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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.'"
(Not talking about the codec, but the Circuit City "rentable" DVD scheme) Easily a bigger flop than WebTV or the Clik drive.
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.
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!
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.
... to the whole concept of push content.
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.
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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.
"Multimedia"
Egads man, the entire web is all about multimedia. How on earth can you claim that it's a flop?
8" floppies
A flop? It was a earlier technology and part of a natural progression. This is like saying that horses were a flop because everyone uses cars now.
RS-232 serial port (25 pins, of which 4 are used)
Are you saying the port is a flop? Which would be wrong because it's the one legacy port that has/will outlive most others. The fact that it doesn't utilize all 25pins. Well the rs232 spec doesn't mention anything about using 25 pins. 9 pin connectors are also very common as well as using POTS telephone cabling (very popular back in the day to wire terminals).
Audio Cassettes for data storage
Hardly, most of the popular home based computers depended on this cheap technology for there "mass" storage needs. It simply became obsolete.
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.
IBM never recovered from the Junior.
Wow... I wish I could NOT recover like IBM has! :)