7. Microsoft’s own ‘Danger’: Microsoft paid around $500 million in 2008 for the mobile company Danger, which was supposed to co-operate with Microsoft and help them make phones—but all the key employees left, and Microsoft was left with ‘Kin’, a social smartphone, that flopped. Badly.

6. Cisco bought Pure Digital and then shut it down: Cisco, seeing the opportunity that Flip had to make it big, bought Pure Digital (its mother company) for about $590 million. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse when digital cameras started getting integrated into almost every other smartphone in the market—probably why Cisco chose to shut down the division early last year.