The coming of the new year gives us an opportunity to both look back wistfully and look forward with hope. It also offers a chance to look back with anger and toward the new year with a sense of cynicism and schadenfreude. So, in the interest of curdling your eggnog a bit, we're dusting off Ars' tech company "Deathwatch" list to see which companies we've tracked in the past have managed to survive, which have slipped into various levels of oblivion, and which companies need to be added to the stack to replace those that have either emerged victorious or have fallen irrevocably into corporate limbo.
First, a clarification of our criteria for what places a company on Deathwatch. To be considered, companies need to have experienced at least one of the following issues:
- An extended period of lost market share in their particular category
- An extended period of financial losses or a pattern of annual losses
- Serious management problems that raise questions about the business model or long-term strategy of the company
The Deathwatch took a holiday last New Year's, but our 2014 picks proved to be good for another 12 months of pain: RadioShack, BlackBerry, Zynga, HTC, and AMD. RadioShack, our most sickly suspect, restructured and then sold some of its stores to Sprint, closing the rest. While it still exists as a brand in some locations, the company has essentially ceased to exist. We rule that RadioShack has earned a toe-tag, while the others…well, they're largely in the same delicate condition they were in when we last did this list.
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