Best of 2009: Most interesting exits; foot-in-mouth moments
In 2009, some companies adhered to the philosophy ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, leave the market’:
- Joost, its CEO Mike Volpi forced out and investigated
- Nortel, auctioned off in pieces. A giant of telecom tries to save itself one last time and then simply dissolves.
- Verizon selling off rural lines to Frontier, exiting smaller markets to instantly boost its FiOS penetration levels
The biggest foot-in-mouth moments after the break…
- Verizon Hub Halt. Verizon Wireless was pretty proud of its $200 broadband-enabled wireless/wireline hybrid; right up until it ceased making it.
- T-Mobile losing all its Sidekick customer data. One of the year’s biggest disasters in cloud computing?
- Verizon and AT&T, on separate occasions, floating the imminent arrival of metered pricing – their customers, especially vocal ones like bloggers and influence peddlers, are going to fight this tooth and nail.
Coming on Monday: The most overhyped technologies
