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By Michael Cooney Mistakes are never small in the network world. They may be quickly forgotten or swept under the rug, but they are never small. Here we take a look at a number of developments chronicled - OK, hyped - in Network World during the past 15 years that have flopped like so many dead fish. It's not pretty. Few times in the history of flops has a movement come and, well, been kicked into submission so quickly. A study released in January said that 210 don't-com firms were shuttered in 2000 - 121 between October and December alone. The study went on to say of the dot-com deaths, about 75% offered products or services primarily for a consumer audience. Another 21% had a business clientele, and the remainder had a blend. E-commerce companies accounted for just more than half the closures. Content-based properties made up 30%, while infrastructure and online service companies made up the remainder. The study's author, Webmergers.com, reports that between 12,000 and 15,000 dot-comers lost their jobs. Of course, there are thousands of dot-coms left - some successful - but their failure rate in the past year and a half is unprecedented. For now, that alone earns them a spot on this list. Telecommunications Act of 1996 Many are still arguing over its impact, but we'd have to say this act has been a failure. Does anyone remember what this legislation was supposed to accomplish? Let us remind you. The act was supposed to:
 What
would a "flops" section be without a bloated and failed IBM plan?
Pretty much everything IBM's networking group did (in one iteration
or another) in the late '80s and throughout the '90s is already dead,
is being phased out, or is owned by Cisco. Perhaps no technology flamed
as vividly as Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking. Why, we remember like
it was only yesterday talking about the quintessential strengths of
APPN, its peer-to-peer networking capabilities, its sophisticated
class-of-service features . . . all shot to hell.
IBM did just about everything wrong here. It made APPN gear complicated
and costly (it even wanted royalties from potential third parties
that could have helped establish the technology, remember that?).
APPN's role did bring about one of the great industry squabbles. At
one point in 1994, IBM's Rick McGee, promised to "kill" vendors (read:
Cisco) and "eat our own young" before IBM would let any rival cannibalize
its mainframe channel-attached SNA segment of the network. Ouch.
25M bit/sec ATM to the desktop
Classified mostly as a solution looking for a problem, 25M bit/sec
ATM to the desktop failed before it really got rolling. While many
folks thought the idea of providing all that bandwidth to user PCs
was worthwhile, the idea of paying twice as much for the luxury compared
with switched Ethernet didn't fly. It wasn't the last technology Ethernet
would whack of course (see HSTR and FDDI).
High-Speed Token Ring
This technology took a called strike three in the bottom of the ninth
with two outs and the bases loaded. Token ring in general by the late
'90s was suffering from years of battles with Ethernet. High-Speed
Token Ring (HSTR) was supposed to be the last hurrah, but it just
never happened. One of our readers summed up HSTR this way: "End users
failed to rally around HSTR, and the token-ring vendors are basically
giving up." To say the least. By the end of 1998, HSTR's champion,
IBM, pulled the plug. Madge and Olicom did the same soon after.
FDDI
Once the fashion plate of high-speed LAN users, 100M bit/sec fiber-optic
gear has run out of gas. More to the point, faster and less-expensive
technologies - such as Gigabit and Fast Ethernet - have supplanted
it. Most of the last FDDI chips shipped in January 2000.
DME
 Can
you say "overambitious management standards initiative?" Lots of folks
did. The Open Software Foundation's Distributed Management Environment
(OSF/DME) died a slow death in the early '90s. Still, DME's death
and legacy hasn't prevented vendors from trying to come up with other
cross-industry standards. Oh, no. Can you say Web-Based Enterprise
Management (WBEM)? By no means a flop just yet, WBEM has some 70 vendors
behind it promising a new breed of Web-based tools. We may be writing
about his one flopping in our 20th anniversary issue.
OSI
We'd be remiss not to highlight one of the all-time great failures
of this industry: Open Systems Interconnection. You may recall that
OSI was a set of standards for creating truly interoperable multivendor
systems and networking.
It never happened. Oh, the OSI seven-layer model is a reference tool,
but products really tanked and users yawned.
DCE
More proof that big, ugly architecturelike movements generally fail.
The Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) consisted of directory,
security, remote procedure calls and other client/server-based services
designed to run across heterogeneous networks. It sounded good and
even garnered some user acceptance. But rather than creating a community
of interoperable applications, DCE technology essentially "became
a collection of proprietary platforms with a common heritage," as
one analyst put it.
Contact Associate News Editor Michael Cooney
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