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.'"

Comments

People will hate me for this.

[Krapangor]

But I think that Apple computers are the world's greatest tech flop.
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.