Cynical Capitalist

Costly tech blunders

In April of 1987, IBM launched next-generation operating system called OS/2. Co-developed by IBM and Microsoft, it was designed to replace DOS and was able to multi-task, and rely on a Graphical User Interface blazing a new trail. It was also more stable than the DOS-based Windows 95, its main competitor, but ended up losing the OS battle in dramatic fashion as, incredibly, IBM refused to preload OS/2 onto its own desktops or servers, which were offered with Windows instead, mostly due to OS/2's ridiculously expensive per license price.

Wang Laboratories was a computer company founded in 1951 by Dr. Wang. At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over 33,000 people.Wang Labs was doomed by its owner's character, as he stuck to his conviction and focused on producing single-task machine (word processing computers) when the market headed towards flexible and more complete computers.

The Newton platform was a personal digital assistant developed by Apple. Development of the Newton platform started in 1987 and officially ended on February 27, 1998. It is widely regarded as Apple's biggest flop, and the product was even mocked in an episode of The Simpsons for the poor performance of its handwriting recognition software. The Newton has left one particular lasting impression: the term personal digital assistant (PDA) was first coined to refer to the Newton. Apple invested approximately US$100M to develop Newton.

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