3Com

3Com was a computer networking products company founded by Robert Metcalfe in 1979 to commercialize Ethernet technology outside the research laboratory. The company's strategy of broad licensing and ecosystem cultivation — rather than proprietary lock-in — accelerated Ethernet's market penetration and established the template for how open standards could generate competitive advantage through network effects rather than through exclusionary control.

3Com's product line expanded from network interface cards to switches, routers, and modems, making it one of the dominant networking hardware vendors of the 1980s and 1990s. The company was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2010 for .7 billion, by which time its original mission — making Ethernet ubiquitous — had been so thoroughly accomplished that 3Com itself had become redundant.

3Com's rise and absorption into HP is a case study in strategic obsolescence: the company succeeded so completely at making Ethernet universal that it eliminated its own reason to exist. This is the paradox of standardization businesses — they are designed to make themselves unnecessary.