The Techie Guy: Top 5 Tech Company Blunders

1. Real Networks & Philips Rejects IPOD Offer

Apple’s Ipod was actually a brainchild of Tony Fadell. He started a company called “FUSE”, which was electronics company. One of his device idea was to create a small Hard Drive Based Music Player. How ever FUSE was failure, to raise fund for company, he started creating device for other companies. He approached Real Networks with his IPod idea, but Real Networks has rejected the idea, then Fadell Approached but Philips too dropped the idea. The Fadell approached Steve Jobs, who immediately took up the idea, but Steve Jobs was the one who designed the IPOD user interface. The Fadell idea was to provide a Sleek, small and a content delivery system for the customers to fill their pods in a easy way.

Result : Apple controls over 80% of Digital Music world, with ITunes and No need to mention about IPod sales. Real Networks is still the same old player in Streaming Media world, whose revenue where only fraction of Apple’s IPod and ITunes profits.

2. Yahoo Rejects Face book offer

In 2006, Face Book was about to be acquired by Yahoo for a whopping $1billion, but by then Face Book was only 2yrs old and had around 8 million users when compared to MySpace who has around 100 million users

(in picture Mark FACEBOOK CEO)

After the deal came to light, Yahoo’s share reduced by 22% overnight, then Yahoo then CEO Terry Semel cut down the offer money and proposed to by Face Book for $800 million, Face Book refused and the deal is dropped

Result : Face Book has around 250 Million registered users and almost worth $10 Billion and Yahoo is still waiting in the bench, whether Microsoft will Buy it or not

3. Xerox Throws Alto and apple create MAC

Way before Windows and MAC exists the world had a wonderful personnel computer called XEROX ALTO, which runs on their own operating system.

Xerox Alto is the world's first computer with a window-based graphical user interface, a mouse, a Ethernet card and WYSIWYG text processor in 1973. By then PC market does not existed hence they dumped the technology. Until in 1979 Steve Job visited the XEROX PARC and used those GUI and mouse in APPLE LISA by then XEROX was on abandoned the ship mode and left ALTO. After Apple’s success, they realized their costly mistake and released XEROX STAR buy then it was too late

Result : Apple took from XEROX and MICROSOFT indeed inspired from APPLE and rest is history, we cannot imagine a world without Mouse, Word or Windows and computers.

4. The Search engine Before Google

Now Internet Search war was going between Microsoft’s Bing and Google. Let’s hope Bing wins.

Way back in mid 1990, do we had search engine, the answer is Yes. it was called as Open Text Search

Open Text indeed had the logic of now Google’s search based on Back links not on the frequency of search. By 1995 Open Text Corp. claimed that it had indexed every word on the roughly 5 million documents that constituted the Web. In I995 they merged with Yahoo and after two years they abandoned the Open Text Search engine and moved their business to Enterprise Content Managent.

Result : In 1998 “BackRub” was formed, puzzled its the first name for Google, then Google was formed. The rest is history.

5. Microsoft Saves Apple

when I first read this, My reaction was “what??”

Everyone knows Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, but very less know he was fired from his own company in 1985. Since then Apple’s MAC sales had lot of ups and down, Around 1996, Apple was almost to be collapsed, then Steve jobs rejoined the Apple as advisor and negotiated a deal with Microsoft worth $150 Dollars

“Microsoft agreed to release MS OFFICE (Netopia) for MAC for next 5years as they do in WINDOWS and then All MAC OS should have Internet Explorer as a default browser”. The whole MacWorld bowed Steve Jobs for this move.

Result : Steve Jobs became Interim CEO of Apple and then CEO, then he merged his NEXT OS with MAC and released Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The IPOD, the ITunes etc(the list goes on) Apple once again raised from the death bed.

The Actual winner is customers, Apple was still alive and they are still competitor to Microsoft. what would have happened if Apple was killed by Microsoft, we would have a WinPhone nstead of IPHONE and WinTunes instead of ITUNES lolz.

Classic One

This one is special. In 1980, when IBM was interested in making PC, it’s first contact for making DOS Operating System was not Microsoft, Indeed Bill Gates suggested to approach Gary Kildall of Digital Research, author of the CP/M operating system.

Kidall was busy with some other project and fly away for attending some other project delivery. so he let his wife to negotiate deal with IBM but the deal was a failure.

Then IBM approached Bill Gates to create a new OS, then came MS DOS, which is indeed based on Tim Paterson's Quick and Dirty operating system (QDOS), which was itself based on CP/M.

Before DOS, Microsoft's biggest products were versions of the BASIC programming tool. After MS DOS, rest is history

is born ;)