People discussing whether RIM, Yahoo, MySpace, etc can ever turn it around and return to past glory. Turnarounds are hard in general & I believe near-impossible in technology, largely because struggles are often born in having missed a shift in technology, platform or markets, from which it's near impossible to recover due to speed of innovation & network effects.

One alternative is to try and reorient the company towards a bet on the *next* shift but if the company had the skills and resources to achieve this goal, it wouldn't have ended up where it is now.

Finally some folks suggest using current cash flow to just buy up promising startups and let them create the future, but I have no examples of this actually working.

So, can a once dominant tech company ever refind its footing after landing in the basement?

** And no pointing to Apple - they might simply be the exception to the rule, unless you can cite other companies which followed their pattern.

I agree that it is incredibly difficult for a once-dominant tech company to become dominant again -- so difficult as to be verging on impossible, which is part of what makes Apple so special. Clay Christensen talks about this with hard-drive companies and others in his book -- even when they see the shift coming, they still can't manage to jump on board, let alone become dominant again. It's a combination of human nature and corporate inertia.

Think only non-Apple example of a big consumer tech brand regaining footing (separate from share price, which sometimes correlates but often doesn't for a while) after losing it is Priceline. And that company never had the fundamental problems that YHOO, AOL, RIMM have.

That said there may be lessons in the way that the telcos have managed to survive the move from wireline to wireless, though I think the primary students of that will be the MVPDs, who are set up to survive the (eventual, not anytime soon) move from TV to Web.

Tech turnarounds are hard but not impossible. The issue with tech vs. others is that tech is so dependent on talent and once you have a company heading so forcibly to the ground it is extremely hard to attract/keep the right tech talent. So, ultimately the turnaround is completely dependent on whether talent can be re-attracted. In the tech space most company brands don't have the longevity to withstand the wait. There are also relatively few tech companies that have such strong assets that great talent eventually comes back because the assets are so differentiated and come back once an environment is created where they can really have some real fun with them (and attract more talent, etc, etc). I think acquisitions, if done in the right way can help this and to be frank I don't think we have seen a great CEO/Corp Strategy/Corp Dev/M&A team really attack one of these turnaround cases (it is not just acquiring companies but it is acquiring the right companies in the right way)