Zune

Cause of death

Killed by a successor

Made by

Microsoft

The iPod had already won, and then the iPhone made winning the iPod contest irrelevant.

The Zune arrived five years after the iPod into a market that had finished deciding. The hardware was competent and the later Zune HD was genuinely well designed, but Microsoft was fighting for second place in a category the iPhone was about to dissolve entirely. Hardware was discontinued in 2011. Its software ideas survived into Windows Phone, which then died too.