A book series by Dan Boabeș

Non-fiction · Forensic histories · Volumes 1–3

Why They Died

They had the money, the engineers and the data to see what was coming. Then they looked away.

Each volume of Why They Died opens one graveyard (messaging apps, video games, American retail) and asks the only question that matters: what, exactly, killed them?

001

The four traps

Different industries, different decades, the same cause of death. Every empire in this series walked into at least one of four traps, with its eyes open.

01

The arrogance of dominance

“We are too big to fall.”

Market share is read as permanence. The numbers are right; the direction is fatal.

Exhibit: BlackBerry
02

The refusal to cannibalize

“If we launch the new thing, it will hurt the old thing.”

The future gets vetoed to protect the present, until someone with nothing to protect ships it.

Exhibit: MSN Messenger · Yahoo Messenger
03

Optimizing the wrong number

“The dashboard is green, so we’re fine.”

The metrics measure what is easy to count. What users actually feel goes unmeasured, and then they leave.

Exhibit: Skype
04

The absence of user empathy

“We know better than they do.”

Products get replaced by what the company prefers rather than what people love. Eventually people stop following.

Exhibit: Google’s thirteen messaging apps
002

The volumes

Coming soon · Kindle & paperback

Messaging Apps

How ICQ, BlackBerry, MSN and Skype Lost Two Billion Users

On June 26, 2024, ICQ went dark.

For a quarter of a century, more than two billion people talked to each other through apps that are now almost all gone. The companies behind them had everything: money, talent, first-mover advantage, and internal data that showed exactly where the world was heading. This is the story of how they lost it anyway.

  • ICQ
  • AIM
  • Yahoo Messenger
  • MSN Messenger
  • Skype
  • BlackBerry Messenger
  • Google Talk & co.
  • MySpace
  • Orkut
  • Mxit
  • Discord
  • Snapchat
Manuscript complete · In production

Video Games

How Atari, the Dreamcast, THQ and Telltale Lost the Game

In 2014, in a landfill outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, an excavator turned up the body.

The messaging graveyard is invisible. The video game graveyard is physical: cartridges under concrete in the desert, dead arcade cabinets, studios whose names outlived the people who made them great. From Atari to the live-service collapse, a tour of an industry that keeps burying its own.

  • Atari
  • Dreamcast
  • THQ
  • Sierra
  • LucasArts
  • EA’s studios
  • Telltale
  • Midway
  • Dead hardware
  • Game retail
  • Live service
In the works

American Retail

How Sears, Toys “R” Us, Circuit City and the Mall Lost America’s Shoppers

The largest shopping center on Earth closed in 2009. On the same land, an Amazon warehouse now stands.

For most of a century, retail was America’s largest private employer. This is the biggest graveyard in the series, and it is the size of the country: catalog empires, five-and-dimes, category killers and the malls that housed them.

  • Sears
  • Montgomery Ward
  • A&P
  • Woolworth
  • The mall
  • Toys “R” Us
  • Circuit City
  • RadioShack
  • Borders
  • Tower Records
  • J.C. Penney
003

The author

Dan Boabeș has spent more than twenty years building the kind of companies this series dissects, and watching some of them die.

A Bucharest-based entrepreneur since 2002, he built one of Romania’s first mobile payment aggregators, mobile ticketing for public transport, car-sharing and ride-hailing platforms, and today runs one of the largest taxi groups in Bucharest. He has launched ventures across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

The series began with Cimitirul Aplicațiilor de Mesagerie (Editura Creator), his Romanian-language autopsy of the messaging apps his generation grew up on. Why They Died takes the same method to new graveyards, in English.

Published by Sunset Protocol LLC

Learn to name the trap before it kills the company.