1. AltaVista – a better search engine than Google even when there was tech cred in saying Google was better.
Cause: Digital constrained it, CMGI killed it with portal mania and lack of focus.
Culprit: Digital/CMGI
2. Octopus – Better than any personal portal or RSS aggregator and started when MyYahoo was terrible and RSS aggregators were twinkles in techies eyes.
Cause: Investors panicked over it as a consumer application and jumped on the idiotic enterprise bandwagon.
Culprit: VCs
3. Wired – It had one of the first search engines and content businesses on the web.
Cause: Selling off the online bit at a time when a magazine about the web seemed more valuable than anything on it.
Culprit: Wired
4. Paypal – should have brought down half of the anachronistic, check writing, retail banking system.
Cause: Swallowed up in an organization (Ebay) that can’t take risks because it has to protect its borders from whenever they breach.
Culprit: Ebay
5. Backflip – shared bookmarks years before the current batch.
Cause: simply too early, no buzzword like tags to pretend that keyword categories are different and probably too much money, small ideas become big if you don;t drown them in cash and over-inflated expectations.
Culprit: Dotcom money.
6. Egroups – No matter how much people go on about blogs, forums keep coming back.
Cause: Egroups grew because anyone could create the equivalent of a Usenet group. It failed to take over the world when Yahoo bought it and didn't even bother to allow people to search it.
Culprit: Yahoo
7. Blox – An online spreadsheet tool where every cell connects to web services. This is the way spreadsheets will eventually work, and something that Microsoft haven't done much about.
Cause: It was almost too good a product, it had the kind of interface that isn't being done yet by the Ajax cult. I'm sure the details of what went wrong were complicated, but I suspect it was just too innovative for the type of people who use Office to get.
Culprit: Micorosoft Office Users