25 computer products that refuse to die

“Packard Bell
What it was: A PC manufacturer (named after a venerable but defunct
radio company) that dominated the retail home PC market in the
early 1990s. What happened: Numerous products in this article fell
on hard times in part because of crummy business decisions by their
owners, but no other one did itself in so quickly and so
self-destructively as Packard Bell. Its computers were cheap in
part because they were terrible and were backed by subpar customer
support…

“Zip Disks
What they were: Iomega Corp.’s extremely useful, cleverly marketed
high-capacity removable disks, introduced back in 1994, when 100MB
qualified as high capacity. They were never as pervasive as
floppies, but they must be the most popular, most-loved proprietary
disk format of all time.

“What happened: The same things that happened to floppy disks,
only more slowly — and complicated by the malfunction ominously
known as the click of death. When cheap CD burners made it easy to
store 650MB on a low-cost disc that worked in nearly any computer,
Zip started to look less capacious and cost-efficient. And then USB
drives — which offered more storage than Zip and required no drive
at all — came out. Along the way, Iomega launched new disk formats
such as Jaz, PocketZip and Rev, but they failed to recapture the
Zip magic.”

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