But I went with Windows in style.

A few days ago, I purchased a brand new Sony VGN-FZ140E notebook computer from the local Circuit City. (Here’s the laptop homepage on Sony’s website.) Circuit City had a deal which was pretty hard to pass up. For the incurably geeky, here are the specs on my new computool:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 processor running at 1.8 GHz
• 15.4-inch widescreen WXGA LCD with reflective coating
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
• 200 GB hard drive (only runs at 4500 RPM, unfortunately)
• 2 GB of memory
• Built-in wireless connectivity to 802.11a/b/g, and even n
• Built-in webcam and microphone
• DVD-/+RW drive, which I think has that cool LightScribe labeling thing
• Slots ‘n jacks ‘n ports up the wazoo
• Only 5.75 pounds, including battery
• Windows Vista Home Premium

So why no MacBook Pro? It’s simple: the display for the regular ol’ MacBook is too frickin’ small, and the base model for the MacBook Pro is $2,000 before sales tax and shipping. What did I pay for my Sony? A nice, light $1,200 including sales tax.

And I have to say that this Sony almost matches that Apple cool factor. It’s extremely thin and light, and has this graphite coating that just begs to be caressed. The display is absolutely gorgeous, the brightest and clearest I’ve ever seen. So far, the machine’s been as quiet as a church mouse, it doesn’t heat up unnecessarily during normal use, and the Vista Aero graphics are pretty snappy. I’m not quite used to the keyboard layout yet, but the action is phenomenal — the keys are almost flat, like the MacBook’s, and they don’t clatter loud enough to wake the neighbors.

All in all, this should be powerful enough to do what I intend to do on this laptop. Which is plunk my ass down in a series of Starbucks and write Geosynchron, the third book in the Jump 225 Trilogy. There will be the occasional bit of web contract work on here, but again, I mostly reserve that for my desktop.

I’d gotten used to all kinds of inconveniences with my 2003 vintage Toshiba notebook. The lid doesn’t open and close properly, hibernation doesn’t work, there’s no built-in WiFi, and the thing vents out the bottom, so if you stick it on a cushioned surface it overheats and shuts down. Almost any new laptop I buy would solve those problems, but the Sony VAIO solved problems I didn’t realize I had. Like the fact that all of the ports are exactly where I want them to be, and the power jack includes an L-shaped connector that makes the cord take up less space.

So what are the immediate downsides I see to this machine?

• The trackpad is a bit smaller than usual, and it’s almost completely flush with the rest of the casing. Seriously, it’s only recessed about a millimeter. This means that half the time I have to slide my finger around for a second or two to actually find the trackpad. It doesn’t help that the trackpad is black with black buttons, so it’s almost completely camouflaged. In low-light situations, you can barely even tell it’s there.
• The sound is a lot tinnier than I expected. I probably should have gone for the model with the fancy-schmancy Harman-Kardon speakers, but I suppose it’s not really that big of a deal. I listen to most of my music on the desktop anyway, and if I’m going to watch DVDs I’ll be using headphones.
• No Bluetooth. Which isn’t a tragedy for me, considering that I don’t really have any Bluetooth gadgets. But I was really hoping to start Bluetoothing my office so I can get rid of some of those wires. Guess I can always go buy an expansion card.
• The integrated video isn’t powerful enough to let me run advanced games, which probably won’t be too much of an issue considering I do the little gaming I do on the desktop PC.

Probably the most noticeable thing about the Sony OOBE (out-of-box-experience) was the massive amount of bloatware that came pre-installed. AOL was infecting everything, and there were poorly designed ads for all kinds of crappy products on the desktop and hidden in the Start menu. Not to mention pre-installed trial versions of everything from Office 2007 to QuickBooks to (Lord help me) Symantec Internet Security. Not only that, but get this — Sony actually included complete versions of Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 on the laptop, which you need to pay about 10 bucks to unlock. Because, you know, when I’m in the mood to watch Spidey, I prefer to watch him in gawdawful DRM’d Windows Media format.

All this bloatware tells me that Sony isn’t making much money off these laptops anymore. No wonder IBM wanted out of the business. There’s relentless downward pressure on prices — hell, they’re making $100 laptops now. So it seems the only way the company can make a buck off a Sony VAIO is by selling ad space and cross-promoting other Sony products. (The Spider-Man film franchise is Sony’s, in case you hadn’t figured that out.)

The other strategy at work here is that Sony is trying to differentiate their laptops by including all kinds of proprietary software. Most laptops come with their own branded networking apps and backup utilities. My Sony VAIO also came with a Sony media player, Sony DVD creation utilities, Sony photo editing package, Sony audio recording software, Sony camera utilities, Sony desktop wallpaper, Sony power management, Sony driver update utility, Sony wireless networking, and Sony video conversion. And in case you missed the hint, there’s a Sony Memory Stick slot right in front of your face.

So let me just say this to the good product managers at Sony: you’re not Apple. You’re not even Microsoft. Sony, you make clunky programs with lousy user interfaces, and nobody in their right mind is going to buy your laptops just to get a copy of your lame-ass SonicStage media player. Your core competency is cutting-edge electronic equipment with fantastic design. But if you’re going to pretend to be a software company too, you need to hire people that know enough not to put dialog boxes in your update utility that say “Please install manually some patches.”

It’s almost impossible to come up with a single answer, or even a single set of answers. What do Google, Microsoft, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Mozilla, Adobe, Dell, and Apple have in common? I came up with a number of factors off the top of my head — empowering users, keeping a steady pace of innovation, good PR, making easy-to-use products — but none of them seemed to be the end-all, be-all of high-tech success.

So I decided to look at the question from the opposite angle. What makes a technology company fail? Here are a handful of companies from the past twenty years that strike me as prime examples of organizations who lost a commanding lead and/or market dominance in a particular field due to their own idiocy or incompetence.

1. Atari. The mass market videogame console was more or less invented by Atari in the late ’70s. Their only real competitor for years was Mattel’s Intellivision, which may have had vast technical superiority but had inept marketing. (George Plimpton? You’ve got to be kidding me.) But instead of innovating, Atari took the road of suing anyone and everyone who touched its much-beloved system. (Activision, Coleco, Starpath, Odyssey, Nintendo, Phillips, and Epyx all suffered Atari’s litigious wrath.) There was also a precipitous drop-off in videogame quality, as anyone who remembers notoriously bad media tie-ins like E.T. The original company was sold off many times and finally diluted to nothingness in the ’90s. The name still had such cachet, however, that Infogrames later licensed it for themselves.

2. Netscape. Netscape partisans and Microsoft haters have long promoted the urban legend that Microsoft drove this company into obscurity. And while Bill Gates & Co.’s anti-competitive practices certainly helped, ultimately the blame lies with the company itself. Netscape was running neck-and-neck with Microsoft in the browser wars for several years until its hideous Navigator 4 browser (which earned the company the Nutscrape label, among many other less complimentary names). Undeterred by their slipping fortunes, the company followed Navigator 4 with… nothing. For years. They pursued a ruinous portal strategy instead and sold out to AOL, who let the company completely die on the vine. Now Netscape is stuck with a dying portal website and an also-ran browser that piggybacks on both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

3. Palm. The early PalmPilots finally found the magic formula that had eluded so many other companies for so long. They were easy to use, integrated tolerably well with your PC, and were extremely reliable machines. No wonder the company built up such a network of software developers. And then a long series of ownership switches threw the platform’s future in the toilet. The result? Microsoft’s Pocket PC platform (now Windows Mobile) overtook the Palm on basic, must-have features (like oh, say, enabling a contact to have both a home and business address, which the Palm still can’t do). I read recently that the Palm OS actually still funnels everything through emulation software for its ancient Dragonball processor, which is a good indicator of how far behind the innovation curve these folks have gotten.

4. America Online. In order to get on the Internet in the mid-’90s, the average household could go one of two routes. They could download a program called Trumpet Winsock and configure connection strings until they tore out their hair, then FTP down a series of Internet apps of varying quality. Or they could install America Online off a single floppy disk and be up and running in minutes. AOL was on top of the world at the turn of the millennium with their buyouts of Time Warner and Netscape. What happened? They turned out to be, well, a bunch of cowards. AOL so feared getting shut out of the Windows 95 desktop and losing new customers to Microsoft’s new MSN service that they bowed to Redmond’s wishes. They continued licensing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and simply let the Netscape browser die a slow death. And then, in one of the most astoundingly stupid business moves ever, they utterly failed to come up with a broadband strategy until — well, they still don’t have one. I thought one of the main reasons they bought Time/Warner in the first place was to get a hold of its cable networks. Wha’ happened?

5. Apple. Steve Jobs brought the modern window-based GUI to the masses via Apple’s revolutionary Macintosh computer. His reward? Getting booted out of the company by a corporate board too concerned about Steve’s titanic ego and famous inability to play nice with others. Baaaaad mistake. The corporate stiffs (Amelio, Sculley) who followed Jobs utterly failed to grasp what made Apple so unique, and pursued a course towards unexciting, run-of-the-mill products. The company was headed for the permanent dustbin of history by the early ’90s when it had lost every market except that of the graphic design world. (Meanwhile, Steve Jobs was off creating his own horribly inept company, NeXT.) But this story had a happy ending. Apple brought Jobs back aboard, the iMac and iPod were born, and the rest is history.

6. Sony. The company’s name has been practically synonymous with quality consumer electronics for a generation. But that reputation is starting to tarnish, and Samsung is now just as much of a quality brand as Sony ever was. The company has stubbornly bet the farm on its Blu-Ray high-definition videodisc, earning the ire of consumers and unnecessarily delaying the release of its Playstation 3. (Didn’t they learn anything from their own disastrous Betamax experiment?) The Playstation 3 might turn out to be the company’s redemption — or it could be the point when the company’s videogame consoles permanently ceded ground to Microsoft’s XBox.

7. Gateway. Dell, Compaq, and Gateway were once fierce competitors for the crown of the PC industry, which boggles the mind. (Who remembers that Big Country was once just as popular and revolutionary a band as U2?) The quality of Gateway’s equipment dropped off precipitously in the late ’90s, with a number of high-profile hardware recalls. And then the company spent way too much money pursuing a boutique retail presence while Dell was busy staying as far away from retail as possible. Lately Gateway has made something of a comeback, but they’ve got a long way to go to catch up to Dell.

8. Compaq. Owning an “ultra-portable” Compaq laptop was a status symbol in the ’80s. Then the company spent several years creating their own proprietary drivers and components in an attempt to make their machines premium products. Instead they pissed everyone off. For several years, at least, Compaq machines were every computer tech’s worst nightmare (although the laptop I used from 2000 to 2003 was a pretty reliable machine). The company’s purchase by a troubled Hewlett-Packard has relegated its products to also-rans in the marketplace.

9. Intuit. What happened to Quicken? Quicken was personal finance software for more than a decade. Then the company hung around waiting for Microsoft to acquire them — which Bill Gates & Co. did indeed try to do, only to be stymied by anti-trust regulators. Quicken is still the market leading personal financial product, but it’s fighting a neck-and-neck battle with Microsoft Money. Quicken differentiates itself these days by tying in to the company’s irritating and ad-strewn websites, which doesn’t strike me as a recipe for success. The company now stakes out the niches of home tax preparation software (TurboTax) and small business finance (QuickBooks), where their products succeed because nobody’s made a serious effort lately at unseating them.

10. RealNetworks. Once upon a time, RealAudio was the coolest thing on the planet. I’m not sure when the company began its slide into irrelevance — when was the last time you watched anything in RealVideo? — but the ad-laden disaster RealOne Player surely was a major turning point. It took the much-loved and highly functional Real Jukebox and hobbled many of its features or made them premium add-ons. Like Netscape before them, it seems the company largely got spooked by the dominance of Microsoft and tripped over their own feet.

—

So there we have it: ten tech companies, ten high-profile failures. The main causes? Seems to me they are failure of nerve, failure to innovate, excessive greed, excessive litigiousness, and overwhelming fear of Microsoft. Am I missing anything?