Five Companies That Will Be Dead by the Year 2000
[Hey, don't shoot the messenger. I like SGI and have friends that work there. I'm just posting what's out there. djane]
Jesse Berst, Editorial Director
ZDNet AnchorDesk, WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 1998
In a movie called D.O.A., a man strolls
into a police station to report his own murder. Poisoned
by a toxin with no antidote, by the time he learns he is
ill -- he is actually as good as dead.
A number of technology companies are about to find
themselves in a similar situation. They are as good as
dead, they just don't realize it yet. Only a miracle could
save them. A merger, for instance. An acquisition. Or
an innovative overhaul.
Not surprisingly, many of the doomed companies are
trapped near the bottom of volatile or mortally wounded
market segments. Segments that have been poisoned
by price cutting. The Internet. Or other advancing
technologies. Some of the tainted include:
Second-tier computer makers. Without comparable
low-cost customized offerings, companies such as
AST, NEC and others have fallen into a treacherous
commodity trap. Now they are being squeezed to
death. By major vendors on one side, who can provide
technical service to lucrative Fortune 500 accounts.
And by cheaper "no-name" PC makers on the other.
Click for full story.
Proprietary workstation makers. Such as Intergraph
and Silicon Graphics. SGI, maker of high-performance
computing systems and software that brought the
Jurassic Park dinosaurs to life, has had a tougher time
animating its lackluster bottom line. Hit hard by
declines in the Unix workstation and supercomputer
business, its core business eaten away by lower-cost
Windows NT workstations, SGI now plans to turn its
attention away from its own proprietary OS -- to focus
on NT. But the damage is already done.
Desktop database makers. Borland's Paradox is
dead. Nobody writes in dBASE anymore. Microsoft's
Access has this market all tied up.
And there are other troubled tech segments as well.
Second-tier cross-platform tools makers, for example.
They've watched their niche evaporate with the growing
dominance of Microsoft Windows, coupled with the
emergence of Web-based cross-platform solutions
provided by HTML and Java.
Now it's your turn. Which companies do you expect to
be D.O.A. at the turn of the century? Use the TalkBack
button below to tell me. I'll post some of the best
responses beneath this story. You can also join the
discussion underway in my Berst Alerts forum.
By the time the hero of D.O.A. discovered he was in
trouble, nothing short of a miracle could save him.
Same goes for the companies listed above. Unless
they discover an antidote to their malaise -- and fast --
they will be dead before they know it.
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