Yahoo is not alone: six failed tech companies and how they fell

As the web business offers its core web company to Verizon, we have a look back at AOL, Myspace and other faded companies

Yahoo on Monday signed up with the elephants graveyard of fallen web giants. While the business is formally still alive, now merged with fellow faller AOL and owned by Verizon, it survives on as a shadow of its previous self with an unsure future. The web has actually shown a relentless testing room for tech business. As soon as white-hot business that have actually failed to endure and adjust, here are some of the other.

AOL

How the magnificent have actually fallen: the business that taught millions about dial-up web and presented them to email was the most popular name in tech when it combined with the media powerhouse Time Warner in January 2000. That offer showed among the worst in history. AOL, as soon as worth $226bn, was obtained by Verizon in 2014 , for $4.4 bn.

AltaVista

The ruling web search business prior to Google, AltaVista ping-ponged around the tech sector over 5 years and had as numerous owners. It tried a share sale in 2002, after the dotcom bubble had burst, however was required to cancel due to absence of interest. Its last purchaser? Yahoo. Yahoo closed Altavista in 2013 .

Netscape

Once upon a time, there were 2 web browsers secured an everlasting fight for market share: Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Both are gone now, Microsoft having actually revealed a brand-new web browser Edge that will supersede Explorer. For its part, Netscape was the scrappier, savvier, open-source web browser, the creation of Marc Andreessen, now a billionaire financier, who had actually likewise co-authored the first wide-use web internet browser, Mosaic. AOL purchased Netscape in 1998 and ultimately closed down the business however its spirit makes it through in Mozilla, which establishes the present leader in open-source internet browser software application, Firefox.

Myspace

The billionaire Viacom chairman, Sumner Redstone, fired the business CEO, Tom Freston, for cannot obtain Facebooks significant rival ahead of Redstones bane, Rupert Murdoch. He must have offered Freston a bonus offer. News Corp paid $580m for the less adroit social media, then approaching 100m users, in 2005. In 2011, News Corp offered Myspace for $35m and it is now mostly a music website .

Napster

In a period when CD sales ruled the music world, Napster provided a sneak peek of the future: digital music totally free. The record market chose to take legal action against almost everybody associated with the online music sharing website and ultimately won with a court injunction in the A&M Records v Napster case in 2001. The damage was currently done. The music markets golden days of high-profit music sales have actually paved the way to a leaner, meaner digital future.

Pets.com

Plenty of business on this list are victims of cannot adjust rapidly enough to innovation or the law, however Pets.com might be the only one that was practically simply a development of the stock exchange. Provided the outsize evaluations of tech start-ups at the minute, Pets.coms $300m infusion of money prior to its devastating IPO appears nearly charming by contrast (Snapchat is apparently worth $20bn), however at the time it was unmatched. The business went public in February 2000 at $11 per share ; by the time it revealed its liquidation in November of the exact same year, the cost had actually been up to 19 cents .

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/failed-tech-companies-yahoo-verizon