{"id":540053,"date":"2010-04-22T14:16:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T18:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5587346.post-4840686213531921947"},"modified":"2010-04-22T14:16:31","modified_gmt":"2010-04-22T18:16:31","slug":"how-bubbles-destroy-software-the-story-of-broderbund","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/540053","title":{"rendered":"How bubbles destroy software – the story of Broderbund"},"content":{"rendered":"

My kids need some typing software. I remember a “Broderbund” “Mavis Beacon” product from eons past, so I started looking into the current state of the product. It took me a while to sort things out; and along the way I was reminded of how much was lost in the tech bubble of the 1990s.<\/p>\n

It turns out there’s now a Mac-only “Mavis Beacon” product sold by “Software MacKiev<\/a>” (Ukranian Mac contract software development) and another product (XP\/Mac) sold by “Encore Software”. The Encore Mac product is buggy and unsupported, the MacKiev version sounds a bit more promising.<\/p>\n

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<\/span><\/div>\n
it seems the current products are both descendants of a common ancestor that passed through a number of corporate labels including Software Toolworks \/ Mindscape<\/a>, Broderbund<\/a>, and The Learning Company<\/a> .<\/span><\/div>\n

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What a mess. How did that happen? For that matter, what happened to all of the pretty good educational software produced by all of those companies? How did it all die, without true replacements (the closest things today are Flash apps on commercial sites that do child marketing)?<\/span><\/div>\n

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Part of the answer is that these companies had a good skillset for computer gaming, and that was a much bigger industry. Another part of the answer comes from the the wikipedia article on Broderbund<\/span><\/a> (<\/span>1980s history here<\/span><\/a>) [1], (emphases mine, remember those who got cash were the winners)  …<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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… Softkey …purchased The Learning Company for $606 million <\/span>in cash<\/span><\/b> and then adopted its name…Br\u00f8derbund was purchased by The Learning Company in 1998 for about US$420 million in <\/span>stock<\/span><\/b>…<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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In a move to rationalize costs, The Learning Company promptly<\/span> terminated 500 employees at Br\u00f8derbund the same year<\/span><\/b>,[16] representing 42% of the company’s workforce. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Then in <\/span>1999 the combined company was bought by Mattel for $3.6 billion … <\/span><\/b>Jill Barad, the [Mattel] CEO, ended up being forced out in a climate of investor outrage. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Mattel then <\/span>gave away<\/span><\/b> The Learning Company in September 2000 to Gores Technology Group, a private acquisitions firm, for a share of whatever Gores could obtain by selling the company. In 2001, Gores sold The Learning Company’s entertainment holdings to Ubisoft, and most of the other holdings, <\/span>including the Br\u00f8derbund name, to Irish company Riverdeep<\/span><\/b>.[19] Currently, all of Br\u00f8derbund’s games, such as the Myst series, are published by Ubisoft…<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This kind of churn is death to software. Software needs continuity to survive. The cycle of acquisition and ‘rationalization” creates zombie software that staggers on, brainless, for years … then dies.<\/p>\n

The tech bubble made a few people rich, and it destroyed a lot of good products. Not to mention costing Mattel’s shareholders quite a few pennies.<\/p>\n

After the tech bubble burst came 9\/11, then the great asset bubble and, not least, the Bush administration. One, two, three, four. No wonder America is reeling.<\/p>\n

[1] At one time Mavis Beacon was sold under the Broderbund name, but by that time Broderbund might have been owned by Riverdeep. I include this story as an example of all the things the tech bubble killed.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My kids need some typing software. I remember a “Broderbund” “Mavis Beacon” product from eons past, so I started looking into the current state of the product. It took me a while to sort things out; and along the way I was reminded of how much was lost in the tech bubble of the 1990s. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":711,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/711"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}