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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.'"
has someone already mentioned n-gage? huge hype from nokia, big shipping numbers, some games got even good reviews in finnish video game magazines (yeah, the finnish magazines always give good points for finnish games, and nokia's games), but did anyone actually buy it?
One of the obscure little known could-have should-have stories of silicon valley is a startup by the name of Insite. Both Insite Floptical and IOmega Zip use optical tracking like a CD to positiong the magnetic read/write head.
The difference between the two was that the Floptical shipped years earlier, and was backwards compatable. The first generation was 21 mb floppy disk, the second was 40 mb, third was 100 mb (all 100% backwards compatable with earlier 3.5" diskettes). This was in the early 90s, before CD writing drives were available.
So why do we still use old floppy drives today, 15 years after this technology was developed? Biblically bad management of the company. Marketing so incompetent that when these drives were being sold at fry's, they neglected to indicate anywhere that the drives were backwards compatable. VP of sales so stubborn he refused cold hard cash from apple for the first million units WHENEVER they were ready.
The last dying gasp was Intel was interested in buying out the company from the dipshit VCs who listened to their buddy the CEO (who was really a VC himself, hence the incompetent management), and as a result were trying to cut their "losses". Intel's business team wanted to buy the company to push the technology not because of the money they expected to make from drive sales, but because the technology would enable multi-media PC application (remember this was before everyone had a CD-ROM and long before anyone had heard of DVDs).
The business team was overruled by the three people in charge of Intel because of their 5-year plan said "thou shalt not buy hardware companies" (I'm guessing these guys are the same ones who weren't interested in trying for the PC market in the late 70s -- another great call!).
So, the patents were sold off to a dozen other companies who had niche uses for them, effectively killing the technology. The most advanced form it achieved was marketed as the "SuperDrive" with a 200 mb capacity. IOmega had no interest in the technology for political reasons ("yeah, so these other guys developed a better system with capabilities we couldn't achieve faster and cheaper").