company launched its Palm Pilot hardware device in 1996 as a personal organizer. In 1999, it released its Palm V. The Palm Treo smartphone was developed by Handspring which Palm acquired.
In the quarter that ended in September 2005, Palm sold 470,000 Treo units, up 160 per cent same quarter the year before. During this time, three companies dominated the smartphone market: Palm, Research-In-
Iridium
Iridium, the global satellite phone company backed by Motorola filed for bankruptcy in 1999. The company is often called a $5 billion flop. The Motorola-backed venture that sought to build and launch its infrastructure of satellites to provide worldwide wireless phone service. To work properly, the system needed 66 satellites. The creation of this enormous system forced the company to default on $1.5 billion of debt.
The service had been such a failure that it only had 10,000 subscribers. Finally, the system that cost Motorola more than $5 billion to build ultimately sold for $25 million.
According to a Dartmouth Tuck Business School case study on the history of Iridium in 1998, the company forecast that it would have 500,000 subscribers by the following year. But, the service was expensive for customers, and the cellular phone business had started to take hold as its infrastructure was built out in most of the large developed countries.
Segway
The last on Time magazine's biggest technology failures of the past decade is Segway, the two-wheel transportation vehicle launched in 2002.
During Segway's much-fanfared launch its head said, "It will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy". A famous VC predicted that Segway sales might hit $1 billion as fast as any company in history. The company spent about $100 million developing the product.
However, the company failed to get the pricing right. According to Time, "Segway did not understand that its price point, well above $3,000 for most models and $7,000 for some, was too high to draw a mass consumer base." http://www.atriptoindia.com/
