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

Yet... DivX missed how?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Not talking about the codec, but the Circuit City "rentable" DVD scheme) Easily a bigger flop than WebTV or the Clik drive.

Also missing ...

[Wingchild]

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.

UH NO

[dave1g]

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.

Tech Flops or Pioneers?

[bpiltz]

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.