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

Mistake on Clik! Drive

[BWS]

The Clik! Drive is 40MB, not 40GB as the article states!

MMmmmmm

[sparkes]

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

Cue Cat

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:Also missing ...

[zulux]

Iridium is still going.

After bankrupsy they were able to change their price structure to somthing more sane. I use mine at $1.50 a minuite - and the phones are now under $1000.

I highly recomended Iridium if you spend any time in the wilderness. With the serial calble and a old Psion Revo - I can telnet to any of my servers from anywhere and the whole package is under three pounds.

Re:Dataplay

[pla]

Meta-comment here...

In case people can't tell (and judging by an "informative" rating, they can't), the author of this one meant it as a JOKE.

You don't get higher-than-CD quality in 2/3rds the size, and a green marker does nothing* to any form of digital media - You don't get better or worse quality, you get bits.

Green bits don't sound better than clear bits or blue bits or red bits, although a little too much green might mean you get no bits (ie, render the media unplayable).


* - Relating to making it unplayable, the Sharpie trick to remove the copy protection from some CDs works by making the invalid data track unreadable. It doesn't "improve" the cd, it just breaks it in a way that happens to fix it, ironically enough.

In a way, Iridium is a success

[Animats]

The US Government bought a big share in Iridium, for which they basically get all the airtime they want. When the Government bought in, Afghanistan and Iraq were still in the future. After the US bombed, invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, the people on the ground needed communications. Iridium is providing them. Without Iridium, the US probably would have spent more money frantically setting up communications systems than Iridium cost.

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.

Re:Wait a minute

[HeghmoH]

Feh, get a clue. The original Mac OS ran on m68k too, does that mean it can't run on my computer because I have a PowerPC?

Mac OS X draws from three sources, Mac OS, BSD, and NeXT. From BSD it draws a lot of low level stuff and part of the kernel. From NeXT it draws some other low level stuff and the rest of the kernel, along with a bunch of interface ideas. From Mac OS, it draws inspiration.

Yes, Apple did lots of work. But that doesn't mean there isn't a ton of NeXT code still working away under the surface. As just one minor example, look through any random Cocoa headers, and you'll find #ifdefs for WIN32, which are left over from Yellow Box's Windows NT days. Just look at the progression of developer releases, from Rhapsody on forward, all the way through to Mac OS X. The early developer releases were basically NeXT with a Mac-looking interface, ported to the PowerPC. The system evolved from there until you get what we have today.

Re:UH NO

[gozar]

Myth. By the time Windows took off, with version 3.1, it was technically as sophisticated as the MacOS of the day, and the hardware it ran on was faster and cheaper. It lagged in UI design and stability - but don't you realise that one of the reasons Windows was less stable than MacOS was because it was doing more? It had real multitasking, for one thing, and virtual memory.

Win 3.1 had the exact same cooperative multitasking as Mac OS 7 at the time, meaning one application could still take over the whole computer. Windows didn't get cooperative multitasking until Win95, with NT allowing old 16 bit Win3.1 programs to preemptively multitask.