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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.'"
Tue Dec 23, 2003, 6:04 AM ET
Jim Louderback - ExtremeTech
"Upon us all, just a little rain must fall." - Led Zeppelin
So it is with technology. Some of the greatest flops of all time have come from high tech. Millions of dollars and countless person-hours have been wasted creating products so bad, so misguided, and so difficult to use that entire companies have been destroyed.
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.
Silicon Valley - and other technology centers -suffer from a unique form of groupthink. Powerful engineers with good ideas lead many startups, but lack a lick of marketing sense, especially when it comes to what consumers want. Whole companies can delude themselves into thinking they're changing the world - when all they're delivering is simply a left-handed bread box no one needs.
The Internet bubble produced huge numbers of examples of these, like the misguided Pets.Com and its bedraggled sock puppet. How could they possibly imagine that anyone would pay $20 to ship a $10 bag of dog food? Remember eToys? WebVan? Kosmo?
But those blunders pale when compared to the industry's biggest catastrophes. Here's my unscientific list of the biggest consumer technology calamities of all time.
PCjr: It all started here, with the product they called "the peanut." IBM was still riding the incredible success of its IBM PC. The PCjr. was its entry into consumer computing. Alas, this circa-1984 PC was junior in every way. The terrible keyboard featured stiff little keys that felt like pushing on chiclets and the system lacked expandability - relying on sidecar-style modules to add features. My notoriously cheap grad school roommate actually bought one, but even at the $1,000 price (business PCs were selling for $5,000 at the time), it was terrible. Home PCs would eventually take off, but IBM never did recover from the Junior. This was the first big bomb in consumer computing, and probably still ranks as the worst.
Go: No, not the Internet site, though that also failed. This Go was the hottest thing going in 1992, when it hoped to create the next step after personal computers and Windows. The company spent millions to develop a completely new operating system called Penpoint, based on handwriting, not keyboards. Unfortunately the software was buggy, the computers lacked the horsepower to translate handwriting to characters, and the devices were way overpriced. The tremendous failure of pen computing was shared by contemporaries like Momenta - who burned through 40 million bucks in 1992 while building a mostly useless $5,000 portable computer, and EO - a pen-based phone sold by AT&T and heavier than many notebooks today. It's worth noting that Microsoft's Pen Computing for Windows did no better, though Microsoft is still around to take another shot at this field. More on that later.
Magic Cap: I went to the launch of this early, cutesy yet cumbersome PDA; I remember feeling like it was Brezhnev addressing the politburo. Corporate agents strategically planted about the room led the crowd in rousing applause after every third sentence. I swear at one point they started doing the wave. General Magic, founded by refugees from Apple, failed with its first products, but with backers like AT&T and Sony, it had enough investor money to eventually get a product out the door. Only it wasn't a PDA but a pseudo-friendly, agent-based voice mail system. That, too, ended up on the scrap-heap of histor
The US DOD might not have known where they would have ended up using it. But they knew that sooner or later they would. Part of the job of the US Millitary is to go anywhere they are needed and while there they need phones. It just happened that "There" was Afganistan then Iraq.
As for big Flops, How about the Apple 3?
Erlang Developer and podcaster
You'll use any excuse to post your anti-Apple drivel.
Apple was in the mid-80ies the world monopolist in personal computers.
Apple was never a monopolist. In the late 70's and early 80's, they were simply the leader in a vibrant, competitive market. IBM wanted a piece of that market, and quickly. They slapped together an open (except for the BIOS) system, bought their OS from Microsoft, and then things got out of hand and Microsoft became a 400-pound competition-killing gorilla.
but Apple managed to drag these principles down the chasm with them leading to the clumsy, security holes ridden software
Put down the crack pipe, son. Yeah, Apple software is security hole-ridden. I'm looking at my Software Update log right now. Since September 20, 2002 I've installed 13 security-specific updates to my 10.2.x system. Two of those were for non-Apple applications, Stuffit Expander and Internet Explorer. Eleven Apple security updates in 15 months-- less than one a month. Yeah, that's some swiss cheese security there, jerky. You have to download three times as many security updates to a fresh install of XP.