Brands and products you miss, that went out of business or changed

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498. It's a familiar story: A small, fledgling company comes up with a great new product--so great that a

bigger, more powerful company copies the idea. The larger firm flexes its superior distribution and promotional muscles, the smaller outfit watches helplessly as its business slips away, and that's that--another case of the strong running roughshod over the weak.

You may not realize it, but it was this type of incident that gave rise to the modern chocolate sandwich cookie market. The common perception is that Oreos are the genuine article and Hydrox the generic knockoff, but the truth of the matter is precisely the opposite: Hydrox debuted in 1908, the signature product of the nascent Sunshine Biscuits, and ruled the category until 1912, when National Biscuit (later Nabisco) launched the remarkably similar Oreos.

Given Nabisco's superiority over Sunshine in everything from distribution channels to advertising budgets, it was no contest--Hydrox never had a chance. Over the years, Oreos' popularity and market hegemony became so overwhelming that the product transcended the consumer realm and came to be viewed as a cultural icon, an American original--even though there was nothing original about it.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/03/15/256478/index.htm