Bad Things Happen to Good Products

As a bleeding edge technology adopter - I have seen some really great ideas screwed up due to a wide variety of reasons.

Some of them are the result of evil others coveting the idea. Some as a result of unfortunate happenstance. Some by bad decision making and hubris. But there is a hard core of products that never quite seem to survive the take over by another company.

I think we can point to MySpace as a good example of this. Did NewsCorp screw up or was this as a result of poor timing?

The most recent carcass to cross my desk is Cardscan. This was a killer tool. Feed business cards into it and they automatically get to your desktop.They were taken over by Dymo - itself a former great label maker. Now owned by Rubbermaid. Read the service end here.

Today the announcement was that they were discontinuing the address update service. This is a segment now so well handled by Plaxo and Linked in. Not to mention Facebook.

And look at their valuations. Could Cardscan have become one of these? In my view yes. Too bad they missed the opportunity.

Cheers