They forced others to pay for a licensing fee to use the term that they created "Firewire" that was, in some cases prohibitively expensive or forced folks to use confusing terms like iLink or the base ISO approved name of IEEE1394. They dropped that fee too late after USB had gained too much momentum, they didn't assist with folks who wanted to create more Firewire based deployments. And above all, when they removed it from iTunes sync for iPhone, iPod (classic) and iPod touch, they took it out of view of their own commercial offerings. Also, the slow removal of it from their own products signals a death of their own product, Firewire. Simply stated, they created it, tried to milk it, Intel came along with USB, it got faster with USB2, they countered with the (superior in my view) Firewire800, confused the plugs for people (even moreso than USB micro, mini, A, B that USB offers) and ultimately pulled it from their own machines... from iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch to Mac Air to some MacBooks not having it. If that's not killing it, I don't know what is.