Once upon a time there was a company called Chili!Soft. Founded in 1997, their goal was to bring the ease of ASP development to Apache/Unix/Linux. On December 7, 2000, they were bought by Sun Microsystems, which proceeded to cease development a few years later. If you go to the Chili!Soft page now, you see a message that it has "reached it's end of life" and you can't even buy it.
Why?
Why did they let it die? Why don't they at least release it as open source so others can continue development on it? ASP/VBScript is still by far the easiest and fastest website development system ever made. What a waste.
Once upon a time there was a company called FASA. They made Battletech, Crimson Skies, and several other other games. They decided they wanted to make computer games, and began finding developers to make Mechwarrior games. The first 2 games were made by Activision (1989/DOS, 1995/DOS & Windows), the 3rd by Microprose (1999), and everything was great.
But then they decided to partner with Micro$oft for Mechwarrior 4/Mercenaries in 2000, and sold themselves to M$, and it was all over. M$ then ended the Mechwarrior games in 2002 and stopped development of everything they got from FASA.
Why?
They took an IP that had over 20 years of history including miniature tabletop games, a huge selection of novels written by some of the most well-known sci fi authors, and the previous computer games, and they put it on the shelf with no intention of doing anything with it again. WHY?
They had massive amounts of material to draw from. Computer graphics were making massive improvements & they had a huge fan base. I imagine that since it was M$ it all came down to money. But why did they buy FASA? Did they intend to just shut them down from the beginning? Why buy something if you're not going to use it? It makes no sense.
Thank goodness Jordan Weisman, founder of FASA, worked it out so he would get the IP from FASA back! After he recently left M$ he started a new company called Smith & Tinker and is getting the rights to Mechwarrior/Battletech back! They're making a new Mechwarrior game!
