Slashdot Mirror
Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever
cuppm writes "Yahoo! News has an article on the The Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever.
'What distinguishes a simply bad product from the truly awful? Sometimes it's a dreadful user interface. Other times it's a product that successfully addresses a particularly daunting problem - yet one shared by relatively few people. And often competitive or financial pressure forces new products to market before they're ready - full of bugs and horribly unusable. Still other times, the products arrive too early. Eventually they become a success, but often after the founding company has been ruined.'"
I didn't see Slashdot on there...
activestudios web design
(Not talking about the codec, but the Circuit City "rentable" DVD scheme) Easily a bigger flop than WebTV or the Clik drive.
Windows! Why isn't Windows on there? What other operating system almost brings down the Internet every month because it's hosting 129873 viruses? Bob didn't do that, and it made the list.
:) Hey that's catchy.
Shame on you, yahoo.
My other car is first.
The Clik! Drive is 40MB, not 40GB as the article states!
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
During the war they promised me there'd be flying cars, where's my flying car? --Red
meh
I must say, the whole Online music store thing... that's a huge flop... DRM'd to hell, harder to use than going online and downloading a 'free' version off one of the many networks... Too little too late... Maybe if they did this when Napster first came out, they could have had a larger crowd, but the 'free' networks have better user interfaces, more selection, and (RIAA crap flooding aside) has better quality than what I can get from the 'online music stores'...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
So the biggest tech flops all happened relatively recently and in america?
;-)
There is an easy solution to this lets not only stop using technology, not only from the USA, but from since the americas where discovered by modern europeans!
I'm blogging this right now on my own printing press and if anyone laughs I will get medieval on their arse (ass is such an americanism and is banned)
or alternativly we could find something better to do than look at year end reviews, year coming previews and over hyped journalistic endevours.
I can't wait for slashdot to leave the post holiday period and start getting good again
oh, and my fav techno flop is the Sinclair C5
blog and junk
Nokia N-Gage
I still use Dataplay. The sound quality on a dataplay disk is much higher than that of a CD.
Also, and most people don't know this, but if you run a green marker around the edge of the dataplay disk, the sound quality is even better.
...such memorable Internet buzzwords as "push technology"? Oh yeah, everyone's going to want a desktop that looks like a hyperactive 2-year-old made it.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to wish all of my followers a merry new year. 2004 will be Michael Sims' last year as a Slashdot "editor."
Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Cyberweb Prognosticateur
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
Mr. Case is laughing all the way to the bank...
The Cue Cat was a glorified privacy-invading bar code scanner that flopped in the markeplace (even though they gave away 1 million of these beasties). I still have 3 of these things given to me through various magazine subscriptions. If I ever find the time I will have to hack the cat.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Around 1997 or so, one of the biggest catchphrases was "push," the ability for companies to put whatever information they wanted (News, stocks, weather) on your computer. Microsoft even went as far as to develop an "Active Desktop" so that the content could be placed directly on the user's desktop. Too bad push just turned out to be a constantly refreshing webpage ("fetch" would have been a better term) which took forever to load on the day's 33.6 modems.
The World is Yours.
That's a pretty lame article.
:p
Some of the items on the list are flops, but the biggest 8--not hardly.
I'm sure that if we tried, we could come up with a better list of 8 flops..
Shit, OS/2 ain't even on the list. How about Taligent? Bill Gates himself said that Taligent was the one thing he worried about that ended up being absolutely nothing.
What about the Disney Sound Doohicky--It plugged into the parallel port, and gave some of the crappiest sound ever made on a computer.
The list certainly could have been better than that.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
...COWBELL!
Walken. Teh spoke. Out.
An intresting article, but fraught (as with many "there it went" and "here it comes") soley with human opinion. A little more fact, please?
I've never even heard of most of the stuff in his list. Pretty much the only thing I agree with is his Opinion on MS BOB and internet appliances(which are still around. who's going to stand at their computer to surf the net??)
freddout
"The most looniest, zaniest, spontaneous, sporadic Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict"
Hello? WTF is up with all these articles panning kozmo all the time? I guess they never bothered to follow up and see that kosmo only failed because they expanded too fast thanks to the pushing of the venture capitalists (which I bet if we really check into things caused more failures than anything else).
...).
Kosmo was and is still a very viable idea for people who live in big cities. Everytime one of these pundits comes along and holds kozmo up as a failure it says to me they just don't understand what it is like to live in the City (where City is SF, NYC, Chicago,
I'm still waiting for my nuclear powered car, and electricity that would be "Too Cheap to Meter" that we were promised in the early '60s.
Germanys System for automated colleting of autbahn tolls for trucks. Costs the german tax payer literally millions of EUR each month, has been set up by joint venture of Deutsche Telekom and Daimler Chrysler, meant to be working since '02, launched in Fall '03, failed, ETA '05!
Snafu all the way.....
this message printed on 100% reusable electrons
Iridium, one of Motorola's biggest all-time money losers. I think the DoD still has a contract with them though, even though their original concept (that of public market penetration) crashed and burned quite hard. The nifty air-droppable and instantly deployable solar satellite phonebooths they proposed for low-lying Africa and other places without appropriate infrastructure likewise didn't come into being, as far as I know.
I sure could use some news right now, and I don't feel like loading a webpage. I sure hope my screen saver kicks in soon.
The biggest FLOPS can be found here.
1Eazel! (That's the definition of fucked company) 2All Advantage! (The worst timing in the history of tech companies. This company comes along and gets hundreds of millions of dollars only to lose all their money paying it back to people who got paid to surf the web when ad revenue died)
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
think about it. microsoft seems stupid, still putting out msntv ads. but what happens when the whole country starts buying hdtv? microsoft will have a big advantage dealing with all the issues involved in making a webtv box. if the only issue is 'fuzzy tv screens' , and that issues is about to change, .............. !!!
by the way slashdot is worse than brezhnev talking to the politburo. commie moderator system.
While they were definitely late I would hardly call them a flop. I would never buy a whole album because I'm not a music lover, but occasionally I like a single song I hear and might be inclined to buy one for 79-99 cents.
People have been using these services even though there are restrictions, and they are almost all easily circumvent able, so quit whining, although there is certainly is a consumer convenience argument you could surely make, the market seems to be able to bear these inconveniences in exchange for cheap, "gimme what I want" per song downloads.
Nonetheless people are paying up even though they could get it for free right next door.
The music industry is slowly learning that if you build it, they will come.
So mark this one as a day late, but not a dollar short.
Why ?
Apple was in the mid-80ies the world monopolist in personal computers. But they managed to be crushed by a combination of small and not even innovative companies: Microsoft and Intel. And they nearly got killed in this process - only financial aid by MS (who need desperately a living competitor due to anti-trust trials) and a aggressive Steve Jobs saved them from oblivion.
The main reason for the near-death experience was a combination of high prices together with a lack of innovation. E.g. MacOS used still cooperative multitasking when even MS - not particulary our main innovator - had already ditched it.
And that's very sad because the foundation principles of Apple computers - easy to use and intuitive high quality computers - was in fact ahead of its time. But Apple managed to drag these principles down the chasm with them leading to the clumsy, security holes ridden software we see even in OSS these days.
Jobs tries to revert history right now putting Apple back to it's foundations. But he will fail. It's always impossible to get the wheel of time turning backwards and people who don't realize this usually get crushed below it. Just take a look at the history of communism.
The time to get IT into the high quality direction is over now. People are too much used to cheap resources, so they won't pay for quality any more. Take e.g. the fuss about the iPod batteries. Apple seems oddly out of place these days - like a living fossil from millenia ago. And all PR magic by Jobs won't change this.
Perhaps in the fullness of time people will get back to high quality IT, but I doubt that anyone living today will witness this.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
IBM wasn't always the geek Defender of the Faith. MCA attempted to lock people in to "All IBM, All The Time" (tm). It died a miserable death, its technologies merging with other, more successful attempts to enhance the PC experience.
Having owned two of them in my life,(and still hacking away on one) I must disagree with at least part of the article. The PCjr was hardly the failure that the article makes it out to be. Sure, it came with a puny 128k, ONE 5 1/4 drive and crappy keyboard (which they later replaced with something a little more legit). But at least it was a PC...sorta...it had color, it could play a lot of PC games, which was very important to me as a twelve year old and most important of all, a 300 baud internal modem that started me on this road of nerdom. The article is just plain wrong in referencing the Audrey as a failure. I have two of them hooked into my network. They're picture frames, mp3 players, message boards (complete with cool blinking lights, and caller IDs. How cool is something like that in you kitchen with a touch screen? Best of all it runs QNX. 'Nuff said. Okay, I gotta agree with the other six, although the thought of browsing some porn on my tv sounds pretty neat.
journalists thinking they can get credibility by coming up with top ten lists at the last minute without spending more than 15 minutes thinking about each choice.
in the classic journalistic sense it seems like a good idea: you dont need to do much work and you can get people flaming each other about it, and talking about what should have been included but wasnt. and that my friends is what you call buzz, which is more important than the article itself in the first place.
however, in the long run this type of fluff baloney will lead nowhere, just to more fluff baloney, which in the long run actually takes more work than writing a normal decent article in the first place. burnout!
The funny thing is that many of these failures could probably be predicted. What makes them "big" is that they had the backing of bodies who could afford to spend so much money on them before concluding that their projects have failed!
They produced PC's and were crushed by people copying them. Then, they made an OS many times better than Windows, and they still couldn't sell it.
yahoo on the list?
Oh yeah, I forgot. They aren't technical.
Need Mercedes parts ?
While the article was titled "Biggest Tech Flops" it clearly should have been title "Worst Tech Market Flops"
Marketing wise, Windows is the biggest success in the history of mankind. Bill Gates strategies and tactics, however illegal or immoral they might have been, led to the rise of this operating system over the much more powerful Macintosh of its day.
I know we all hate Microsoft, but as far as being a product that was marketed perfectly, windows gets that prize anyday.
This should be #1 IMHO. It far dwarfed the whole early pen based computing infatuation. Also ...
He breaks out MagicCap/Go seperately. Why? Throw in the Newton and a few others and just say that the early days of pen computing as a general purpose input device was a complete flop.
How about failed OS ventures. Pink, Taligent, Be, NeXT, OS/2, etc.
WebTV? It may have been a flop, but one of the biggest, I think not.
TransMeta anyone?
Windows version Lotus 1-2-3, it's failure helped to change the landscape of application isv's and helped to firmly root Office as defacto.
Apple Lisa/III. Nuff said.
PCJr, NOTHING compared to PS/2, the system that helped IBM lose the PC market.
I'm confused
Here is the comment above
The PCjr was a flop, but it's interesting how many advances it had that other computers would start using:
4-voice sound when most IBM-compatibles could only produce one sound at a time
16-color graphics when CGA (4 color) was standard
Video memory in system RAM - commonly used on many lower priced motherboards these days
Infrared wireless keyboard
Yeah, it was expensive and limited. But it also had some interesting advances.
--RJ
How could they have missed the iLoo?
Their they're doing there hair.
- WAP/UMTS
- Tablet PC
- AmigaOne
- Sun JavaDesktop
- Laserdisc
Follow the URL and find out why , pr0n, and a clear flamebait for any Democrat/Dean supporter, and absoultely off topic for this discussion.
We should be so lucky.
The "New" FAA AAS traffic control system - was going to replace the current system. MASSIVE amounts of money spent, 2.5 BILLION, where 1.5 BILLION of it had to be written off. About a billion of the development was salvaged by using the Display System Replacement
Folks - that 1.5 BILLION wasted
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Itanium may end up here, or?
I have no idea what it was, but Whoopee Goldberg recommended it, so it must of sucked.
Perhaps it wasn't the biggest flop, but Sony missed the chance at a huge media market share, and perhaps propping up their audio MiniDisc format, by not pushing the MD-ROM format harder. Imagine a disc smaller than a 3.5 inch floppy, holding a lot more than a Zip disk eventually would (MD-ROM preceded Iomega's Zip line), at a cheaper price per disc, with no click-of-death? The only one I ever saw was in a press release, but they claimed their small drive was low-power, and at the time, it would have been excellent for laptop use. Not to mention that you probably could have played the music format discs with it. Now, you can barely find any information on the format by Googling.
Get off my launchpad!
If they had done it at 40GB, it would have been a success. Hell, even I might have reconsidered my boycott of Iomega and thought about maybe getting one at that size, at that time, at that price. But in reality, Iomega remains a company whose products are too small, too pricey, too late, and too unreliable. That and their business practices are just too shady. In my book they are the #2 scumbag company in the country.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Iomega Clik! Drive: In 1999, just as recordable CDs started getting really cheap and popular, Iomega released its own proprietary way to write nearly 40 gigabytes of data to a removable disk.
If they couldn't move that in 1999, that's gotta be the biggest marketing flop in history!
Can't entirely blame the author for this typo -- K, Meg, Gig, Tera -- can get a bit blurry in the psat tense
Actually that was on an IBM commercial with Commander Sisko well before the 70's show. And it was a lot funnier, like everything the 70's show rips off.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Unfortunately [Go's] software was buggy, the computers lacked the horsepower to translate handwriting to characters, and the devices were way overpriced.
What really killed Go was probably a faked demo of Windows for Pen Computing at one of the big shows, which gave investors and buyers the impression that Microsoft was just about ready to release a high-quality pen computing environment. Yet, Microsoft didn't have much pen computing software, and when they eventually came out with something, it was far worse than Go.
Iomega released its own proprietary way to write nearly 40 gigabytes of data to a removable disk.
If only--that might still be a good product today. But it was 40 Mbytes.
The wost failure of the 2003 year could be the SCO Linux license, Or SCO as a company.
Robbery as a business plan ?????
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
"The Clik! drive didn't have the Click of Death, but it quickly followed the Zip drive into hell."
So are they saying Zip drives were failures?
It's not over yet.
I asked him about the product, and he tells me the idea was way ahead of its time..
Way ahead my ass!..
Rapid Nirvana
How about Tandy Corporation's THOR CD-RW-like technology developed back in the late 1980's.
What? You never heard of THOR QED.
16-color graphics
The CGA could be coaxed into doing 16-color graphics at 160x100 pixels: set it into a 100-line text mode, fill the screen with the graphic glyph that's split left/right, and then draw images to the foreground and background colors of each character cell. I know of a couple games that used this mode.
What's #1?
Oh wait. Yeah. Microsoft
mattdev@server$ touch
cannot touch `/dev/genitals': Permission denied
I'm a diehard Mac user, but Lotus Jazz' failure set the Mac back in the business world for years.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Yeah...cause Microsoft didn't advertise the service any longer! They bought it to kill it.
Had they advertised, WebTV would be ubiquitous. If people buy WebTV, they're not buying a computer...they avoid the MS tax, no sales of office. I can't believe they put WebTV on that list. There are many people out there that buy computers to access the internet only. What better device for a novice user than their TV? I'm not being a proponent for WebTV, I'm just saying that WebTV was taking off up until MS bought it, then nothing. No ads, nothing. They drove it into the ground on PURPOSE!
Shoddy shoddy journalism.
What about Commodore computers? They got big, then switched to the Amiga then died..
Or the Timex Sinclair..heh
From Yahoo! Shopping:
- Apple iPod 20GB
- Nikon CoolPix 3100
- Nokia 3650
Odd, I really didn't consider those some of the biggest tech flops ever...
It's more of a list of technologies, platforms, software and peripherals relating to computing.
despite the hype
I have no chance of beating a President who is not afraid to take on terrorists...DR Howard Dean
From the article:
... it was just too expensive to compete with either CDR or flash memory. The blanks alone cost around $10. Worse, the Clik drive was doomed by a problem with Iomega's popular Zip drives. Those devices had an annoying habit of spectacularly failing - taking a user's data along to the grave, as well. Before failing, the drives emitted an ominous clicking noise, quickly dubbed the "Click of Death." The Clik! drive didn't have the Click of Death, but it quickly followed the Zip drive into hell.
Iomega Clik! Drive: In 1999, just as recordable CDs started getting really cheap and popular, Iomega released its own proprietary way to write nearly 40 gigabytes of data to a removable disk.
Cheap shot I know but... $10 for a 40 gigabyte disc in 1999!? (These were of course 40 megabyte devices.)
But the actual thing I wanted to say was: I wonder why the author says the Clik! drive was doomed by the click of death, given that (as he points out) the problem was specific to Zip drives! OK, if the click of death had actually bankrupted Iomega then it would be a fair point - but it clearly didn't, because they're still selling (newer, higher-capacity) Zip drives, external CD-writers etc. So what is he suggesting? That nobody bought a Clik! drive because they didn't trust any Iomega product after hearing about the click of death? I guess it's possible, but since the Clik! drive was clearly unable to compete with CD-R on price, convenience or market penetration, it doesn't seem very Occam-friendly to blame the click of death.
Just musing.
... to the whole concept of push content.
Thankfully we no longer have to guesswho will win the format war for the "next floppy disk" Now that USB key drives are here they are soo awsome.
Since they require no drive, only a USB port they can constantly be upraded in size.
The only thing they got going against them is price/size ratio but this is made up by the awsome portability of keychain/necklace.
I got one for christmas from my tech clueless Dad, how the hell did that happen???
And at 40 bucks for 256 MB offlash memory, why are digital cameras not using these, they are WAAAY cheaper than compact flash and all those other kinds at that size.
Unfortunately, my school went with zip and so I had to follow and now I have all these useless zip disks...
It's the FAKELSTEIN troll. Score!
Apple IIgs
Apple Newton
Apple Lisa
Next Cube
Be BeBox
CASE tools
"Object Databases" as a replacement to RDBMSes
VRML
Gopher
"English-like" programming langauges that will make programming as easy as speaking (COBOL)
"War room" programming
"Multimedia"
Graphics cards that allow you to watch television on your monitor, by plugging a coax cable into the card.
8" floppies
Interactive television
Integrating the PC with the TV
RS-232 serial port (25 pins, of which 4 are used)
WORM drives for PCs
QuarterDesk
Audio Cassettes for data storage
Commodore 16
Windows 1.0
PL/I
MSX
Dec Alpha "21164-PC" personal computer processor
"MPC-compliant PCs"
GeoWorks
Project Monterey (IBM, SCO, & some others)
Micro Channel (bus arch from IBM)
Most of these ideas failed because they were outlandishly stupid. The only reason they got any press in the first place was because the companies promoting them were good at hyping ("it's revolutionary!"), and some people just get caught up in the emotional hysteria.
A few of the ideas (Apple Newton, Apple Lisa) were excellent ideas that just were introduced too early.
And yes the 40gb vs 40mb was a big mistake. A 40gb backup would be tremendous and at $10 per disc insanely cheap.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No, that's what ebay is for. Obviously any of these people haven't bought anything online since the dot-bomb bust. Companies have learned that the public WILL pay outrageous shipping.
So slow, bloated, and buggy as to be unusable. Ashton Tate, the company behind it and successful up to II and III, would have gone under but was lucky enough to be bought out by Borland...
Wait, can you still get these? 40 gig on a disk for ten bucks? That sounds pretty sweet!
How much money did AT&T invest in Olivetti and/or NCR in an effort to enter the computer market?
It's supposed to have been on the cusp of taking over everything (according to typical slashdotters) every year, for at least 5 years running. Here we are, with no penetration into the desktop....
Oh, but THIS year it's gonna happen.
does anyone remember the indrema? the Linux based game system that got all hyped up and actually had some (albeit a small amount) of third party support......only to flop?
neway....yea
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
Personally, even if I hadn't already loathed IOmega (even though, as it happens, most of my Zip drives have worked just fine, thank you very much), the millions of little metal clickers that they gave out at computer shows to promote the Clik drive would have prevented any purchases by me.
.
Anybody else remember what it was like walking around industry trade shows that year with a constant backdrop of "clik" "clik" everywhere? Trying to carry on a productive conversation at PC Expo that year was about as viable as sleeping in a field of katydids at the height of their season.
Doggone Utah nutjobs with their clueless, murble, gurble, frazzin' . .
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
It odd, mainly because what they term 'tech failure' are mainly first generation products that have since seen the light of day and are now moderately successful.
Take PCjr and Internet Appliances - companies are still looking for PC-like 'almost compatible' hardware platforms; thin clients and the like that people who don't need a full PC can use.
Go - tablet PCs and PDAs. While the product then was not great, the research bucks pumped into it still account for where we are today. Need I say more?
Bob - while Bob itself was crap, as was Clippy, you can't deny that information overload is pushing us towards more non-technical ways of dealing with data and tasks. Avatars will be big in the future, especially on PDAs etc.
Clik! and Dataplay - removable storage. Yeah, I can think of a bunch of others that have failed too. Pretty much anything that's not 3.5" floppy, CD, DVD or Zip can go into this category.
WebTV - well eventually the two will merge, but you'll see TV features in PCs, not PC features in a TV.
So yes, they were failures at the time, but many have become patr of technology heritage and we can't really class them as failures because they all played an important role in where we are now.
My list would be:
Nokia N-gage
Boo.com
Amiga marketing in the US (it was a tech flop; great product and a company that didn't understand it)
Spectrum PC200 (rubbish PC and a ZX Spectrum in one box - failed dysmally)
Segway (remember the hype?)
And I'd retitle it something like "Tech products that didn't live up to the hype, or the dreams of their creators".
Once they reorganized, things got better - not for MOT but for the new owners, and users... USA Today April 03...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Clik! is the stupidest name they possibly could come up with. They knew about the Click-of-Death in Zips already when they named this. What were they thinking????
Bad things about USB drives...
1. They're expensive - 32MB = 40 (~$60) (not sure where you get $40 for 256MB the cheapest I can find is around $150).
2. 99% of Computers have USB ports at the *back*, meaning that you have to crawl around the floor to get the thing in. Floppy drives are (almost) universally at the front.
3. You need drivers. If you have to boot into DOS they stop working... For a similar reason they're not bootable, so you can't carry around a 'boot pen' to rescue systems the way you can a floppy.
4. They're not durable - electronics is too easy to break. If you get a floppy wet it'll usually keep working. If you get a pen drive wet then that's $40 (or $150) down the drain.
C'mon. They didn't even do a soil assay. 831 years later it has finally stopped moving, though it is still leaning (who the fuck would want to see the "Used-to-be-Leaning Tower of Pisa"?.) It took 9 million bucks and a simple (dare I say 'medieval?') solution to fix the problem. A nine-century old tech flops burns any bitching about the PCjr. Too bad for IBM, it can't plant one out in front of the Armonk facility to lure pensioners on holiday and Swathmore grads spending the requisite 'year abroad.' Of course, Armonk ain't no Tuscany.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
My PCjr is happily humming along, connected via serial cable to one of my linux boxen. Makes a handy terminal with printer.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
My vote for the biggest tech flop (with the exception of all the tech stocks that went from $100 to $1 a share in the crash of 2001) has got to be the 'Pen Computer' of the early 1990s.
This was going to be huge! A handheld PC that used a stylus instead of a keyboard. It would read your handwriting; It would communicate telepathicly. It would be bigger than free beer and chicken!
Imagine...doctors would rush out to buy a machine that take their scribbles and convert it into clear word-processor ready text. So what if the software couldn't tell a handwritten prescription of Lysergic Acid Dythelemide from Lysterine and Diet Coke!
Imagine...Restraunts would flock to buy these $3000 plastic boxes for each and every one of their $3.50/hr plus tips waitresses. They would do it because it would be so much more efficient than constantly buying 59 cent order pad booklets once a week.
So here's a hearty cheer to all those people who listened to this insanity, opened their wallets, and showered money on these bozos.
Here's to GO!, Here's to Milliennia!, Here's to Pi Systems!, Here's to IO!, and an especially grand huzzah to Apple, who spent several several hundred millions of dollars in the biggest positive-feedback bullshit loop in the tech industry history!
The PCjr, Internet Appliances and WebTV are on the list but where is NeXT, Steve Job's bastard child went that went nowhere?
I know one, precisely one, person who owns a NeXT Station. I know many who own WebTVs and Internet Appliances.
Oh, wait a minute... I get it now. There are links to buy iPods on the page. Can't bite the hand that feeds you, I guess.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
LS120s are/were great imo (though whether they were a flop is another matter). at uni every computer has them, so until 2 years ago when CD writers were installed and on-campus accommodation all became networked they were invaluable.
I am surprised not to see Borland somewhere on the list. How about that Inprise name change? Or Kylix (floss em and toss em)? Just unbelievable.
G4 Cube anyone? Though they make nice fish tanks :)
nothing.can.stop.me.now
8 biggest flops of all time? More like the 7 biggest flops published in issues of BYTE found when he finally cleaned out his closet at his Mom's house, plus the PC Jr.
/. skewed low, but come on!
I knew the average age of
How about the Space Shuttle? Or the Mars Observer? How about the billions in miltary flops, like the Cheyenne helicopter or the A-12 attack jet?
-Java, as originally envisioned ("Future Apps will be pushed Applets")
- Microsoft ChromeFX
- XML (supposed to replace HTML since 1997)
- Atari Personal Computers (mid 80s)
- Hologram cube storage (late 80s)
- VRML + Virtual Cyberspace Avatars
- ATM Protocol (was supposed to have replaced TCP/IP)
- Atari Jaguar game console
1. Prodigy. The online service that went up against AOL, delphi, compuserve, etc. I remember at a MacWorld Expo, some guy shoving a Prodigy bag in my hand. I chucked it in the trash, since I didn't want to be seen with it.
2. Oh, and Apple's eWorld. A year after eWorld was canned, I went into a Babbage's and found a shrink-wrapped copy of eWorld sitting on the shelf. Man, they sure keep up on Mac software.
3. Rhapsody/Copland. When Apple was on the ropes after Scully left, they desperately needed a new OS to replace the long-in-the-tooth Mac OS. Rhapsody and Copland wasted so much of developers time (read: years) learning to write code for an OS that would never be released. Books were even written on it and it never happened. This really damaged Apple a lot. Thank god they went with *nix.
These have been around in some form or other since the 1960s. Every few years somebody introduces a new one. The problem was initially economic, or technological. Now it's simpler. People do not want to be seen, and do not want to see where creative conversationalists might place their camera. Remember 'Freevue'? Sort of like CUSeeMe for people who surfed without the unnecessary restriction of trousers.
Wow, an electric wheelchair where you get to stand up... that's what Americans need is less exercise. Good thing you can fit 6 of them in your SUV.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Hey, Kozmo.com! Spells it wrong, and not selected as one of the grand failures, but still mentioned. The real sad thing, as I understand it, is that the service was actually profitable in Boston and New York -- markets where a service like that makes sense. But they tried to extend way too far, and into cities like Dallas and Chicago, where I could have told them it wasn't likely to work. And then they got into so much debt they had to shut the whole thing down, just when Bostonians were getting really addicted.
Some posts have mentioned Apple's hits & misses:
The Newton is really neither. It wasn't really a money loser for Apple (but wasn't a money maker either) - we also have to consider that the CREATORS of the Palm and later Handspring moved on from the original Newton team. The latest Treo is essentially what I think the Newton would have become.
Three of Apple's biggest misses are actually some of the coolest products they've ever introduced:
1) Apple Set Top Box - it was going to be a Tivo/Media Server - almost 10 YEARS before they are starting to become mainstream. I have one of these boxes and was able to get some content working on them. Apparently Apple tried to market these to resort hotels (the info I've been able to run on the box was for DisneyWorld Hotels)
more info can be found at www.applefritter.com
2) Apple Macintosh TV - this was a really cool looking Mac/TV combo that was sold in the education market that is underpowered but again WAY before the time of this type of integration (by about 3 years)
3) G3 All In One - this was only distributed in the education market and was actually a better iMac (had PCI slots, floppy, zip, CD, A/V in and out and three NORMAL RAM slots) I use this unit as my TV - it has great speakers and I have recently been able to upgrade it to 1Ghz G4. This was out 8 months before the iMac
more info can be found at www.apple-history.com
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
>Graphics cards that allow you to watch television on your monitor, by plugging a coax cable into the card.
Um sure. That is why you can walk into any store today and still see four different tuners on the shelf. The market for tuner / capture cards is small but exists and thrives. HTPCs are taking off now with people building TIVOlike devices. A tuner card is required.
PS -
>Audio Cassettes for data storage
You have strange definitions of a flop. The cassette tape was THE means of data storage in the early days of home computing. PET had one, the VIC20, ADAM, TRS80, hell even the IBM XT first came with one.
>Windows 1.0
Strange definition indeed.
Home PCs would eventually take off, but IBM never did recover from the Junior.
Yeah.. I'm always amazed that little Mom and Pop shows like IBM can survive against all the adversity in the big corporate world.
It's really too bad that this Junior PC didn't work out for them. Could have been their big break. Now they'll probably just be bought out now by some big company.
PC component prices plunged during the Internet Appliance heyday, so a full PC wound up costing just a few dollars more than the truncated Applicances.
WebTV:
But when sales stalled at around a million users, someone woke up and realized that low-resolution TVs are lousy at displaying emails and web pages
If these are really the reasons for their failures then both may experience a resurgence. I say that because of the new TV's that are in the stores today. Plasma/LCD TV's were a big seller for Christmas and their price has been projected to drop to half what they are today by next Christmas. Their crisp, bright, HDTV capable pictures will cure what Louderback says ails the category. It is just a matter of time. And Microsoft makes so much money in its monopoly markets of OS and Office S/W that it has all the time in the world for WebTV to take off.
Secondly, WebTV IS an Internet Appliance just not in the form that Ellison was pushing with the "Internet Computer". People will continue to buy TV's for their livingrooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and the backseat of their SUV's not PC's. And once those TV's are capable of displaying high definition images, then the asian commodity manufacturers will jump into the market and bring the prices down along with a multitude of features. I can imagine settop boxes competing year after year with new features like voice and gesture recognition instead of a clumsy remote controls, DRM, long term storage of data in Internet connected facilities, access to grid computing, MMORPG, biometrics, etc. all for $199 and the effort of connecting a few cables to a preexisting TV.
Within a few years I think we will finally see the success of both of these categories.
My dad bought it at Cosco
They obviously never used a PCJr (as I did whilst growing up). The sidecar expansion they so insult was one of the best features. You could upgrade your memory without ever opening the case!
This is the sort of thing I only see in future concept models of computers nowadays (slot in components, computing cores, etc). If you needed another hd/drive/memory expansion you just slapped on another sidecar, it extended the bus for you.
Interesting that WebTV is so honored, because the co-founder of the company, Phillip Y. Goldman, died this week at 39.
viagra ;)
-judging another only defines yourself
Iridium handsets seem large by cell phone standards, but military radios with long range capability are still a backpack item or worse. There's more network capacity in the Iridium system than in military commo nets, and you can call any phone in the world.
Think of it as an instrument of empire, like the British East India Trading Company, not a business.
I've read both Startup, former Go CEO Jerry Kaplan's book, and Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, by ex-Microsoftie Marlin Eller.
IMHO, it's hard to call Go a legitimate "flop"-- they were killed mostly by deliberate acts of Microsoft, who (at the time) developed and marketed Pen Windows for little reason other than to prevent Go from getting a foothold in a market where Microsoft had no competing product. Microsoft also used their old tricks of OEM and ISV intimidation to keep companies from working with Go, and used their infamous per-processor licensing to stick a Microsoft-imposed tax on the PenPoint OS.
Granted, Go Corp was victim of a few bad decisions by its own management, but more than one of those was made with the specter of Microsoft in mind, or after MS already had them on the ropes.
~Philly
It goes without saying the ./ community is going to destroy these types of articles in miliseconds, but it does seem to border on gross incompetence to not mention efforts like Apple's Lisa, which even at the time of its introduction was plagued with the association of being one of the biggest tech flops.
Here are some of my recommendations:
* PRICELINE.COM - proof that some goofy, potentially unenforceable patents and fast talking can bilk millions out of investors. Who in their right mind thought that the masses might want to "name their own price" on things like airfare without knowing whether they'll get their flight until the last minute? Or Priceline's ridiculous grocery-purchasing scheme which ended up having people check out twice in their local supermarket. I consider this more of a marketing scam than a tech flop but the company and its services were promoted as being a tech innnovation.
* PDAs - A lot of you may disagree, but I contend that the whole PDA movement, pen-computing, etc. has never evolved beyond a fad. It doesn't matter what models or technology we're talking about, with the few exceptions in vertical markets, PDAs are nothing more than annoying, battery-powered notepads that have less practicality in 99% of the scenarios where they show up than a simple note pad.
In fairness, I understand the huge value these devices have had in limited markets, but as a general purpose consumer item, all of these tiny devices are little more than novelties. The only thing that IMO will save PDAs is the integration of them with cellular/phone technology, which is a tech success, but by themselves, outside of specific applications, they're goofy toys and a total tech failure.
2. Mine came with a 4 foot extension and a cradle, which I've never used because 90% of the computers I work with are either customers with Dells or Compaqs or HPs; or ones I built, all of which have ports on the front.
3. Linux and Windows2k/XP both recognize mine just fine without any special drivers (although the linux systems do need to be configured right). You're right, they're not suitable for system rescue, that's what the mini-CDs in my wallet are for.
4. I've put mine through the washer twice, and it works fine. Try that with a floppy.
I'm not sure what your beef with USB drives is, but maybe you should try a modern one before you go bashing them. (I will admit I didn't like them when they first came out, but recent ones have improved a lot.)
Nerd who wanted a browser before mozilla was ready and just doesn't think the mozilla tabbing is/was as good. Plus I like it that opera can resume from where I left off.
So bleh! But yeah its popup killing is not as good as mozilla's. Not sure if it was a real popup as in a new window being opened. Looked more like a flash thingy.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
no wait that was yesterday. The Best and Worst Technologies of 2003?
sure isn't viagra ;)
-judging another only defines yourself
Now they are going to have a huge flow of traffic that is going to screw up their database again...
1. Here is one for $55 at Newegg
2. Most new computers have front-mounted USB ports.
3. You need drivers for older versions of Windows and DOS. They are bootable with most newer motherboards/BIOSes.
4. I've had a 128 MB pen drive living in my front pocket for at least a year. Do that with your "durable" floppy.
Virtual reality.
If we're going by most number of really bad scifi movies and tv episodes, this wins hands down. Yes, once upon a time people believed the future of computing would be an evolutionary progression of stumbling into walls with a 20lb brick on your head.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
...we have Daikatana. It was completed, but never came close to returning the investment.
On a somewhat related note, more money is easily blown yearly by movies studios producing crap movies than what the tech industry loses on their flops.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
My company got suckered into buying tons of these shitty drives that would hold 2 GB on each disk, at a cheaper cost than a Jaz Drive. It was a good concept, but they all stopped working after a while. USB, SCSI, Parallel, IDE, didn't matter, they all stopped working. I tried recently to download their firmware updater to update my drive in the small hope that it might be better now, and their firmware loader couldn't even find the drive. One of the biggest POS's ever, I can't believe the company is still in business.
Expensive? $55CDN for 128MB. While it's admittedly a boxing week sale, and costs about $80 CDN (About $50USD) regularly, I'd say that's indicative of where the prices are headed.
USB ports are slowly moving to the front. If they are in the back, the system probably doesn't support booting from USB anyway. And just because most speaker jacks are in the back of computers, the rate of headphones and speakers being plugged in hasn't been greatly affected, has it?
Last I checked, USB drives were bootable, and there are some linux distros that can boot off of them. Why would anyone want to boot into DOS anyway? It's not that great for fixing problems, thanks to the Windows Registry and NTFS.
I concede this point to you...Although, I'm curious as to how you'd be getting your Pen Drives and Floppies out into the rain in the first place. Furthermore, have you ever seen a floppy drive spontaneously destroy all the data on a disk before? Floppies are far from durable as well.
I find it more fascinating how Palm devised a way to capitalize on the flaws of its predecessors to create a reasonably priced, decent working PDA.
What was the turning point on pen computing? The concept of Grafitti writing? Powerful processors? Better requirements? A more realistic approach to market?
The tech industry is full of failures, massive and small. Most of the projects I've been a part of never made it to the light of day, or were canned right before going to production. This usually is because the initial Good Idea that started the whole project got buried under featuritis as different departments, user groups, marketing groups, development groups, and vendors added their pet features. Scope creep is the killer in this industry. As the despair.com poster says, "None of us is as dumb as all of us."
They had more failures (Sega CD, 32X, Saturn) than I have hot dinners...
RS232 used both 9 and 25 pin connectors. The 9-pin serial ports on your computer are RS232*. As far as only using 4 pins, that is incorrect as well. Data was transmitted over two pins. If all you wanted to do was send/receive data you only needed those two pins. Other pins were used for useful stuff such as hardware flow control, carrier detection, and other out of band signaling. RS232 has been around forever, has been extremely widely used, and will be around for a long time to come (though not likely for much longer on consumer PC's)
RS422 is a whole different animal and has nothing to do with 9-pin connectors.
* Note: most new computers seem to be doing away with RS232[c] ports in favor of USB these days.
Laserdiscs came out in the early 80's. 1980 I think. And many came with special features, although hardly as robust as one finds on DVDs.
And MMS.
Top Ten Shameful Games :S
Virtual Boy, I liked the console, though
Post 16-bit Nintendo Failures
Atari Jaguar
Screwed up atari/nintendo agreement. My favourite.
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
CASE tools -- code generators based on diagraming methodology -- were/are failures. But they aren't limited to those things I had to use (and manage, as the Advanced Computer Lab manager) in college: Excellerator, TI Information Engineering Facility (which would generate COBOL or C on demand), etc.
The CASE failures continue with:
-- MS VisualStudio.NET 2003
-- Aspect Oriented Programming
-- TAGLIBS
-- etc.
These new technologies are really just ways to automate programming, like CASE tools.
Sure, they are cool, work reasonably well for small projects, but once you need to scale you have to optimize the general implementations provided by the tools into specific use cases. So, what started out as a prototyping tool turns into a production refactoring nightmare -- especially when you've built a team without the deep knowledge of what those tools implement.
Taglibs are just stupid. Ever notice that JSP2 pages look sleek and parse. Ever wonder why JSP2 forms are broken up on so many pages? JVM has a 64K limit on class size; by the time you've accounted for the overhead in the JSP and added you AOP and taglibs generated code, you've got to slim down SOMETHING. Reminds me of COBOL processing in the 80s/90s on small machines; optimizing code and data to fit in the compiler limited program size.
If you have to scale, require the use of Textpad/VIM/EMACS/Notepad for all programming. As soon as you introduce an IDE kiss scalability GOODBYE!
All the replies to this post rip up his claims, mod him over rated...
many new computer have front loading usb ports, bios can boot form usb, if you are working with dos, you arent working with USB anyways.
If a pen drive gets wet why would it stop working??? I would think if you let it dry off befoore hooking it up to a computer it should work fine.
f im wrong please explain what the water does? corrodes the metal or somethign? they are gold interconnects...
at least in my life. I first encountered zip on a wide scale basis my last year of high school, several years ago when they install parallel zip 100 drives for the new 'digital art' class that combined photography with photoshop.
So I bought my own USB zip 100 which i still use a couple times a month to back up some files I frequently change.
UTexas Austin also has built in zip drives on most of their machines in the windows based labs.
-
Emphasis on "was." I ripped mine out years ago and I don't know of anyone who uses them now. Nor have I seen the media for sale in a long time.
.. but Windows ME! The worst OS Microsoft ever tried to sell. A windows so bad it froze up during installation! A windows so bad that when I had to reboot from a freeze up, scan disk would start, and then freeze up, requiring another reboot, which in turn would cause scan disk to start, and then freeze up again. A windows so bad it only stayed on the market for 9 months, even though it can still be purchased at some walmart stores. Windows ME showed us just how bad windows could truely be.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
The Disney Sound Source allowed me to play Return to Zork - which absolutely required a sound card (no subtitles as I recall) - for the additional cost of a $20 device. Everything else mom could find was $60 or more back then.
Mind you, the sound quality did suck, and I don't recall ever using it again, but it had its place. One of our neighbors was quite happy to get it when we gave it to them. For us it was the affordable next step up from PC speakers. I still had the old SoundBlaster 16 ISA cards that replaced it up until a year ago.
I'm not sure what his problem was either. One small problem with USB drives is that the people making the interface chips seem to target only Windows and maybe MacOS. This results in a lot of unusual behaviour, as documented by the author of the linux usb-storage driver. Basically they're supposed to implement the SCSI-II mass storage command set, or at least a subset. But guess what, most designers have taken short cuts in implementing just enough to work with windows and maybe MacOS.
Originally, "Computer Multimedia" involved using the PC as a switch box for Audio/Video on CDs or LaserDiscs. (The Amiga was based around this idea of multimedia, for example.) I agree that this idea was a failure -- very very few products actually used this stuff.
However, once the CPU appeared to do "Digital Multimedia", it became an undeniable roaring success. Video games STILL have those annoying FMV cutscenes.
> Nobody makes english-like programming languages any more; the idea is universally agreed to be silly.
AppleScript.
The US Navy bought hundreds of these, the NSA *has* hundreds of them, and a particularly large telcom provider in the southwest US used them for all of their billing systems. They were never intended to be used as a home user system so you're comparing apples and pickles.
Not to mention that NeXTStep was a good OS - it now lives on in OSX.
/* ICBM Coordinates 32.78N, 79.93W */
Perhaps one of the most entrenched languages of all time, and a very effective one. One thing most new programmers forget is that the primary purpose of any program is to get the job done.
COBOL works perfectly for that in many environments.
Sometimes I think the GUI set computing BACK more years than it advanced it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
give me a break. i swear to god 2/3 of all slashdot articles are about objective lists, m$ attacks and/or another case mod. JESUS CAN WE GET MORE INTERESTING ARTICLES? ....I thought not..
DEC's Transaction Processing OS that was neither RSX11-* nor RSTS(/E). Announced in '78 or '79 and lasted about 6 months...
And no, it was not bleeding edge, nor did it contribute technologically to any significant extent to any later DEC products, IIRC.
I don't see these around anymore even though I've got one in a laptop. They were excruciatingly slow. I don't even think you can buy media these days.
+1
Honestly, the only experience I had with WebTV was at my parent's house many years ago.
For them this was better then any computer. You sign up, you get your email account, you get access to weather, channel listings (they have WebTV with cable) You can program it to switch to specific channels at specific times. No worries for viruses, worms, corrupted file systems or bloated registries.
For people who just wanted an email address, gamble online, check news, weather, and program their tv/vcr, it was amazing.
Sure low res, and most of these features are in many products, but at the time it was a great idea.
TruePunk | Games
Cosco is a giant shipping company.
Are you sure you don't mean Costco?
Big different there.
Maybe next year we'll see "CEO'd in America, made everywhere else" as the big flop of 2003-2004.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Tue Dec 23, 2003, 6:04 AM ET
Jim Louderback - ExtremeTech
"Upon us all, just a little rain must fall." - Led Zeppelin
So it is with technology. Some of the greatest flops of all time have come from high tech. Millions of dollars and countless person-hours have been wasted creating products so bad, so misguided, and so difficult to use that entire companies have been destroyed.
What distinguishes a simply bad product from the truly awful? Sometimes it's a dreadful user interface. Other times it's a product that successfully addresses a particularly daunting problem - yet one shared by relatively few people. And often competitive or financial pressure forces new products to market before they're ready - full of bugs and horribly unusable. Still other times, the products arrive too early. Eventually they become a success, but often after the founding company has been ruined.
Silicon Valley - and other technology centers -suffer from a unique form of groupthink. Powerful engineers with good ideas lead many startups, but lack a lick of marketing sense, especially when it comes to what consumers want. Whole companies can delude themselves into thinking they're changing the world - when all they're delivering is simply a left-handed bread box no one needs.
The Internet bubble produced huge numbers of examples of these, like the misguided Pets.Com and its bedraggled sock puppet. How could they possibly imagine that anyone would pay $20 to ship a $10 bag of dog food? Remember eToys? WebVan? Kosmo?
But those blunders pale when compared to the industry's biggest catastrophes. Here's my unscientific list of the biggest consumer technology calamities of all time.
PCjr: It all started here, with the product they called "the peanut." IBM was still riding the incredible success of its IBM PC. The PCjr. was its entry into consumer computing. Alas, this circa-1984 PC was junior in every way. The terrible keyboard featured stiff little keys that felt like pushing on chiclets and the system lacked expandability - relying on sidecar-style modules to add features. My notoriously cheap grad school roommate actually bought one, but even at the $1,000 price (business PCs were selling for $5,000 at the time), it was terrible. Home PCs would eventually take off, but IBM never did recover from the Junior. This was the first big bomb in consumer computing, and probably still ranks as the worst.
Go: No, not the Internet site, though that also failed. This Go was the hottest thing going in 1992, when it hoped to create the next step after personal computers and Windows. The company spent millions to develop a completely new operating system called Penpoint, based on handwriting, not keyboards. Unfortunately the software was buggy, the computers lacked the horsepower to translate handwriting to characters, and the devices were way overpriced. The tremendous failure of pen computing was shared by contemporaries like Momenta - who burned through 40 million bucks in 1992 while building a mostly useless $5,000 portable computer, and EO - a pen-based phone sold by AT&T and heavier than many notebooks today. It's worth noting that Microsoft's Pen Computing for Windows did no better, though Microsoft is still around to take another shot at this field. More on that later.
Magic Cap: I went to the launch of this early, cutesy yet cumbersome PDA; I remember feeling like it was Brezhnev addressing the politburo. Corporate agents strategically planted about the room led the crowd in rousing applause after every third sentence. I swear at one point they started doing the wave. General Magic, founded by refugees from Apple, failed with its first products, but with backers like AT&T and Sony, it had enough investor money to eventually get a product out the door. Only it wasn't a PDA but a pseudo-friendly, agent-based voice mail system. That, too, ended up on the scrap-heap of histor
Oops, yeah I've never shopped there myself, sorry about that, thanks for the correction.
Not that the machine was inherently bad technically - it just didn't work very well.
It was unreliable, both in hardware and software (especially the early units), bombs were their equivalent of BSODs and happened just as often, and they had bad PCJr-type graphics modes that weren't even as good as EGA at a time when VGA was becoming standard.
Not only that, the Trammiels were just putrid at running a company and ran Atari into the ground in a few short years.
Worse than that was PCDitto, the Atari ST DOS-emulator (that still required a legal version of DOS - 3.3 or earlier) that enabled a fast 68000-based Atari ST to be the equivalent of a 1 MHz 8088 (about 1/5 the speed of a standard XT).
How do I know? I owned both at one time, unfortunately.
Microsoft's VP of Customer Service is Helen Waite. If you are having problems with their products go to Helen Waite.
It might've worked if it was 100% wireless and if all the TV advertisers used it. I just thought it looked too phallic.
Greased Cue Cat anyone?
C|N>K
I thought the G4 Cube would be on that list for sure.
weird.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
At first I thought yahoo DSL was on the list and I thought, "Wow, that took some guts to admit!" and then noticed the text "ADVERTISEMENT" above the image.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Shit, OS/2 ain't even on the list.
:)
:)
OS/2 may have been a failure in the home/desktop market, but it was a pretty big success in the business/embedded market. It's use in bank ATMs alone may well qualify it as the 2nd most successful OS to date.
How about Taligent?
Better, although it might be disqualified on a technicality: does something have to exist before you can really call it a flop?
What about the Disney Sound Doohicky
I dunno, never heard of it. Are you sure it isn't just ordinary crap? To be a flop, there has to be an expectation of success, and to be a huge flop, there has to be an expectation of huge success. So things can be amazingly crappy without ever being a flop. In fact, when it comes to high-tech, crap is almost the rule, rather than the exception. And everyone knows this, which is why expectations are usually low, which in turn is why huge flops are kinda rare, despite all the utter crap that's out there.
OK, yes all Windows could be on the list, but ME was something that should have never been released. Should have been called Win 98 Third edition. It was slower than 98 SE, did virtually nothing of interest more or better than 98 and crashed more. On my job I meet someone who was on the design team for ME (I live in Washington State). He told me, not that this is a big revelation, that they released it about 3 months early and it had 100's of known bugs/flaws.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
In no particular order:
1. Bally Astrocade (1978) - A competitor to the Atari 2600 and Mattel Intellivision. Had technical problems that prevented it from being released in time for Christmas 1977. Nice machine, though, and had a Tiny Basic cartridge that noone else had. Bally/Midway never sold very many of them. Good thing they had Space Invaders and PacMan to fall back on.
2. Stringy-Floppy (Early '80s) - When even 90K floppy drives cost $500 this was an endless-loop tape drive that was faster than a cassette and cost around $150. Floppy drives started coming down in price soon thereafter.
3. Tandy TRS-80C (Early '80s) - The "ColorTrash80" had a chicklet keyboard, 32K of RAM, a 6809 processor, and a tape drive that allowed 8-character filenames (unlike Atari and Commodore). It was also too expensive and incompatible with the other TRS-80 products. Those who bought them loved them, though. Just not a lot of people bought them.
4. The infamous '70s audio flops: 8-Track tape & Quadrophonic sound.
5. Over-the-air pay television services like ON-TV, Spectrum, SelecTV, and Wometco Home Theatre (1980-85). Right when cable was taking off. Easy to legally descramble with the old thumbwheel-tuner VCRs (at least with ON-TV).
6. Betamax, although it did survive in broadcast TV areas like news departments.
7. Audio tape cartridges that looked like cassettes but were about 3 times as large. This was in the mid-late '60s. Never went anywhere.
Microsoft's VP of Customer Service is Helen Waite. If you are having problems with their products go to Helen Waite.
What the article failed to mention is, once you had a bad Zip Disk, if you inserted it into another perfectly good drive, it would ruin that drive as well. Sort of a mechanical virus. This was a pretty common scenario, since if your disk doesnt seem to be working, what do you do? Find a friends/co-workers drive and try it out there (thus destroying your friends drive in the process).
major hardware flops:
- 3D0 system
- ATARI Jaguar!!!!
- SNK NeoGeo
- Sega Saturn 32X add-on hardware
- Turbo Grafix 16 hand-held
- Sega GameGear hand-held
There are a lot of software flops, but the most hyped and failed game I can remember was Jurassic Park. Why did it flop?
- realistic physics ate frame-rate like mad even with top-of-the-line P2-400 CPU(at the time)
- too graphic intensive: current hardware was not ready to draw realistic trees or huge expansive areas
- bad gameplay
The only good thing about it was that your character had big boobs showing cleavage. In a nutshell an ambitious game released...
The core OS was based on FreeBSD/NetBSD was easily portable, the microkernel also made ports easy. Fat binaries that ran on any platform were also the norm.
Lots of the technology from NeXT OS (aka NeXTStep) went into Mac OSX - from the NetInfo database, the dock concept, to the file system layout.
/* ICBM Coordinates 32.78N, 79.93W */
Where's the Apple ///? And the Lisa? And the eMate?
Dammit, there's not enough Apple in this post!
As an aside, it also lacks wang. You know, the computer company?
Perhaps this article is looking at the wrong side of the coin and taking a pestimistic view of innovation and discovery. How many "idiots" failed at flight before the Wright brothers finally did it? Was their forerunners' effort for naught? Even today we might consider the Wright Flyer a flop - good pilots can barely get the thing to fly and nobody rushed to purchase and deploy their model. They didn't serve a meal and a movie onboard, and failed to fly to the next airport! That's primitive and useless by our modern standards. Judging old technology through our modern lens is a folly that fails to recognize the significance of the technology for its day.
I could go on with early attempts to cirumnavigate the globe, invent the lightbulb, etc. Many failures and cosmic wastes of money prevailed before a breakthrough occured. The buckets of gold handed to you by the Queen to go try something aren't as forthcoming. You have to support yourself with a capitalistic business model. The marketing of the tech product that isn't quite there is an effort (sometimes shady)to recoup R&D money. If you're lucky you get a few spin-offs along the way to pay your bills. If your're not, your business dies and leaves behind a product that "failed". Inevitably another business scoops up the pieces and finishes the job when there is enough money or advancement has solved the technical hurdles.
What matters, is the idea and the useful knowledge that comes from failing. Today's failure might just be the one useful piece of knowledge that makes tomorrow's success fall into place. In his list I see the forerunners and failures that have made Tablet PC, PDA, current GUI interfaces, DVD, etc. possible. So what if the previous business model and marketing attempts sucked. I am glad for my technophile little self that someone tried to make it happen, so I could enjoy their eventual fruits. Innovation is rarely a function of market penetration and stock price. This guy's column is suitable for the MBA crowd, not the tech crowd.
Goals for 2011: 1. Stop plate tectonics. 2. Prevent animal predation. 3. End supernovae now. 4. Rid the world of evil.
Unless you believe it was intended all along to be the hard drive only to be used 8 hours a day, and that failure was the users fault if they used it for more hours a day than that.
Can't believe *that* got left off...
Everything (hardware) that Sega has developed after the Genesis. I still regret having ever bought a SegaCD.
--
Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
XML: A pain to program with, an eyesore to read.
MSX may have failed in the USA, perhaps. It did well in Europe and Japan, and in South America it was a huge success.
You might as well claim the BBC Micro was a failure, because it was barely known in the USA. But they were the mainstay of British educational computing for the best part of a decade.
A flop so monstrous, people even forgot about /. comments to boot (AFAICT).
it when writing this article AND when writing
- Tech support in non-English speaking countries.
- Interns in TV commercials
Okay those may not be technology as such, but for some reason those commercials just made me want to beat my TV set into a smoking pile of wires with a baseball bat.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I had one of those with the updated keyboard. It was a great little PC that cost about the same as an Apple //c (had one of those too). Sure, adding drives or memory to it meant the case got bigger, but that was better than having a nest of cables all over the place like many other home computers. After the chiclet keyboard, the biggest problem was the non-standard connectors on the back. IBM wanted to be able to plug in lots of different things, but didn't have the space for normal connectors. I think before it died due to a broken water pipe, mine had an overclocked NEC V20 replacement cpu, a 3.5" floppy, 768K RAM, a 20M SCSI hard drive, and I think a math co-processor. It could run just about any program I needed (123, Word Perfect, MathCad, PSPICE, Turbo-C, dos GNU tools, etc.). It got me through college. I wish I didn't have to throw it out when we moved.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
And Microsoft's crowning achievement,
MICROSOFT BOB!
Yes, Microsoft, will never rise that high ever again.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Sure, I agree that Microsoft has had some flops (especially BOB), but how does something like WebTV lose out to Apple blunders (Of which there have been just as many) like Newton and LISA. Come on, I mean, WebTV was only a tiny little flop by comparison. . .
In 1999, just as recordable CDs started getting really cheap and popular, Iomega released its own proprietary way to write nearly 40 gigabytes of data to a removable disk.
It was a failure because it was a mere 40mb. They were tiny zip disks that cost more than CDRs.
Most of the flops being discussed were not flops in the sense of being a bad idea that died a bad death.
Here's my top 5 list:
* Attempts at making the IBM compatible PC proprietary. Everyone who has tried has failed, including IBM!
* Copy Protection. From the damaged sector floppies of the 80s to dongles, to encryption schemes to future DRM. All of it has been an abject failure. Anyone remember Copy IIpc?
* Proprietary removable media formats with the exception of iomega.
* Razor blade business model for technology with less than a two year lifespan.
* Proprietary networking technologies. They work for a year then die. Proprietary means only one company makes it. Thomas-Conrad comes to mind.
-- $G
Interpreting as trolling, cause that's what it is, gotcha!
During part of the late '90's, I was installing custom accounting software on clients' systems and the one thing we did to vastly increase the reliability of their shiny new windows 98 systems was to turn Active Desktop *off*. Only some systems showed the problem, not all, but of those that started crashing with seemingly random-module 0E errors, turning it off permanently stopped the problem. Wicked little bastard that one was to correlate. The closest I got to finding the exact cause before leaving the company was that it didn't happen until C or VB libraries were installed as part of an application or driver install. Mismatched set of IE libs + Active Desktop (IE based) = 0E. At my next job I hunted it down. It was the "auto packaging" part of VB that was only including *some* of the IE .dll's, not the complete set (only those that were actually called), and by chance they often did not match those already on the system. I insisted that if any IE .dll's were to be included in our SETUP.EXE's, a complete version-matched set had to go. Worked like a charm, but we also had the luxury of insisting in our licensing that the systems be for our software's use only. Due to the clients' security practices, they were not to be networked, so possibly killing IE was not a problem. That way if an 0E problem cropped up due to someone else's install, a reinstall of our app including the .dll's solved it 98% of the time at little support cost. The other 2% were due to printer driver app installs; we usually backed them down to a more "generic" driver included with the OS so that the fancy printer applications were not also installed. Long and short of it is that Active Destop + VB-autopackaged installs pretty much ensured a flakey system. May .dll-hell rest in peace and never again walk this earth.
Something like 70% of business programming world wide is done in COBOL. PITA at times? Yes. Flop? No. Grace Hopper's creation will likely outlive YOU.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Yeah but ... who would have thought that anyone would pay much, let alone soda prices for bottled water?
IBM never recovered from the Junior.
Wow... I wish I could NOT recover like IBM has! :)
has someone already mentioned n-gage? huge hype from nokia, big shipping numbers, some games got even good reviews in finnish video game magazines (yeah, the finnish magazines always give good points for finnish games, and nokia's games), but did anyone actually buy it?
My first PC was the PCjr. It was not bad at the time considering the difference in the price between PC and PCjr.
Originally I bought the Apple IIC, returned it to the store and got the PCjr instead. And it had colour (Apple IIc was mono). My favourite game - MS Flight simulator. I also used it for writing my assignments. WordStar was fitting on one 360K floppy and still had room for data.
....Successful would be defined as sold millions, made billions, still in business producing their product today.....
STILL in business today??? No. But neither is the Apple IIc, Commodore 64 (quite successful one). And successful just means that the production cost of the unit was less the what it was sold for (IBM would have the real figures)
1. Bootable USB port
2. Combined 802.11x and 128MB flash device
3. Linux configured as wireless router on the flash.
4. Plugin, reboot. Instant WiFi access bypassing the corporate firewalls.
Can you hear the SysAdmins screaming? Let's hope everyone remembers to disable booting from USB in the BIOS and then locks it down...
Don't forget cash registers.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Yeah, Lisa was a flop - but Lisa built the foundation for the Mac.
As for Newton - how was that a flop? It still has fanatical fans.
Clear, Dark Skies
Yup, now, but remember that Zip disks were around $20 or so when they first came out. Regular MD discs at that link you provided (thanks! I mistakenly called this MD-ROM instead of MD-Data) are about $1.89/each, and I'm sure, had the data format been "popular," they would have come down somewhat in price, and probably had a few increases in density later, too.
Get off my launchpad!
The chiclet keyboard was a bad idea, but it had a purpose: You could insert overlays showing which key does what for a particular application. Even in its day, though, IBM got enough flak about the chiclet board that they sent all PCjr owners a more normal keyboard free of charge.
I don't think the sidecar alone was the reason for its demise (although not being able to use standard ISA cards certainly contributed to it). The main problem was that it just wasn't compatible enough with the PC, lacking "business" features such as DMA and hard-disk support. And it had a name that was hard to take seriously.
I thought it was so funny when they finally figured out that Segways would flop over when they had little or no power. Anybody with half a brain would have realized that power to the electronics and motors keeps it upright and without power it would fall over. In my opinion, the single speed Segway is not a good idea. Now if it had variable speed you could go with the crowd without mowing everyone over. The price would also have to come down drastically for it to really be a "big hit".
The things you listed might be considered advances when compaired to the standard PC, but none were original with the Peanut, all had already been used on other systems.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
One of the obscure little known could-have should-have stories of silicon valley is a startup by the name of Insite. Both Insite Floptical and IOmega Zip use optical tracking like a CD to positiong the magnetic read/write head.
The difference between the two was that the Floptical shipped years earlier, and was backwards compatable. The first generation was 21 mb floppy disk, the second was 40 mb, third was 100 mb (all 100% backwards compatable with earlier 3.25" diskettes). This was in the early 90s, before CD writing drives were available.
So why do we still use old floppy drives today, 15 years after this technology was developed? Biblically bad management of the company. Marketing so incompetent that when these drives were being sold at fry's, they neglected to indicate anywhere that the drives were backwards compatable. VP of sales so stubborn he refused cold hard cash from apple for the first million units WHENEVER they were ready.
The last dying gasp was Intel was interested in buying out the company from the dipshit VCs who listened to their buddy the CEO (who was really a VC himself, hence the incompetent management), and as a result were trying to cut their "losses". Intel's business team wanted to buy the company to push the technology not because of the money they expected to make from drive sales, but because the technology would enable multi-media PC application (remember this was before everyone had a CD-ROM and long before anyone had heard of DVDs).
The business team was overruled by the three people in charge of Intel because of their 5-year plan said "thou shalt not buy hardware companies" (I'm guessing these guys are the same ones who weren't interested in trying for the PC market in the late 70s -- another great call!).
So, the patents were sold off to a dozen other companies who had niche uses for them, effectively killing the technology. The most advanced form it achieved was marketed as the "SuperDrive" with a 200 mb capacity. IOmega had no interest in the technology for political reasons ("yeah, so these other guys developed a better system with capabilities we couldn't achieve faster and cheaper").
Whoops 3.5", 5.25" ; no 3.25" heh :P
One of the obscure little known could-have should-have stories of silicon valley is a startup by the name of Insite. Both Insite Floptical and IOmega Zip use optical tracking like a CD to positiong the magnetic read/write head.
The difference between the two was that the Floptical shipped years earlier, and was backwards compatable. The first generation was 21 mb floppy disk, the second was 40 mb, third was 100 mb (all 100% backwards compatable with earlier 3.5" diskettes). This was in the early 90s, before CD writing drives were available.
So why do we still use old floppy drives today, 15 years after this technology was developed? Biblically bad management of the company. Marketing so incompetent that when these drives were being sold at fry's, they neglected to indicate anywhere that the drives were backwards compatable. VP of sales so stubborn he refused cold hard cash from apple for the first million units WHENEVER they were ready.
The last dying gasp was Intel was interested in buying out the company from the dipshit VCs who listened to their buddy the CEO (who was really a VC himself, hence the incompetent management), and as a result were trying to cut their "losses". Intel's business team wanted to buy the company to push the technology not because of the money they expected to make from drive sales, but because the technology would enable multi-media PC application (remember this was before everyone had a CD-ROM and long before anyone had heard of DVDs).
The business team was overruled by the three people in charge of Intel because of their 5-year plan said "thou shalt not buy hardware companies" (I'm guessing these guys are the same ones who weren't interested in trying for the PC market in the late 70s -- another great call!).
So, the patents were sold off to a dozen other companies who had niche uses for them, effectively killing the technology. The most advanced form it achieved was marketed as the "SuperDrive" with a 200 mb capacity. IOmega had no interest in the technology for political reasons ("yeah, so these other guys developed a better system with capabilities we couldn't achieve faster and cheaper").
You'll use any excuse to post your anti-Apple drivel.
Apple was in the mid-80ies the world monopolist in personal computers.
Apple was never a monopolist. In the late 70's and early 80's, they were simply the leader in a vibrant, competitive market. IBM wanted a piece of that market, and quickly. They slapped together an open (except for the BIOS) system, bought their OS from Microsoft, and then things got out of hand and Microsoft became a 400-pound competition-killing gorilla.
but Apple managed to drag these principles down the chasm with them leading to the clumsy, security holes ridden software
Put down the crack pipe, son. Yeah, Apple software is security hole-ridden. I'm looking at my Software Update log right now. Since September 20, 2002 I've installed 13 security-specific updates to my 10.2.x system. Two of those were for non-Apple applications, Stuffit Expander and Internet Explorer. Eleven Apple security updates in 15 months-- less than one a month. Yeah, that's some swiss cheese security there, jerky. You have to download three times as many security updates to a fresh install of XP.
1st of all, its more like MD-RAM.
2ndly, they DID use it in the matrix :-)
I am unique, just like you, and you, and you...
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/hardware/feata.html
"What many home computer users really need is something that is many times faster than a cassettes but much cheaper than a disk. Such devices exist and are known as 'floppy tapes' or 'stringy floppies'. Originally developed in America for Tandy's TRS-80 Model 1 system by Exactron, the first stringly-floppy used a continuous loop of tape in a cartridge housing; the idea was borrowed from the eight track audio tape system that was fashionable some years ago. The principle of operation is simple; the tape loop circulates constantly, so the various programs can be found much more quickly. A catalogue of all the programs and files stored on tape is also kept (just like the directory on a disk), so a list of the contents is always available."
Here's a Creative Computing article about the wonders of Stringy Floppies. I really loved that magazine. David Ahl's da man! (Note to kids about the article: Kate Bush is not the president's daughter.)
"Whether or not the wafertape has any real future in the microcomputer industry is for Exatron to decide. If it takes the time to finish its product, that certainly will be a start."
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Isn't it entirely possible that the next wave of new storage technology was on the horizon? One which has the potential to store 8GB or more, is shock proof, *very* small, and fast.
Sony calls it the Memory Stick.
MCA was good technology, but (to elaborate on what your said) IBM set onerous licensing terms for cloners to use it, including paying royalties to IBM for every previous, non-MCA clone they had ever made. Basically, it was a piss poor attempt to stuff the cloning genie back in the bottle.
Oh, and they also deliberately hobbled the first iteration of MCA so they could un-hobble it to artificially create an improved second version in less time than the normal IBM product cycle.
Too bad push just turned out to be a constantly refreshing webpage
This reminded me of a question I've had for some time: if a site owner uses meta refresh=30 seconds (or whatever), does that contribute to overall page views for the page when site stat programs totals up the results or does the software discard say, 100 page views if they all come from the same (static or floating) IP address over a given period of time?
For those unfamiliar with what I'm talking about read this(Understanding Hits, Page Views and User Sessions).
lalalalala ai aaammama bboooo
You just had to remind us didn't you? Ahh da pain....
"Apple has sold over 25 million songs on iTunes. That's a huge flop?"
Actually yes.
Maybe in 1973, $25M is a lot of money.
In 2004, its...cute. What I mean is, a Fair-sized Wal-Mart will sell $1M a day. So what you're talking about is the gross of a Wal-Mart for a month.
That's an accouting error for a big company.
It cute, but it doesn't indicate much at this point. Failure? No. Success? No.
If iTunes grosses $250M this year, then its a budding success. If it only gets $75M, then its a failure.
Particularly *since apple makes no money*.
And, Mr. Finkelstein, unless Apple is making a 10% return on their investment *its a loss!!!*.
"Think of it as an instrument of empire, like the British East India Trading Company, not a business."
This is a brilliant thought. Do you mind if I borrow it and claim it as my own?
If the browser respects the refresh and intervening proxies don't try to short-circuit it, the requsted page will be re-transmitted from the server. This event will be logged and it will show up a new page view if your log analyzer is dumb.
I don't actually play with web logs, but it should be easy enough to make them "smart" enough to filter out repeated requests from the same IP address. I imagine that most analyse software could handle this, but check your documentation... Also, depending on what information you want, there are smarter ways to get it than by analyzing the logs.
Hit counters and other graphics that get loaded with a page are a different story. I would imagine that most browsers don't reload these on a META-refresh request.
As a side note, most hit counters are not smart... you can hit the manual refresh and watch them increment.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Thanks for the information.
I use Google Adsense, and it provides me with a pretty good idea of traffic.
I've always been suspect of sites that claim "millions of hits" without any other info.
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/32278.html
http://www.strategicadvantage.com/nwbsmicro.html
Television advertisements were all over the place on many channels targetted to teens. They ran so many contests that I lost count. They had promotions, events, and giveaways. And then they disappeared.
It was a device somewhat ahead of its time, with wireless chat and games. It can be programmed in C, LOGO, and BASIC, or C++ and bytecode with the Pro version of the SDK. It had about 512K flash memory, RAM, a decent processor, grayscale screen, and full keyboard. All on a handheld device costing just over $100.
For information on Cybiko development, see CyDevr.net.
A week before the silly season a colleague of mine mentioned that someone was planning a new generation of Iridium handsets and that we should get in on it as a component supplier... .... then I told him about the history. I thought they were going to park those satellites good and proper... I heard the original Iridium handsets wouldn't work inside buildings, hence its massive failure (3000 users worldwide was the figure I was told)
Nobody counts signal ground as a connection.
Technically, though, unless the computers are double insulated (and I'm yet to see a desktop machine that is) the ground connection may not be needed. OTOH, mains earth is pretty noisy.
"The rs232 spec requires 25 pins".
t -a nd-signal.htm ...or any one of the 400 or so sites google returns if you search for "rs232 pinout", which all say the same thing: rs232 uses 9 connections, no matter how many pins are on the port. If it uses more than that, it isn't rs232.
No, the RS232 spec requires 9 pins to comply. The signal lines are: TxD, RxD, RTS, CTS, DSR, DTR, DCD, RI, and Ground. 25 pin connectors merely duplicated ground connections. 8 pin RJ45 (phone jack) type rs232 connectors are also used; I believe they omit the RI (ring indicator) line.
"The 9-pin connectors were rs422."
Correction, the 9 pin mini-DIN (round) connectors on Macintoshes were rs422. The 9 pin D-connectors on PCs are rs232.
"When an RS-232 was connected to POTS, 19 of the 25 pins weren't connected to anything."
Which proves nothing, since the only pins that have a fixed function in the rs232 standard are ground, TxD and RxD, the state of the other pins depending on the software controlling the port.
As a cure for your ignorance I prescribe:
http://www.aggsoft.com/rs232-pinout-cable/pinou
Now, about IEEE-488...
The reasons for weird rs232 pinouts are simple.
/.'er being totally wrong about the rs232 standard, how can you expect a non-geek (the people who buy cheap computers) to work out what's what around the back of the machine? Its much simpler, and cheaper in tech support, to have one socket. Remember, there are some people who literally panic when it comes to plugging things in.
Cost: one socket (even though it's larger) costs less than two, and if you're dealing with 100,000 units, 20 cents per unit adds up. It also costs more to punch two holes in a metal case than one.
Redundancy: most manufacturers are pushing towards USB, so why fit two sockets that may never be used? These days the only thing most people (present geek company excepted) have hanging off a serial port is a printer, most of which use 25-pin connectors and will work directly connected to these odd ports. But if the customer ever needs it, there is a second serial port available (with the purchase of the right adaptor; ka-CHING!).
Simplicity: given that your comment was sparked by a
Its worth mentioning that rs232 ports have used D-25 connectors for many more years than they have D-9 connectors (I have D-25 rs232 cables that are old enough to legally buy liquor...and the still-functioning dot-matrix printer they came with; rs232 was established before the IBM PC was released). Technically, if you are putting a legacy port on your machine, it should be a D-25. Of course, we all know about PCs and "standards"...
Personally, the only machines I've ever seen with combined ports are older HP Pavillions (another term for a pavillion is a circus tent, which is a place where clowns work...)
In 1985, Amiga had: 4-voice STEREO sound 4096 colours at 320x400 ...only one year after PCjr. ...and before anyone says it, no, I don't think the Amiga was a flop, at least not a complete one. If it was, then they would't have still been building them in the 90's.
www.wavefront-av.com
Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Actually, Palm didn't INVENT Graffiti, they simply brought it to market. Xerox successfully sued Palm for patent infringement. Palm has since stopped shipping Graffiti in favor of the JOT system originally featured on PocketPC.
BTW, Microsoft licensed both JOT and Calligrapher. Calligrapher, known as Transcriber in native PocketPC, is based upon Newton handwriting recognition.
The problem with ALL handwriting recognition is that english letters and numbers look too much alike.
Examples
1 I l |
5 s S $ 6 G @
Z 2 z
0 O o 6 8
. , ' "
( [
* + t T
A rational handwriting recognition forces the user to change their style of writing. Especially print writing. The methods of keystrokes are just too similar. I believe that US style of print writing will eventually change because of this.
Cursive writers actually have an advantage in natural systems. Cursive letters have enough difference that it's EASIER for the software to distinguish between two characters based upon pen strokes.
OK, back to the point. No Apple doesn't sell PDAs. But palm no longer sells PDAs with Graffiti. Ironically, a graffiti compatible system is now included with every PocketPC. Apple sold the FIRST PDAs, there is NO dispute about this. Apple COINED the term PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). Kudos to Palm for making the concept cheap, simple and practical.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!