Palm Pilot
The future in your pocket, sued by a pen.
CAUSE OF DEATH: HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm and shut the whole line 13 months later.
The PalmPilot launched on March 10, 1997 and had reportedly sold over a million units by 1998. It taught professionals to write in a special alphabet with a plastic stick. By 2000 Palm had some 74 percent of the market. The Pilot Pen Corporation sued over the name and settled, so the most famous gadget of the decade had to stop using its own name. Palm was passed from USRobotics to 3Com and then to HP, which paid $1.2 billion in 2010 and ended every Palm device on August 18, 2011. In 2014 the trademark was sold to a shelf company controlled by a TCL executive. It owned 74 percent of a market that turned into the iPhone.