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

Push

[Moderator]

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.

I only owned two

[solfood]

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.

Re:Cue Cat

[Lumpy]

actually I found the Cue Cat to be a gigantic Boon to me and my business.

I modified over 50 of them and sold them to customers with linux Point of Sale systems for resturants and small stores.

I was able to get barcode technology to businesses that could not afford it any other way. (A commercial keyboard-wedge barcode scanner costs $200-$500.00 I sold the cue cats for $25.00)

Cue cat's were excellent and luckily I got 2 cases of them forom the local radio shack when they were tossing the leftovers to offer free replacements to my customers...

(Yes, I have a freelance linux consultation side business/ General Computing consultation business on the side of my real job)

Apple's hit & misses (nobody's mentioned)

[adzoox]

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