Utorrentt

In the pantheon of software tragedies—Netscape, Winamp, Skype—μTorrent occupies a unique place. It wasn't bought and killed. It was slowly poisoned while still running, a digital zombie that users keep alive only in old, frozen versions, like a fly in amber.

BitTorrent Inc. needed to monetize. Unlike Napster or LimeWire, the BitTorrent protocol wasn't a company; it was an open standard. The client was just a window into the swarm. How do you make money from a free, open-source protocol? utorrentt

Sometimes the best code is the code that stays small, stays free, and stays out of the boardroom. μTorrent didn't fail because of competition. It failed because its owners forgot that the user is not the product—the swarm is. In the pantheon of software tragedies—Netscape