5 Products That Can't Be Killed

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Everything old is new again. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try to discard aging technology for the hot new thing, breaking up is hard to do. Electric cars may never replace gas-burners in our affections. McDonald's(MCD) can tempt us with new salad varieties, when all we want is the return of the McRib. Apple(AAPL) can banish wonky Flash plug-ins from its iOS, but public demand found a way to bring it back, HTML 5 be damned.

Apple has long led the way on tough-love innovation that discards old technology for new, incensing users and threatening industries. First Apple stopped shipping computers with floppy-disk drives. Then it shut the door on the FireWire transfer standard, just as it did for SCSI, the serial port and the desktop BUS. Big deal.

But walking away from Adobe's(ADBE) Flash -- which powers most video and animation on the Web -- was, indeed, a big deal. User and developer protests forced Apple to reconsider and allow some Flash development for its devices, with the first to act on the move being a company called Skyfire Labs. It released a $2.99 mobile Flash-translating Web browser called Skyfire on the App Store on Wednesday.

Demand for the app essentially crashed Skyfire servers within hours. The company had to cancel sales.

From a statement by Skyfire CEO Jeffrey Glueck: "Skyfire has historically generated high demand for its browser products but nothing like this ... we were blown away by the demand and sales."

Newsflash! New doesn't always mean better, as numerous products with Rasputin-like staying power prove.