Caldera & SCO

Once a prosperous, medium-sized and laid-back Northern California software company that produced successful and reliable vertical market UNIX
operating systems for x86-based servers throughout the 1980s through the early 2000's, the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) began its demise shortly after
being acquired by Caldera, Inc., a Linux vendor based out of Provo, Utah.

Part of the Nay Noorda-backed family of companies known as the Canopy Group, the company re-named itself  "The SCO Group" and soon began to
find itself in a bit of an identity crisis. SCO Group's first incoming CEO and former CEO of Caldera Ransom Love wanted to merge Caldera and SCO's
Linux and UNIX product lines, and create a best of breed OS. Indeed, that would have been a marriage worth consummating.

SCO had partnered with Intel, IBM and Sequent briefly during the mid-1990s on "Project Monterrey", an attempt to unify, merge and port the best
aspects of the company's UNIXWare OS and IBM's AIX to the new Intel Itanium as well as IBM's POWER processor.

With the rise in popularity of Linux and 64-bit x86 chips, interest in Itanium waned and the effort to market the completed IA-64 variant was scuttled.

SCO's failure to market the IA-64 version of Monterey resulted in Ransom Love being pushed aside and succeeded by Darl Mcbride. With McBride at
the helm of SCO, the company became entirely focused on litigation as opposed to product development.

SCO not only sued IBM for alleged contributions of Monterey code to the Open Source Linux kernel, but also large customers, end-users and vendors of
various Linux OSes, including Red Hat and Novell.

This turned the company into a pariah not only among the legion of Open Source and Linux developers but SCO's own customers and the entire
technology industry. The litigation debacle went on for years, chronicled in gory detail on sites such as Groklaw.

SCO's sales of UNIX products went down the toilet, and was forced to lay off virtually all of its employees to focus entirely on its lawsuits.

In 2007, SCO filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In 2009, Darl Mcbride was fired. Early in 2011, UnXis Inc purchased SCO's remaining UNIX
software assets. 
The Many Marriages of Palm
Palm has such a storied history with its relationships with companies that it acquired and companies that acquired it that it would be not be unreasonable
to deem it as the Zha Zha Gabor of the technology industry.

A few years after its founding, Palm Computing was purchased by US Robotics, a company known mostly for producing data communications products.
Under that marriage, starting in 1996, the legendary PalmPilot PDA was sold and manufactured. But that marriage was short-lived, as networking
company 3COM bought US Robotics in 1997. Unhappy with the way the company was going, the company's two founders, Donna Dubinsky and Jeff
Hawkins, went their own way and formed Handspring, a company that produced PalmPilot clones.

In 2000, Palm was eventually spun off by 3COM into an independent publicly traded company. While this improved the company's finances for a time,
by June of 2001 the company had lost over 90 percent of its publicly traded value.

In 2001, Palm also purchased Be Inc., a company that produced high-performance computer workstations that ran on BeOS, which was one of the
original contenders to replace Apple's aging Mac OS System 7. When Apple chose Steve Jobs' NeXT company and their OpenStep OS instead, Be was
bought at a fire-sale price of $11 million. While industry followers expected the company to use the OS as the basis for its future products, Palm never
did anything with BeOS.

In order to attempt to generate more revenue, In 2003 Palm split itself into two companies, PalmSource (for licensing the Palm OS) and PalmOne for
producing the PDA hardware. In 2003, PalmOne also purchased Handspring to bring Dubinsky and Hawkins back into the fold.

You still following this?

Palmsource, the company that was meant to become the software licensor, ended up being purchased by Japanese company ACCESS in 2005, which had
the intention of creating a next-generation Linux OS, ALP (ACCESS Linux Platform) for mobile devices that would have Palm emulation capability.
This went effectively nowhere.

What ACCESS did do was sell the trademarks for the name 'Palm' back to PalmOne for $30 million in 2005.

Palm continued to flounder for several years until 2009, when the webOS mobile operating system and the Palm Pre smartphone was introduced. While
displaying innovative multitasking features and a unique user interface, the Pre was a market failure.

In 2010, Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm for approximately $1.2 billion. The Palm brand was discontinued in favor of HP's branding, and the company
began development of new smartphone as well as tablet products that used webOS.

On July 4th, 2011, HP's TouchPad tablet went on sale to an unreceptive public and to extremely unfavorable reviews, many citing the product's
sluggishness and numerous software bugs. After 45 days on the market and abysmal sales. Hewlett-Packard made the decision to discontinue the
manufacturing of all webOS-based products.

In December of 2011, under the leadership of HP's new CEO, Meg Whitman, the company accounted that WebOS would be released in the near future
under an open source license.

The future of any webOS-based products produced by HP or any potential licensee is currently uncertain.
Oracle & Sun
 

Take one of the most established players in the enterprise software industry and merge it with one of the most established players in enterprise hardware,
you get one hell of of combination, right?

Well, maybe not.

Sun Microsystems, once the darling of Silicon Valley, started to experience problems in the mid-2000's when the emergence of commodity Linux x86-
based servers, the rise in popularity of Open Source software and pressure from other high-end enterprise systems vendors such as IBM and HP began to
erode much of the company's core server business.

To counteract this downward trend, the company began to embrace a more Open Source philosophy with projects such as Opensolaris, OpenOffice and
Glassfish, and began to acquire Open Source software firms such as MySQL AB, VirtualBox and sponsor external Open Source projects such as Xen,
which became the foundation for their xVM virtualization product line.

Unfortunately, many of these efforts were too late to save the company, and it became obvious in 2009 that the only route for the company's survival was
that of being acquired by a much larger competitor. IBM, Fujitsu and HP were thought to be the prime candidates, but in a last minute and completely
unexpected move, Oracle came in with the winning bid for about $7.2 billion including the company's debt.

What followed was to be expected. Thousands of employees were layed off, and many of the Open Source efforts that Sun began were quickly
extinguished, including OpenSolaris. The OpenOffice project effectively disbanded and regrouped under the Document Foundation as LibreOffice, and
the founding MySQL team forked into a number of different projects.

Under Oracle's leadership, Sun's core hardware business has continued to decline dramatically. To recoup the losses, Oracle has filed patent lawsuits
against Google for allegedly using their Java intellectual property in their Android operating system, which uses virtual machine software called Dalvik
that emulates the programming syntax of, but is not compatible with Java.

Oracle has asked the courts for billions of dollars in damages in the hopes of turning their Sun lemon into lemonade. If Oracle succeeds in collecting
substantial damages from Google, it will have made its investment in Sun a smart one. If the damages are deemed to be minimal, then it will probably go
down in history as one of the biggest strategic blunders by a technology company of all time.

Either way you look at it, between the mass layoffs of talent, extinguishing of Sun's open source corporate culture and weaponizing Java against Google,
Sun has become anything but an honest woman under Oracle's stewardship.
AOL & Time Warner & TechCrunch/Huffington Post
 

Facing challenges from the growing Internet/Web and broadband industry in the late 1990s that was encroaching on its bread and butter dialup services
and "walled garden" of content, on-line services provider America Online pursued a strategy of re-invention as a content and broadband giant by
purchasing Time Warner in the year 2000 for a whopping $164 billion.

The merger, executed by AOL CEO Steve Case and Time Warner CEO Gerald M Levin, turned out to be a total fiasco, with the new company unable to
capitalize on Time Warner's strengths. Total subscribers of AOL went from an estimated 30 million at the height of its popularity to less than just over 5
million in 2007, with no significant quarterly growth since 2002.

The company's market valuation has plunged significantly from a high of $240 billion to $1.73 billion as of February of 2012.

In 2009, shortly after appointing a new CEO, Tim Armstrong, AOL announced it would spin off Time Warner into a separate public company, ending a
fruitless eight year relationship.

AOL has since gone on a New Media purchasing spree, including Patch, Techcrunch and The Huffington Post, which joins their other New Media
properties such as Engdaget which it acquired as a result of its Weblogs, Inc. purchase in 2005.

The result of these New Media mergers has been something of a disaster in and of itself. After re-organizing all of its its new media properties under one
roof and appointing Arianna Huffington as its leader, TechCrunch became the subject of a highly publicized internal power struggle when its founder,
Michael Arrington, came into conflict with Huffington over journalistic ethics when he unveiled a plan, with AOL's backing, to start a venture capitalist
fund to invest in the very same sort of companies which he writing for Techcrunch chronicled.

After weeks of public blog posts criticizing his employer and the media circus surrounding him, Arrington was terminated. This resulted in the departure
of several members of TechCrunch's staff, including Paul Carr, one of its most popular writers, as well as the company's CEO, Heather Harde.
Hewlett Packard & Compaq & Digital Equipment Corporation
 

In the late 1980's, HP determined that their PA-RISC systems architecture for enterprise-class servers was going to hit a performance scaling threshold
and began to investigate a new systems architecture, VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word). 

In 1994, under the direction of CEO Lewis E. Platt, believing that it was no longer cost-effective for HP to have its own microprocessor foundry, the
company ceased production and development of PA-RISC, shut down its own foundries and instead partnered with Intel to produce this new VLIW 64-
bit enterprise chip, which came to be known as the IA-64.

Released by Intel and HP as the "Itanium" in 2001 after seven years of development and billions of dollars of R&D invested, the chip earned the early
nickname of "Itanic" due to its low performance compared to less expensive, commodity x86 chips in most regular business applications. IA-64 also
proved to be horribly slow when executing x86 instructions, which it had to do using software emulation.

Eventually, both AMD and Intel would produce 64-bit x86 systems, which when clustered in HPC configurations would easily outperform equivalent
IA-64 systems for significantly less money.

IBM and Sun would continue to develop their POWER and SPARC architectures for their high-end servers, which eroded most of HP's high-end market
share.

While other vendors such as Dell and IBM briefly introduced and sold Itanium-based systems, they shortly discontinued them. An executive at Dell
publicly referred to the product as an "Albatross".

While the Itanium partnership with Intel surely started HP down the road to hell, it was accelerated in 2001 when HP, under the guidance of CEO Carly
Fiorina decided to merge with Compaq in a $25 billion dollar deal.

Many large shareholders opposed the merger, including Walter Hewlett, the company's outspoken director and son of the company's co-founder, who
engaged in a proxy battle in an attempt to prevent it. The prime objection was that Compaq had many overlapping product lines and would get the
company involved in the low-margin PC business that its main competitor, IBM, was already in the process of exiting.

Compaq had only just acquired Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) four years before, along with its powerful 64-bit Alpha RISC chip and Windows
NT/Digital UNIX servers that had seen some moderate success in High-Performance Computing environments.

Seen by both executives at HP and Compaq as a redundant overlapping product under the new merged company and with Intel's IA-64 efforts underway,
the Alpha -- arguably a much more mature, better supported and more desirable platform was phased out.

Under Carly Fiorina's reign, the merged "New" HP lost half of its market value and the company incurred heavy job losses. Fiorina stepped down in
2005.

Since the Compaq merger, HP has endured numerous problems with failed initiatives, dubious acquisitions (3COM, EDS, Palm, Autonomy) and has
been plagued with ineffective management, including two major ethics scandals that have forced Chairwoman Patricia Dunn and two CEOs in
succession, Mark Hurd and Leo Apotheker to resign.

Third-party OS development for Itanium other than HP's HP/UX UNIX derivative is now practically non-existent, as Microsoft no longer produces an
IA-64 version of Windows Server. Itanium is considered to be a deprecated and legacy architecture by the Linux Kernel Project and is no longer actively
supported by mainstream Linux distributions such as Red Hat, SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu.

HP is now the only company to sell Itanium-based servers under their Integrity brand, and Oracle recently announced that it would no longer be
developing software for the chip.  
Nortel & Bay
 

As part of the Bell Canada group of companies, starting with its formation in the 1890's, Northern Telecom Limited grew into a huge multinational
telecommunications equipment manufacturer, and until the rise of Research in Motion, was the poster child for technological innovation in Canada.

During an expansion period during the internet boom of the late 1990s, the company acquired Bay Networks for $9.1 billion in 1998, which was formed
only four years previous by the merger of two networking companies, Synoptics and Wellfleet. Synoptics was one of the earliest innovators of baseband
twisted pair Ethernet products which had heavy penetration into the enterprise networking market, and Wellfleet manufactured enterprise routers and was
a heavy competitor to Cisco. 

As a result of the merger, the company renamed itself Nortel Networks. In the hopes that the company would make tremendous profits from the the sale
of fiber optic network communications equipment, huge speculation of the stock on Wall Street cranked up the price of the company's shares to
ridiculous levels, this despite that the company was unable to be profitable, quarter after quarter.

After numerous efforts to restructure the company and financial mismanagement scandals over a period of about ten years, the company filed for Chapter
11 in January of 2009, and its various businesses were eventually liquidated.
Microsoft & Danger Mobile
 

Danger Inc, formed in the year 2000 by executives from Apple, WebTV and Philips was a company that specialized in software and services for mobile
computing devices. The company was best known for a mobile smartphone/messaging device called the T-Mobile Sidekick, which was also branded as
the Danger Hiptop.

In 2008, Microsoft purchased the company for an undisclosed amount, but the price was rumored to be around $500 million. Post acquisition, the
employees were all absorbed into Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business (MCB) where they went to work on a future mobile phone platform.

While this future device development was underway, in October 2009, Danger incurred a catastrophic data loss resulting in complete business continuity
failure at one of its data centers which was hosting personal customer data used T-Mobile Sidekick product that eventually took two months to recover
from.

The highly publicized fiasco undermined consumer confidence in the product, and it resulted in T-Mobile canceling the product in the summer of 2010.

And that future mobile phone platform that the Danger developers were working on at Microsoft?

After two years of effort approximately $1B worth of development, it became the Microsoft Kin, and two versions were launched exclusively on Verizon
in April of 2010. The devices were utterly savaged by the press for their lack of key features such as Instant Messaging, Calendaring, GPS navigation and
memory expansion.

After 48 days on the market, the product was pulled.

Microsoft has since launched a much better mobile device platform, Windows Phone 7. But the negative experience with the Kin still taints its reputation
not only with consumers but also with critical wireless carriers such as Verizon, who as of yet has refused to commit to selling more than one model of
Windows Phone or an LTE version which puts it on par with its arsenal of Android devices.
Borland & Ashton Tate
 

Before Visual Studio, there was Borland, which was the world's leading vendor of computer programming languages for personal computers. Its flagship
programming environment in 1990 and 1991, Borland Turbo C++, is shown above. Borland also produced Turbo Pascal as well as Turbo Assembler, as
well as a relational database product, Paradox, which competed with Ashton-Tate's dBase.

While the name is virtually unknown today, Ashton-Tate was a prosperous software company in its day. Its flagship product, dBase, was the first widely-
used database management system (DBMS) for PCs. Like Lotus 1-2-3, it was a character-mode app. dBase was a hierarchical database, in that it
organizes data in a tree-like structure. Prior to the introduction of PC databases such as Borland's Paradox, Clipper, FoxPro and Microsoft Access which
introduced relational database capability into their products, dBase was considered to be one of the most important and popular productivity apps.

Numerous clones of dBase, known collectively as "xBase" were all over the market. 

In 1991, Ashton-Tate merged with Borland, just as the industry was starting to move to Microsoft Access, Visual FoxPro and SQL-based systems using
client-server technology.

In the mid 1990s, Borland quickly found itself in competition with Microsoft's Visual C++. Access and Visual Basic products which started to become
popular, and as a result of Microsoft's dominance in the software development toolset space, the company's products lost considerable market share.
Borland eventually renamed itself to Inprise, sold off a number of its software product assets, renamed itself as Borland again, to eventually be acquired
as a subsidiary of Micro Focus in 2009.
Novell & USL and WordPerfect
 

In 1991, if you were running a personal computer network in your business or enterprise, there was a good chance it was running on Novell's NetWare,
which was the predominant server-based network operating system at the time. Released in both 16-bit and 32-bit versions for the 286 and 386 Intel
processors, 1990's era NetWare ran on a proprietary protocol called IPX, which ran on on Local Area Networks using Ethernet, Arcnet or IBM Token-
Ring topologies. NetWare was known for its excellent network performance, server reliability, fault tolerance and OS stability, as well as its relatively
easy administration, which helped it maintain its market position for many years.

Novell had several competitors in the space, such as IBM OS/2 LAN Manager and Banyan-Vines, but none of them were ever as popular as the NetWare
stack. However, with the release of Microsoft's Windows for Workgroups 3.1 in 1992 and Windows NT operating system in the summer of 1993,
companies quickly began to shift to a fully integrated, single-vendor Client and Server OS solution for their networks.

To maintain relevancy in the network operating system space, in 1991 Novell entered a partnership with AT&T's Bell Unix Systems Laboratories
(AT&T) to produce a "SuperNOS",  that would combine the network protocols of Netware with the power of the UNIX operating system. The
partnership, called Univel, resulted in USL being purchased by Novell in 1993 and the release of the UnixWare operating system.

UnixWare at Novell was a complete dud. In 1995, Novell sold the operating system to SCO. However, the exact terms of the transaction were not fully
determined until 2011, when it was ruled by the US Court of Appeals for the tenth circuit that despite SCO's ownership of the UnixWare operating
system itself, the UNIX copyrights still belonged to Novell. 

In addition to failed UnixWare partnership, in June of 1994, Novell looked to enter the office productivity software space by purchasing WordPerfect
corporation. That marriage lasted a whole two years, and the WordPerfect company's assets were sold off to Corel in January of 1996.

The legacy Novell NetWare operating system continued to be developed until 2003, where it was superseded by Open Enterprise Server (OES) a
network operating system which runs on top of Linux.

In November of 2010, Novell was acquired by Attachmate, for $1 Billion.

News Corp / Myspace
 

Founded in 2003, Myspace was once the most popular social networking web site in the world, and in June of 2006, the company surpassed even Google
as the most visited website in the United States. In August of 2006, the site had reached over 100 million account activations.

In 2005, the company was purchased my Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580M. When the company was at its peak in 2007, Myspace had a
market capitalization of about $12B.

In 2008, the company's fortunes began to go into a steep decline. Rather than improving their social networking experience the company chose to go with
a "portal-style" strategy for building its audience around music and entertainment instead. Additional modifications to the site in the hopes of increasing
the company's advertisement revenue also made it unwieldy and slow to use.

To make matters worse, the company's main rival, Facebook, was eclipsing it in traffic with its clean and efficient site design, increased number of users
and was building a platform where 3rd-party developers could plug into an API to build new applications for it. By contrast, Myspace was doing all of its
development in-house.

In June 29, 2011, Myspace was sold to Specific Media and pop star Justin Timberlake for approximately $35 million, a far cry from the $12B valuation it
had only four years previous.