Five technology brands that failed and are no longer in Argentina

Many companies have failed to adapt and have resonated in recent decades, despite having a leading position in their markets.
These companies have turned to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to grow, but have not been able to take advantage of, or adapt to, changes in these technologies by borrowing money. bad ways. Here you have five companies that did not understand these transformations and that are not in Argentina today.

Blockbuster

While Netflix initially sent home movies to post offices, Blockbuster continued to maintain physical stores in many countries, including Argentina.

In 2000, Netflix wanted to combine with Blockbuster, which offered him to play the role online. But the management of the company rejected this idea because it seemed ridiculous. In 2010, Blockbuster declared bankruptcy.

Dish Network, which acquired the company in 2011, closed in 2014 the 300 stores that Blockbuster still remained open in the United States, where it had more than 4,000 stores, as well as its distribution centers.

In Argentina, the company closed in 2010, after the judiciary formalized bankruptcy at the local level, at the request of the American subsidiary of the American company, which declared bankruptcy in September of the same year.

At that time, it had an asset of 17,034 244.98 pesos, a liability of 26,185,848.98 pesos and had 21 branches in the country, where work approximately 160 people. The premises were in the cities of Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, Rosario, Córdoba, Mendoza, Neuquén, Bariloche and Greater Buenos Aires.

The company was born in 1985 in Dallas. At its peak, at the beginning of the last decade, it had 60,000 employees in more than 9,000 stores in more than 20 countries.

In the following video, the documentary director Rosario, Gastón Miranda, tells the story of the Blockbuster break and his scripted video, played and directed at the time of his resignation from the company.

BlackBerry

The mobile phones, mail and messaging systems of this Canadian company were groundbreaking at the beginning of the first decade of the century, offering a complete physical keyboard, speed and security.

When in 2007, Apple introduced its first iPhone, with its touch screen, Blackberry did not join the trend because it wanted to protect what it already owned. There is Twelve years later, BlackBerry and Nokia have dominated the mobile phone market, but the iPhone and the Android operating system have swept away these "empires".

Today, both brands are trying to be reborn separately with teams recovering some of their DNA and adapting to the current trends of the second decade of the 21st century. While the Finnish-based company is present in Argentina with Android mobiles, the Canadian company signed in 2016 an agreement with the Chinese multinational TCL, to which it authorized the manufacture of its brand of telephone.

The creator of the instant messaging system BBM announced its latest equipment in Argentina in 2017, with the BlackBerry Keyone, which combined software and BlackBerry security, business areas left in Canadian hands, to the manufacture of TCL. These teams were assembled in Famar, a company based in Tierra del Fuego.

However, traditional brand markets, businesses and governments, as well as "professional consumers" and intensive text generators have ignored it, even if it worked with Android Nougat 7.1.

The BBM stopped working in May 2019 after being moved by WhatsApp and Telegram. Three years ago, BlackBerry granted a license to Emtek Indonesia for its consumer email application, to add users, but could not compete with WhatsApp or other apps. .

In 2013, the brand introduced in Argentina one of its latest popular models in the country, the Curve 9320:

As you can see here, some users are selling BlackBerry models on the Mercado Libre platform, including the Blackberry Curve 8520, equipped with the famous QWERTY physical keyboard.

MySpace

This is a web platform that dominated social networks before the advent of Facebook. But when the giant created by Mark Zuckerberg appeared, the social network began to lose users. In 2011, he changed his focus to focus on music and entertainment. However, this operation did not work because it fired 500 employees.

To achieve the prevalence of MySpace, it reached a point that in 2006, it had more traffic than Google. The social network reached its peak that year with over 100 million users who used it to meet and listen to music or to download their own videos or songs.

In 2005, the creator of this company, Chris DeWolve, and that of Facebook met and Zuckerberg proposed to sell him the social network for $ 75 million, but DeWolve declined the offer, in a "remake" of the aforementioned story between Blockbuster and Netflix. On this note.

In March 2019, MySpace was back in the news because it announced in a statement that it had lost all the files uploaded by users until 2016, due to a problem with its servers. In practice, that meant about 50 million songs, more photos and videos.

The loss of files has affected since MySpace started working, in 2003, until 2015. The server migration took place last year and users then noticed the lack of files but the social network was confident of being able to recover them. MySpace has been the launching pad for artists, among which

those who count Lily Allen, Kate Nash, Arctic Monkeys, Adele, The Ting Tings and Calvin Harris, among others. In Argentina, one of these groups was Miranda !, which in 2009 offered secret recitals to its MySpace fans:

But in recent years, musicians have chosen platforms such as Bandcamp and Soundcloud to download their songs. News Corporation acquired the site in 2005 for $ 580 million while the social network had 20 million unique users per month in the United States. and managed to increase that number, but the emergence of new competitors eventually truncated the MySpace race.

Terra

On the web, you can talk about the times before and after Google and / or Facebook. In the days leading up to these Californian giants, one of the best known actors was Terra, a company that came to be known as Terra Networks in late 1997. it has come to overtake in capitalization at the oil company Repsol and the bank BBVA.

The bursting of the Internet bubble in March 2000 marked the beginning of the decline of the company. In 2002, Terra's losses were more than $ 2 million.

A decade later, Telefónica attempted to relaunch the portal by focusing on direct and live content rentals, movies or music, but again failed. The company closed in 2017 after 18 years of history.

In Argentina, as in Chile, Colombia, the United States, Spain, Mexico and Peru, he offered access to his portal, his mail and his instant messenger. She also sponsored music events and streamed some of them.

Palm

It is a company that is very successful thanks to its personal digital assistants (PDAs). But his fall was noisy. While in 2009, it was one of the stars of CES, the largest event of consumer electronics and computing in the United States, which took place in the city of Las Vegas, it was transferred in 2012 to a division of HP.

For a while, it seemed unbeatable. This company dominated the PDA market with a firm hand. But he has not managed to compete in the smartphone industry despite his attempts and developments such as the webOS operating system.

Palm was born in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan. That year, he launched his first camera, the Zoomer, manufactured by Casio. Palm contributed to the software. That year, the first Palm series also appeared, such as the Palm Zire.

There were several Palm series on the market, until Treo was launched. This range of devices began without including a telephone area, but quickly added this capability, forerunner of the later concept of "smartphone". It was not a cheap device, it cost $ 700 for a camera of only 0.3 mega pixels and a 2.4 inch screen.

It was an excellent working tool and the design of the Treo was appealing, but it was not for mass consumption, but for the company.

In April 2010, HP bought Palm for $ 1.2 billion. The Californian multinational was looking for a space between Android, iOS and BlackBerry, but its touchpad model did not live up to its expectations.

In 2011, HP announced the shutdown of all webOS devices and, two years later, the sale of WebOS to LG. Palm now belongs to TCL, yes, the same brand that was made of BlackBerry phones.

Discover the latest news in the digital economy, startups, fintech, business innovation and blockchain. CLICK HERE