The companies that couldn’t cut it in 2011

You can't reflect on the year that's been without pausing for a moment to remember those that are no longer with us. Whether they're companies, products or brands, their death or disappearance — through bankruptcy, acquisition, deliberate shutdown or just plain stupidity — serves as a worthwhile opportunity to reflect on where we've come from and where we're headed. In a sector like tech that doesn't always slow down enough to appreciate history, too many entities are simply forgotten along the way.

With this in mind, here's a brief overview of some of the more notable losses over the last year:

Palm
A decade-and-a-half ago, every geek had a PalmPilot. They didn't do much — unlike today's smartphones, they were updated by physically syncing them to a PC, apps were laughably simple and stylus-based data entry using Graffiti proved maddening to the uninitiated. But Palm sold enough of them to establish itself as the first mobile vendor that truly understood that simplicity could sell. Unfortunately, as that market shifted toward smartphones, Palm lost the script.

Its early Treo models were innovative enough, but later offerings were too derivative of increasingly capable alternatives from Research In Motion and, later, Apple and Google. Palm's me-too-ness resulted in a lost decade of countless corporate reorganizations and rebrandings, culminating in the 2010 $1.2 billion HP buyout. Despite promises of baking Palm's critically adored but commercially ignored webOS operating system into every piece of hardware it made, HP unceremoniously killed the slow-selling TouchPad 49 days after its launch and shuttered the Palm division. The final coup de grace: HP donated webOS to the open source community, a bittersweet end to one of the more notable coulda-beens in 2011 tech.

Flip
In another case of potential-saviour corporate parent killing the once-innovative child, Cisco abruptly terminated its line of consumer-focused video cameras barely two years after buying Pure Digital for $590 million. As trendy as the simple USB-based Flip cameras once were, they had been largely eclipsed by increasingly capable cameras built into smartphones. Why buy a separate, detached unit when you can shoot it on your iPhone and upload it directly to YouTube or Facebook? Cisco asked the same question and realized despite its dreams of expanding beyond its roots as an Internet infrastructure powerhouse, it would never cut it as a consumer-facing company.

Napster
The one-time bad-boy of pirated music — it launched the whole copyright-flouting, illegal-MP3-downloading craze way back in 1999 — was eventually sued into oblivion by the recording industry before being resurrected as Napster 2.0, a (legal) online music store. After Roxio sold the operation to Best Buy in 2008, it merged in late 2011 with Rhapsody, a move that prompted the final retirement of the Napster brand. It may have been far removed from its counterculture roots, but few would deny its lasting impact on the industry.

Borders
The bookseller's demise speaks volumes about the traditional brick-and-mortar businesses and the consequences of not adapting to the technology-driven change. The once-dominant retailer was notoriously slow to integrate online distribution and marketing into its business plan — it waited until July 2010 before launching an online ebook store. By the time Borders began to make tentative moves beyond paper, Amazon's ruthlessly efficient online juggernaut had largely left the company with nowhere to go but out of business.

Facebook Deals
Even the mighty can fail, as evidenced by the social media giant's answer to Groupon, a leading daily deals site. Despite a built-in audience of 800 million users, Facebook failed to convince its users to stretch beyond playing FarmVille and poking each other. Facebook Deals died four months after it was launched.

Microsoft Zune
It was never going to topple Apple's iPod, but when launched in 2006, Microsoft had high hopes it would at least carve out a viable niche in Apple's shadow. No dice, as Zune devices never recovered from their first-generation clunkiness (brown? Seriously?). Later attempts to extend the Zune brand into software and experiment with music subscription models also failed to garner attention in a market increasingly turning to smartphones and established online services for their on-the-go entertainment. Zune technology will live on in some diluted form in Microsoft's other platforms — it forms the basis of the well-received "Metro" interface in the Windows Phone 7, Xbox 360 and upcoming Windows 8 products — but the brand itself is now dead. At least Microsoft hung in there for five years before throwing in the towel.

Adobe Mobile Flash
Technically, Adobe still supports the broader Flash standard, but Adobe's decision to stop development and pull back support for the mobile version has cast a shadow over the entire brand, as well. The late Steve Jobs famously refused to include any flavour of flash on Apple hardware, calling it inadequate on a number of fronts, including security, performance, battery life and software development. The new mobile world is increasingly HTML5-based, leaving Adobe little room but to withdraw. While Flash provided an early and much-needed means of offering multimedia capability to a very plain mid-1990s Web, the world has evolved tremendously since then, and its architecture is no longer competitive.

While some losses may sting more than others, tech's forward-looking culture leaves little time to mourn. Once any lessons from these losses are learned, those that survive turn once again to focus on whatever comes next. The coming year will serve up its own share of fresh corporate deaths, and all that matters is doing whatever it takes to avoid being on next year's list.

Carmi Levy is a London, Ont.-based independent technology analyst and journalist. carmilevy@yahoo.ca