The tech world is full of flops. This ain't them; some of these companies and their products were monstrously successful for a time; others never even had the high expectations and hype required for something to earn the title "flop".

Nope, this is a list of the folks who had something special—a firm grasp on a huge market, or the first fingers on a new one—and squandered it. Maybe it was hubris, a failure to scale fast enough, or an inability to see that they were on to something special. Each of these companies suffered from asleep-at-the-wheelness in some form or another, and allowed others to clean up in a market that they should've owned. These are the guys who coulda been—and maybe once were—contenders.