Two of them come to mind with my own experience: Palm and Netscape. Ill share first my Palm story. When the first generation of Palm Pilots were launched, I was busy selling Now Up to Date and Contact in Japan (my NDAs with Now are long dead). At that time, a lot of extremely powerful technologies were being developed at Now Software and in cooperation with powerful friends. Now had a compact HTML prototype that could render an interactive page – to a Pilot. The theory was that (and get this – a year before the first Palm-powered phone ever shipped) companies could interactively invite individuals to meetings, and that the system would assist you in finding mutually free times to hold meetings – all remotely. We had two engineers working within the Palm facilities even.

At that same time, Now had a good foothold in Japan for a number of reasons – the first was teaming with a company under the auspices of Marubeni Corporation – one of the top five shosha trading companies in Japan. The second was a small software company in Japan that linked Now Up to Date and Contact with the Sharp Zaurus – the first really powerful PDA. This was backed by the very large consumer electronics company – NEC.

Given our close partnership with Palm, I contacted the then newly minted international sales manager for Palm, and offered to facilitate a relationship with this technology partner (and by extension, NEC). It didn’t take much to foresee that Sharp would launch a low priced competitor as soon as possible to counter Palm.

And get this: Now Software was even reselling Palm Pilots and had negotiated to become the new Mac OS desktop for future Palm Pilots – since the desktop for the Mac was simply terrible.

Palm’s international sales manager was positively affronted by the offer – I would even say insulting – and assured me that Palm would enter the Japanese market very, very soon. He gave me the impression that there was no real strategy for the market.

A year later – no localized Palm Pilot in the Japanese channel, and a large collection of a newly muscled Sharp Wizard organizers and more smartly priced Zaurus’ were on the market.