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Ask HN: Which software company did you think could never fail but did?

4 points by question11 ↗ HN
There have been a bunch I have witnessed. Novell, Wordperfect, Borland, Lotus, Sun Microsystems, & DEC (last too were mixed HW/SW).

Which are today's bunch that seem unstoppable that may disappear? Oracle? IBM? Facebook?

7 comments

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ggm
You're asking TWO questions not one. I THOUGHT sun and Dec wouldn't disappear into other companies. I'm still really cross about Dec. I learned on a dec10 and operated 11 and 11/780 systems as well as decstations.

I THINK that a lot of sw dev tooling companies will get folded in. Atlassian for instance.

Intel isn't as strong as it needs to be but US govt support will probably keep it there.

uberman
For me, the surprises were the deaths of Sun, DEC, and Silicon Graphics. Runners up might be Gateway, MySpace, and AOL
phendrenad2
Palm, Inc. Man those little devices were cool for their time. Not sure what happened. How did the shareholders agree to sell to HP? Did they really think HP stock was more valuable? Anyway, hindsight is 20/20.
abraae
IBM's already had an enormous slide from undisputed #1 so I don't think they seem unstoppable by any means.
andrei_says_
Google committed to “not be evil” and are continuously failing at it, despite employing some of the most brilliant people on Earth.

They are also failing more and more in providing useful search results - the top matches are now ads.

I hope “success” is not only measured by profit.

mikewarot
I thought Borland was unstoppable, until they lost focus, and started chasing Microsoft instead of leading the field. Turbo Pascal was magic - compile times so short the program was running just after you hit F9. Compare that to an hour waiting for your program to compile in the queue on the VAX 11/780 in college.