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In the lucrative server network interface card (NIC) business, 3Com dominated market share, with Intel only able to break past 3Com after dramatic price slashing. It started developing Gigabit Ethernet cards in-house but later scrapped the plans.
- 3Com at The Dotcom Boom
- How 3Com’s Long Decline Happened
- Why 3Com Failed
- Who Bought 3Com
- 3Com Today
Around the time of the dotcom boom, 3Com was a 5.8 billion dollar company. They were founded in 1979 by Bob Metcalfe, the co-inventor of Ethernet. And for the next two decades, they were thego-to brand for network cards. While the 3C501 network card is notoriously bad, their other cards from the 1980s and 1990s are very well regarded, and always we...
But after the dotcom bust, 3Com faded away. What happened to 3Com, ultimately, was a series of bad decisions that led to a loss of profitability. Some of them may have made sense at the time. But not all of them. The first thing that happened was 3Com walked away from its enterprise networking equipment business. Admittedly Cisco was hard to compet...
Ultimately, 3Com failed because it was too dependent on network cards. Network cards accounted for about half their revenue during their bust years. And their cards were expensive. Intel undercut their price to try to gain market share, and they succeeded. And then they did exactly the wrong thing. It was the late ’90s, and they bought their way in...
So what happened to 3Com? 3Com didn’t go out of business and they didn’t sell out to Huawei. They got Compaqed. Hewlett-Packard bought them out, which seems to be where every great ’90s technology company went to die. Hewlett-Packard paid 2.7 billion dollars in late 2009 for 3Com’s assets. HP still sells network equipment like switches, routers, an...
Vintage 3Com network cards are very popular with retro computing enthusiasts. It had top-tier name recognition in the 80s and 90s. All but their very earliest cards generally have good driver support, work well, and are easier to configure than most of the cheaper competitors. My favorite retro network card is a very specific Intel card, but if you...
3Com. A frustrated Robert Metcalfe left Xerox in 1978 intending to make Ethernet a dominant local area networking technology: a technology he had conceived and managed through implementation. The daunting challenge was to pry Ethernet from the proprietary grasp of Xerox. He began consulting.
Apr 12, 2004 · But the company also has a history of missteps and failed opportunities, including expensive forays into operating system software, analog modems and Internet radio.
- Joel Shore
But by late 1999 3Com management had concluded that Palm had become a distraction away from the company's networking core. 3Com, therefore, announced that it would spin off Palm during 2000.
Jun 4, 2019 · 3Com faltered in this century; in 2010 it was acquired by HP, which eliminated its storied brand. Former 3Com executive Jeff Chase and coauthor Jon Zilber tell the company’s story in a new book...
Jun 4, 2019 · 3Com was the hottest Silicon Valley startup of its time, a Dragon (a term that is rarely used referring to a company that not only makes back what a VC invested in it but so over performs it pays off the entire investment fund more than covering all the losses for the firms that failed).
