Seven weeks after it was put on sale, Hewlett-Packard killed its TouchPad tablet, the company's competitor to the Apple iPad.

Last year, Microsoft pulled the plug on its Kin mobile phones only 48 days after they went on sale.

In recent years, technology companies have been cutting their losses with increasing speed. Google proudly released Wave, its platform of collaborative work tools, to the general public in May 2010. It canceled Wave 77 days later. Palm announced its first tablet, the Foleo, on May 30, 2007. By Sept. 4, the company had halted development, and the product was never sold.

Pure Digital, maker of the Flip camcorder, had planned to release the Flip-Live on April 13, but Cisco, which acquired Pure Digital in 2009, shut the entire division April 12.

These days, big technology companies -- particularly those in the hypercompetitive smartphone and tablet industries -- are starting to resemble Hollywood film studios. Every release needs to be a blockbuster, and the only measure of success is the opening-weekend gross. There is little to no room for the sleeper indie hit that builds good word of mouth to become a solid performer over time.

When Microsoft released the Xbox 360 in 2005, there were widespread reliability issues, and the console faced serious competition from the Nintendo Wii. Yet the company stayed the course, and now the Xbox is one of the best-selling video game consoles of all time. That kind of tenacity seems to be in diminishing supply.

Some analysts trace the origin of this blockbuster-or-bust mentality to Apple. Each release of the company's popular iPads and iPhones crosses over into being a mainstream media event. Al Hilwa, an analyst at the research firm IDC, described the accelerated life cycle of high-end hardware as "Darwinian."

"There's a level of desperation from anyone whose name is not Apple,"...

2011-08-30 01:50:34