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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.'"
I didn't see Slashdot on there...
activestudios web design
(Not talking about the codec, but the Circuit City "rentable" DVD scheme) Easily a bigger flop than WebTV or the Clik drive.
Windows! Why isn't Windows on there? What other operating system almost brings down the Internet every month because it's hosting 129873 viruses? Bob didn't do that, and it made the list.
:) Hey that's catchy.
Shame on you, yahoo.
My other car is first.
The Clik! Drive is 40MB, not 40GB as the article states!
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
During the war they promised me there'd be flying cars, where's my flying car? --Red
meh
So the biggest tech flops all happened relatively recently and in america?
;-)
There is an easy solution to this lets not only stop using technology, not only from the USA, but from since the americas where discovered by modern europeans!
I'm blogging this right now on my own printing press and if anyone laughs I will get medieval on their arse (ass is such an americanism and is banned)
or alternativly we could find something better to do than look at year end reviews, year coming previews and over hyped journalistic endevours.
I can't wait for slashdot to leave the post holiday period and start getting good again
oh, and my fav techno flop is the Sinclair C5
blog and junk
I still use Dataplay. The sound quality on a dataplay disk is much higher than that of a CD.
Also, and most people don't know this, but if you run a green marker around the edge of the dataplay disk, the sound quality is even better.
The Cue Cat was a glorified privacy-invading bar code scanner that flopped in the markeplace (even though they gave away 1 million of these beasties). I still have 3 of these things given to me through various magazine subscriptions. If I ever find the time I will have to hack the cat.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
The World is Yours.
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 biggest FLOPS can be found here.
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.
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!
Oh yeah, I forgot. They aren't technical.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
Instead, why not try and think of some stuff they missed?
- The SCO Group
- The current incarnation of the music business
- Digital Rights Management
- WAP
- "Push" based web content
And some stuff which seems/should be doomed:- Spam
- The current incarnation of the movie business
- Tablet PCs
- Film based P&S cameras
- Geeks with no life
;)
What are everyone else's personal "WTF were/are they thinking?"UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The PCjr was a flop, but it's interesting how many advances it had that other computers would start using:
4-voice sound when most IBM-compatibles could only produce one sound at a time
16-color graphics when CGA (4 color) was standard
Video memory in system RAM - commonly used on many lower priced motherboards these days
Infrared wireless keyboard
Yeah, it was expensive and limited. But it also had some interesting advances.
--RJ
But they managed to be crushed by a combination of small and not even innovative companies: Microsoft and Intel.
This must be a troll, but I'll bite anyway (it's slow this morning). Sorry, but Apple ALWAYS played second fiddle to IBM/Microsoft in the "pc" market wrt market share.
Plus, even if your history weren't totally wrong, your premise is. Even if Apple went under today, the positive impact they had on the industry is far reaching and prevasive. Some of the particulars can be argued, but the fact is that computing in general is a better place thanks to Apple and therefore they can't be considered a "tech flop". After all, a "flop" doesn't last over 20years.
The "New" FAA AAS traffic control system - was going to replace the current system. MASSIVE amounts of money spent, 2.5 BILLION, where 1.5 BILLION of it had to be written off. About a billion of the development was salvaged by using the Display System Replacement
Folks - that 1.5 BILLION wasted
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Perhaps it wasn't the biggest flop, but Sony missed the chance at a huge media market share, and perhaps propping up their audio MiniDisc format, by not pushing the MD-ROM format harder. Imagine a disc smaller than a 3.5 inch floppy, holding a lot more than a Zip disk eventually would (MD-ROM preceded Iomega's Zip line), at a cheaper price per disc, with no click-of-death? The only one I ever saw was in a press release, but they claimed their small drive was low-power, and at the time, it would have been excellent for laptop use. Not to mention that you probably could have played the music format discs with it. Now, you can barely find any information on the format by Googling.
Get off my launchpad!
What you failed to notice is that the article was written by Jim Louderback. This should explain everything.
... 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.
.
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.
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
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Iridium handsets seem large by cell phone standards, but military radios with long range capability are still a backpack item or worse. There's more network capacity in the Iridium system than in military commo nets, and you can call any phone in the world.
Think of it as an instrument of empire, like the British East India Trading Company, not a business.
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! :)