#9 Blockbuster

What it had: All the resources, and was launched at a time people were very much in to renting movies for home viewing.

What it missed: when market was ready for them, even with their resources they fumble to deliver services. For people who wanted to rent a movie, the only option was Blockbuster. The movie rental company turned blind to this opportunity, the customers were vexed by crappy movie collections, and their inability to keep the movies in stock, resulted in long waiting. So it was obvious that customers hated Blockbuster.

Even when challenge came from a nascent peer, Netflix, the company some how deluded into believing it has got strong base of customers. Meanwhile Netflix turned into primary choice for movie rentals, focusing well in all areas Blockbuster missed. An attempt by the company to improve by copying Netflix model was unsuccessful. It’s obvious, the company was sent to oblivion.  

#8 MySpace

What it had: While people were grappling with slow Friendster, the one thing they cared about was speed, and MySpace had it. It had no parallels in social networking space, the speed and a glimpse of friends on the site was thing of the day. 

What it missed: The moral of the fable—tortoise and hare fails here, MySpace was taking its own sweet time for innovations and in a jiffy the social networking space got hijacked by Facebook.

The site was chaotic and narrow. The auto loaded high metal songs and weird gif background, which was ok with youngsters,  failed to include greater bandwidth of users. And after a while even youngsters seemed to love social networking sites which had essence of suburbs. It is ironic that the site was acquired by News Corp. for a whopping $580 million in 2005, and did nothing to improve it. Overall MySpace was a flop show.