Defunct & Fallen

Household names that no longer exist, and exactly how it happened.

Entries in this category (53)

• Blockbuster — The video-rental empire that passed on buying Netflix
• Elizabeth Holmes — Theranos founder whose $9B blood-testing empire was built on fiction
• Theranos — The $9B biotech startup that tested almost nothing
• Eastman Kodak — The company that invented the digital camera — then couldn't survive it
• MySpace — The first social network to rule the world — for about three years
• Toys “R” Us — The toy cathedral that debt killed — and nostalgia resurrected
• Sears — The catalog-and-store giant that the discount era and Amazon left behind
• Circuit City — The electronics superstore that Best Buy and the internet switched off
• Borders — The big-box bookseller that Amazon and the e-book switched off
• Toshiba — The Japanese giant that pioneered memory and laptops, then unwound itself
• Atari — The company that invented the video game boom - and the crash
• Yahoo — The internet's first giant that fumbled the future
• Compaq — The PC upstart that beat IBM, then got absorbed by HP
• Acorn Computers — The Cambridge firm that won the BBC's schools contract, built a processor nobody asked for, and died — while that processor ended up in most of the world's phones
• Amiga — The 1985 computer with custom chips that outran everything at its price, sold about 4.9 million units, died with Commodore in 1994 — and whose trademark has since passed through Escom, Gateway, Amiga Inc, Cloanto and Hyperion
• AT&T — Ma Bell — the century-long telephone monopoly that dismantled itself to save its future
• Bed Bath & Beyond — The housewares chain died in 2023; the name did not — it now belongs to a company called Neighborhood Intelligence that is rebranding Container Store shops under it
• BlackBerry — The smartphone giant that ruled the corporate world, then fell to touchscreens and apps
• Boeing — The aviation titan that was once the gold standard of American engineering — and became a cautionary tale of corporate hubris
• Borland — The company behind Turbo Pascal and Delphi, which beat Lotus in court over Quattro Pro, renamed itself Inprise and back, and finished as a product line inside OpenText
• Commodore International — The Toronto typewriter business that became the world's largest home computer maker, launched the Commodore 64, bought the Amiga — and was liquidated in 1994, after which its brand name was sold on for another three decades
• Credit Suisse — The 160-year-old Swiss banking giant that collapsed after a crisis of confidence — and was absorbed by UBS
• Digital Equipment Corporation — The maker of the PDP and VAX minicomputers that helped create the computing industry — bought by Compaq in 1998
• Enigma — The cipher machine Germany trusted with its military secrets — reconstructed by Polish mathematicians, then broken at Bletchley Park
• Enron — The Wall Street darling that collapsed in weeks — one of the largest corporate frauds in history
• Ericsson Mobile — Sweden's handset arm, merged into the Sony Ericsson joint venture in 2001 and sold outright to Sony in 2012 — Ericsson kept the networks and gave up phones for good
• Established Men — Ashley Madison's sister site — a 2009 sugar-daddy brand that the 2015 hackers demanded be shut down alongside it, promoted through a "founder" who turned out to be a paid spokeswoman
• Fisker — The luxury EV startup that promised a sustainable car — and collapsed into bankruptcy in 2024
• Fry's Electronics — The Silicon Valley electronics superstore chain with 34 themed stores and a one-day shutdown in February 2021
• FTX — The crypto exchange that was worth $32 billion — and collapsed in days amid one of history's biggest frauds
• Gateway — The mail-order PC maker from a South Dakota cattle town that shipped its computers in cow-spotted boxes, grew to nearly 25,000 employees, and was bought by Acer — which then revived the brand in Walmart
• Harman Kardon — Two men walked out of a public-address company in 1953 with $5,000 each and built the world's first integrated hi-fi receiver — the company is now a brand inside a Samsung subsidiary
• Imperial Chemical Industries — The giant British chemical firm that made everything from paint to explosives — broken up and sold off in the 2000s
• Iomega — Maker of the mighty Zip disk and the 1990s' favorite portable storage — bought by EMC and folded away
• Kmart — The chain that invented the Blue Light Special and once ran 2,486 stores is down to three — two in US territories and one in suburban Miami
• Lotus Development — The company whose 1-2-3 spreadsheet made the IBM PC worth buying, sold to IBM for $3.5 billion in 1995 — with the brand retired in 2012 and Notes, Domino and Sametime now run by HCL
• Microsoft Encarta — The encyclopedia on a disc that taught a generation to look things up — until the open web made it obsolete
• Motorola — The company that made the first commercial handheld cellphone — split in two on 4 January 2011, so that the name now belongs to two unrelated businesses
• Nortel Networks — Canada's most valuable company at the dot-com peak, broken up in bankruptcy and sold off business by business — the last piece, a patent portfolio, went for $4.5 billion
• Palm — The company that made the handheld computer mainstream — bought by HP in 2010, shut down in 2011, with its webOS software ending up in LG televisions and its name licensed onto a very small phone
• Polaroid — The instant-photo pioneer that went bankrupt twice — and was reborn out of a project to keep its film alive
• Qimonda — The German memory-chip maker that rose quickly in the 2000s and collapsed into insolvency in 2009
• The Quartz War — The fifty-year fight over how a watch keeps time — which Japan won on accuracy, Switzerland won on price and prestige, and which is now being fought again from China
• RadioShack — The 1921 Boston ham-radio shop that became an 8,000-store American chain, went bankrupt twice, and now survives as a licensed brand sold through other people's shops
• Ranbaxy Laboratories — The "Indian Pfizer" that built a generic-drug empire on fabricated data — and paid a record $500 million fine
• Sega — The arcade and console giant that took on Nintendo, produced the Sega Dreamcast — and then exited the hardware race
• Silicon Graphics — Jim Clark's 3D workstation company that put the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, helped define OpenGL, and was sold in 2009 for $42.5 million to a server maker that took its name
• Huy Fong Foods — The Sriracha maker whose rooster sauce conquered the world — then lost the pepper farm it depended on
• Sulpicio Lines (now Philippine Span Asia Carrier) — The shpping line that was haunted by disaster — and changed its name and business to survive
• Sun Microsystems — The workstation and server pioneer behind Java and Solaris — acquired by Oracle in 2010
• Timex — The American volume watchmaker that helped kill Swiss mechanical watchmaking from below — and whose Scottish factory went on to build Sinclair computers
• Tupperware — The iconic food-storage brand that built a home-party empire — then declined and filed for bankruptcy
• Yahoo Personals — The paid dating service inside the Yahoo portal, 1997 to 2010 — closed not by a hack but by free sites, phones, and a company that had stopped wanting to run it