BlackBerry
Had 56% of the market. Kept the keyboard.
CAUSE OF DEATH: Lost the market to the iPhone and Android, then lost $1 billion in a single quarter.
In 2006 Webster's put "CrackBerry" in the dictionary. In 2009 BlackBerry held 56 percent of the American smartphone market. In 2010 it was worth more than Adidas. Then phones turned into glass rectangles and BlackBerry kept selling a keyboard with a phone attached. Its tablet ended in a $485 million write-down. A multi-day outage in 2011 cut off millions of users. In one quarter of 2013 it lost $1.049 billion and cut 4,500 jobs. It stopped designing its own phones in 2016. One licensee shut down in 2022 without ever releasing a device. The company now sells software, which is what you do when hardware asks you to leave.