The Top 21 Tech Flops

PetManimal writes "Whatever happened to Digital Audio Tape? Or Circuit City's DIVX program? Or IBM's PCjr. and the PS/1? Computerworld's list of 21 biggest tech flops is an amusing trip down the memory lane of tech failures. Some are obvious (Apple Newton), while others are obscure (Warner Communications' QUBE). Strangely, Y2K didn't make the list."

Comments

DAT was a flop?

[kinabrew]

I thought it was still used?

Re:DAT was a flop?

[lightversusdark]

I have to say, I was a big fan of ATRAC. At the time, it was a "trick" to bounce to and from MD with your finished mixes. ATRAC compromises dynamics not unlike FM, and it was a quick test to see "how it sounds on radio".

But as for being dead - you should drop by a radio station recently - it has become the de facto standard for jingles:
Fast random access, rewritable and replayable without sonic degradation. Fits the bill very neatly.

Dreamcast was not a flop

[PoderOmega]

When I think flop, I think something embarrassing that no one bought or appreciated. The Dreamcast was a loser in terms of sales, but not a flop. The article itself says 10 million were sold. In terms of gaming fun I had with the system, it was a huge success.

Re:Dreamcast was not a flop

[evilviper]

The article itself says 10 million were sold.

Yeah, but that was mainly because they were marked down to nearly free for the last 6 months of its life...

When the PS2 hype was sucking the marrow from Dreamcast, and widespread piracy methods were worked out, they decided to give them away, since they knew no new games were possibly going to appear.

In terms of gaming fun I had with the system, it was a huge success.

I'm sure that will make Sega's stock holders feel much better about the ridiculous amounts of money sunk into it.

Personally, I'd think the Sega Saturn would have qualified as a much bigger flop. It was the Saturn that sent Sega towards the cliff.

DRM Killed DAT

[Black-Man]

The early DAT decks... I know... I own a Panasonic SV3700 which I paid close to $1800 for back in the day... had a "copy protection" scheme SCMS where you were limited copying (digital copy) using the SPDIF I/O at 44.1KHz. So... it basically killed the market for a cheap (mass produced) consumer model, so you had to pay outragous $$ for the Pro version. All studios mastered onto DAT, so you again were forced to buy one. You could use the pro I/O without the copy protection and there actually was a DIP switch on the SV3700 where you could defeat the SCMS. I think it was the only one who had that "feature".

DAT is dead... good.

Re:DRM Killed DAT

[AshtangiMan]

DATs strength was field recording . . . live concert recordings. Better than tape and minidisc. But for listening purposes, it was best to create CDs. That way you get direct access and reliability. I've not experienced it directly, but hear that dat suffers from shelf life issues . . . happily my library is intact. I believe that these issues must arise from usage rather than simply age. At the end all of the Dead tapers had transitioned to DAT, and the early mixing board bootlegs were also being traded as DAT (from the original reel tapes, not dubbed from cassettes). The SCMS could be switched off on the TASCAM decks, I don't know about the Panasonic models.

Re:DRM Killed DAT

[gobbo]

DATs strength was field recording . . . I've not experienced it directly, but hear that dat suffers from shelf life issues . . .

Yes, I have some DAT tapes here that I'm anxious about, as I haven't converted them and me and my pals have all moved on to other tech.

One of DAT's more notorious flaws was its sensitivity to head alignment, so that a tape recorded on one deck wouldn't play on another, sometimes it was sheer voodoo: blood, feathers, dancing cables and hauling decks around.

While the portable Tascams were sweet machines for field recording, they were bulky and $2800 CDN. The next step down in price was $1000 and had no XLR inputs. As far as I'm concerned, we're in an in-between phase: the right replacement for DAT hasn't come along yet, and I just use MiniDV cameras when I need to record in the field. It's a drag, audio should be so much easier than video.

Re:DRM Killed DAT

[fgodfrey]

Much as I prefer special purpose devices, the good news about digital audio is that it doesn't take all that much in the way of resources to commit it to disk. Using two Motu 828 mk1's (18 analog and digital channels to Firewire ) and a Creamware A16 (feeds 16 channels of analog to the Motu's), I was able to record 32 tracks at once for over two hours and repeated that process for several nights. I was using Apple's Logic Pro and a relatively slow 800MHz iBook G4. I was recording 44.1kHz at 16 bits.

The key to not having skips or dropouts is to make sure that the computer is not doing any processing of the audio as it's recording. Also, I can't speak for Windows, but at least MacOS X and Linux are pretty good about being able to put the non-recording tasks into the background.

Re:DRM Killed DAT

[tcr]

Good post....

I was a bit suprised that DAT made it to the list, as it got quite a lot of use in the pro audio industry.
 
I thought maybe they were thinking of the Philips Digital Compact Cassette - DCC.
 
Anyone remember those??

Lisa was a step, not a bomb

[Toe, The]

Lisa was a step in the evolution from the Apple II line to the Macintosh.

The other things on the list are dead-ends. Lisa wasn't profitable, but it also wasn't a dead-end.

Re:Lisa was a step, not a bomb

[earthforce_1]

Actually, I bought my first mac because I couldn't afford a Lisa. For the first year of its existence, the Lisa was the primary development platform of mac software, since the 128k "thin" mac didn't have enough RAM or disk space to run a real development environment. (Unlike the first Mac, the Lisa came with an optional small hard drive) From what I remember the biggest problem with the Lisa was the non-square pixels, and funky floppies that never took off.

The mac itself would have died an early death and been on the list as well (it sold very poorly in its first 6 months) if not for the apple laserwriter, which helped spawn the desktop publishing industry. (regrettably couldn't afford one at the time, had to settle for their noisy as hell and slow dot matrix printer)

I disagree with Smart Appliances being listed

[Trojan35]

It's a technology that's on its way to becoming a reality. As soon as RFID replaces bar codes, you're going to see smart applies everywhere. It won't fix someone putting the milk carton back in the fridge when it's empty, but it will still be very useful. Imagine pulling recipes just for the foods you currently have, printing out a shopping list straight from your fridge, etc. It *is* a good idea, it just won't work until RFID arrives.

Still the article was a fun read.

Ahead of Time Flop

[TaoPhoenix]

1. "Paperless office". I think word got around that this was as much Management Glamor. Of course you couldn't ban the Scribble-Note. What everyone meant was Paper-Reduced, and this HAS happened. When you're actually working on something, you're gonna have some paper floating around. (Anyone want to join me in a round of PrintReport, FurrowBrow, FixMistake ?) When everyone signs off and it becomes a done-deal, *then* you scan it, & store it on servers.

2. Virtual Reality. This hasn't happened ... *yet*. Just because the Adoption Curve is 35 years instead of 15 doesn't make it a flop. The Revenge of the Nerds movies were signs of their times. Today, we wail about Joe Average, but Joe Average *doesn't* ridicule computers anymore. 3 years from now when the eruption from the Microsoft Volcano dies down, we'll be able to concentrate a little more on *apps*, not OS's. (And 2010 is the next symbolic Arthur Clarke date, though his timeline was torched by many people.) In 2010, some elite gamers will have acquired some high end VR gaming hardware, and There It Will Be. It will take ANOTHER 5 years minimum (And getting past another OS crisis!) before Joe Average types Memos in Thin Air.

Segway

[JeremyR]

More in the category of "not living up to the hype" than "flop" is the Segway. "IT" (as it was known for more than a year, shrouded in secrecy for more than a year before its unveiling) was to be "revolutionary" and change all our lives. Did that happen? I'm still waiting...

I'd also like to nominate Windows Vista for the list, but even that might be a little premature.

Newton != Flop

[vertigoCiel]

The Newton, while utlimately too large and expensive for widespread adoption, was certainly not a "flop" by any standards. Without the Newton tackling the quirks of handwriting recognition, and figuring out a GUI that works, there would be no Palm, and no PDA as we know it.

If were going to pick on Microsoft

[MSRedfox]

I'd say Windows ME is pretty high up there. While BOB was dead in the water from the get go, Windows ME just took a little while longer to die.

I love you, PCjr

[Chris Pimlott]

Yeah, I'm a little miffed about that. The PCjr was the first home computer my family had and we had a blast with it. Some of the points in the article are a bit unfair; the wireless keyboard wasn't the only option, we had a wired one with perfectly normal keys. Some of the software was on the bizarre cartridges but most came on perfectly normal 5.25" floppy disks (including the original King's Quest, originally written specifically for the PCjr). Sure, it didn't have a hard drive, but that wasn't very unusual at the time, and is perfectly understandable since it was intended as affordable system.

For a computer of the time it had unusually good video and audio capacity (okay, so it was basically 4 channels of PC speaker. Still, that was better than most). There was a ton of good software for it. It came with BASIC in the system ROM (me and my brother cut our teeth transcribing games from Family Computer magazine). If it weren't for the PCjr, I would be undoubtably be a different person today.

Not a bug.

[Belial6]

Y2K was not a bug. It was the fact that the software was used out of spec. The programs that would have had a problem with Y2k were never designed to be used past the year 2000. That was the point. Saying that Y2K was a bug is exactly the same as saying all of our software now suffers from the Y10K bug. The Y2K problem was usually created because the software lasted longer than expected. It's usually considered good when a product lasts longer than expected.

Now, you could argue that choosing a 2 digit year was a bad design decision, but the reality is that every product draws a line where they expect their product to fail, and decide that making the product even more robust just doesn't justify the cost.

Re:Not a bug.

[fabs64]

This is false, a bug causes undefined, undocumented behaviour, had the systems with the Y2K BUG popped up an error message saying "this software is not meant to run past 30/12/1999" as well has having this behaviour documented, then you would be right.
As it is I'm not aware of any systems that did this.

I Remember Qube

[lenski]

My first job out of school. Very cool place. Their polling system consisted of a stack of Data General Nova single board computers, each responsible for polling one supertrunk. They were supervised by a Data General Eclipse (the polling system), which had aggregate responsibility for the entire system.

There was a separate Eclipse, the "Studio System", which used a high speed interprocessor bus to move polling data to and from the polling system.

I wrote several of the studio system's technical scripts, which needed to be synchronized with the TV shows.

QUBE flopped as a technology due mostly to the fact that people are (and were in the late 70's) in the habit of being couch potatoes, rather than interacting through a rather stilted 2-way system.

QUBE gave two-way cable communications hardware people some pretty good practice in how to run signals both ways through a hierarchical network. Eventually, (with huge improvements, etc.) it led to today's cable modems.

A cute cultural story: The two-way boxes were designed by Pioneer Electronics (the stereo folks) in Japan. The Japanese engineers had absolutely no idea how quickly Americans would learn to hack the boxes to watch pay-per-view premium content without the box reporting that they had selected premium channels. It turns out that the box was designed to detect channel change events and track the changes, rather than reporting the channel that was currently selected for viewing. The result was that as soon as someone discovered how to disable the change detection logic (with a paper clip), they started watching premium content for free.

The business management folks had me write a program that statistically analyzed premium purchasing habits, noting (for example) when a given customer transitioned from several months of reasonable amount of premium content, to absolutely zero premium viewing. The program was called "zerobill". Naturally, its capabilities grew in various ways to track a whole range of statistics about viewing habits during the next few years. Eventually, zerobill became *the report* that every manager wanted to see, every morning without fail. I had some *exceptionally early* mornings caused by various bugs and vicissitudes in the database.

Phone rings...
Me: (knowing damn well what was coming next) Hello?
Night operator: "Daily batch died."
Me: "and..."
Night operator: "Not sure, it looks like an error."
Me: "Did it leave a suicide note, or was it just shot in the head?"
et cetera...

My best friend and I were not scheduled the evening of the Rundgren concert, and we had a *kickass* time at the concert, including a little while backstage. It was a great time and place to be a young software geek, mixing television and technology.

Where's my Sony MiniDisk

[dollar99]

The first thing that came to mind for me was the Sony MiniDisk. For a while in the late 90's all I remember is late-nite and weekend infomercials for the Sony MiniDisk. I waited forever for that thing to take off. It was apparently another attempt to succede the audio tape but I feel its a way better flop than DAT because I've actually seen DAT.

I had a PCjr

[ksheff]

It ran Word Perfect, 123, TurboC, MathCAD, a slew of various BBS programs and games. It's what I used for a computer in high school and college. It was cheap for an IBM compatible machine at the time. While most people bitch and moan about how terrible the 'chiclet' keyboard was, they forget that it didn't take IBM too long to ditch it and replace it with a decent one. IIRC, it was about the same size and feel as the "Happy Hacker" keyboards that used to advertise on /. a few years ago.

Re:Why would Y2K make the list?

[Michael Woodhams]

I had to fix a 100% genuine Y2K bug. I was doing (among other things) source control admin for a company of perhaps ~80 developers. At Y2K, we were using SCCS for source control. (Later changed to ClearCase, but that is a different story.) I was called in on I think 2 Jan 2000. Some eager developers had returned to work early, and their new checkins were messed up.

Although we'd updated all the computers to a Y2K-compliant version of the OS (IRIX), on one of the machines the (non-Y2K) SCCS binaries had got there by copying rather than a proper install - so the OS upgrade didn't know they were there, and didn't upgrade them to the Y2K fixed versions.

End result: I edited the corrupted SCCS files to fix them, and called a sysadmin to fix the binaries. Two people called in, some developer time lost - it probably cost about 10 geek-hours in total. I think I might have got a few hundred dollars extra pay as well - I can't remember now.

Re:Why would Y2K make the list?

[SuperQ]

The one Y2K thing I had to fix was the voicemail server. We had a nice trusty old OS/2 box that sat in the corner for years doing our voicemail.. everyone freaked out when all the voicemail vanished.. sure enough, the voicemail app thought it was year 19100 and had no idea what to do. I just set the clock back to 1994, and all the voicemail re-appeared. We got the y2k voicemail server patch from our phone vendor (on a single 3.5" floppy) and we could finally set the clock to 2000.

For my shame, I worked for such a consultancy

[jimicus]

I worked for a consultancy firm which had (apparently) been in IT consultancy for years. Though at the time, 99% of its business was Y2K consultancy - basically, going to clients' offices and auditing their PCs for Year 2000 compliance.

Understand that at the time I wasn't long out of school and had zero real-world IT experience.

This consultancy had bought a proprietary software package which went on a floppy and could be operated by a monkey. The idea was you booted the PC from the floppy, the software checked the clock on the PC would happily support the year 2000 and we put a sticker on the front to confirm this.

In order to earn our money, we also installed a Windows '95 patch for y2k and ran a piece of software which audited what software was installed and wrote the results to another floppy. We'd then return these floppies to the office where some other piece of software would turn them into a report to go to the client.

In a team of 3 of us, we could probably do about 80-90 PCs each per day, assuming they were all easy to get to. In about a month or so of doing this, I think I saw about a dozen PCs which "apparently" had problems. I later found that IBM's original specifications for the PC accounted for the Y2K problem, so the chances of finding something with a hardware issue were pretty slim.

The more alert amongst you will have noticed that I haven't said anything about the real business-critical stuff. The software which runs on, say, a mainframe or midrange Unix system, is accessed via telnet (or, if you're lucky these days, SSH) and you won't learn a damn thing about by auditing client PCs. Remember this is late 1998, Windows was still just finding its feet in the server room and such applications were pretty common. There's a reason for I haven't mentioned it. We were under strict intstructions not to go near servers - apparently someone more qualified "would do them later", but I never saw any evidence of that. And seeing as we were charging by the day, you'd think they'd dedicate some time to that.

Re:DAT Wasn't a flop - DCC was!

[Bazman]

Digital Compact Cassette - same form factor as ye olde analogge cassettes so you could play them in a DCC player, but recorded digitally. Was supposed to be a consumer format, but never caught on as CDs dominated.

It wasn't all bad news though - the technology used to make the read/write heads found its way into beer making:

  http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6121

mmmm beeeeeer.

COBOL programmer full employment act

[wiredog]

Heh. A cousin of mine had 'retired' from programming to stay at home and be a full time mother in 96. In 98 she was offered $100+/hr to go back to work fixing y2k bugs. Two years later, with the kids college funds fully funded, she pulled the kids out of day care and re-retired.

Newton wasn't ahead of its time

[DrYak]

Newtons... great devices, a bit ahead of their time.

Newton wasn't ahead of its time.
Newton was mostly very badly designed crap.

"Ahead of its time" usually means "people weren't ready for it".
Whereas technically what killed the Newton was :
- ridiculously huge and heavy
- outrageously expensive
- bad battery life
- ergonomic aspects like :
* handwriting recognition is something hard, specially given the CPU power available at that form factor
* a handheld device isn't a desktop computer. user expect quick and short task oriented usage. Not firing up MS-Office and waiting it to boot.

This are the exact key point that made successful both Palm and Psion :
they both made device that were smaller and more pocketable, could run for a long time on AA batteries, had at least some low entry price models in the range, used simplier input methods (keyboard, or easy to recognize/fast to draw 1-stroke graffiti) and fast response time (push the date button, look for what you need on the screen, turn it back off).

And this also what is alienating me with Windows-based pocket PC :
a PDA shouldn't cost you as much a laptop, and a Windows OS has nothing to do on a PDA.

But towards the end of their life, they were starting to get the needed power to be useful. Another generation, and Apple would have gotten there.

the only thing that could have save newtons is if apple decided to build smaller, more pocketable unit with better battery life, and did ditch the input method for something faster and more accurate.
Basically, they should have built a palm.

For the other products I agree with you, they were nice product, that just lacked the publicity needed to launch them into the market, or got crushed by competition with bigger war chests (OS2 vs. WinNT, DreamCast vs. PS2).
Or some other products just persisted in niche market (DAT, VR, DreamCast motheroards in Sega Naomi arcade cabinets)

But with the Newton, the situation is just different : Apple just did it wrong. They weren't crushed by any competition : there wasn't any in the begining. They just produced some cool-looking gadget without thinking if the gadget would actually be practical once produced. The Palm inventor tells a story how he purposedly built mockups in 1:1 scale just to see if they could actually be pocketable.
Fortunately, Apple did his homework trying to make an usable device when creating the iPod, its wheel has been seen as a good improvement when compared to interfaces of concurrent models of that time.

Re:Newton wasn't ahead of its time

[feijai]

Mmmmmmm. Someone who has never used a Newton before. Behold:

Whereas technically what killed the Newton was : - ridiculously huge and heavy

0.9 pounds. 7.25x4.5x.75 in. Smaller and lighter than any UMPC on the market. Fit in a coat pocket.

- outrageously expensive

True. $800.

- bad battery life

False. My MP2100 gets about three weeks on a charge. And unlike the Palm Pilot, if the Newton ran out of power, it didn't lose anything (it was all in flash).

* handwriting recognition is something hard, specially given the CPU power available at that form factor

Ah. Someone who's not used HWR on the Newton before, I see.

* a handheld device isn't a desktop computer. user expect quick and short task oriented usage. Not firing up MS-Office and waiting it to boot.

This is the most hilarious one. Thinking that the Newton had PC-style applications! Newton apps are small, specifically task-oriented, and instantaneously available.

What killed the Newton is that Apple misjudged the market: people didn't want a $800 sophisticated PDA. They wanted a $300 crappy PDA. That's what Palm figured out. Apple was moving there too, about to release a small PDA, before it got Steved.

Re:Bob really sucked

[necrognome]

In a sense, however, Microsoft Bob was a tremendous success for its project manager, Melinda French. I'll let you do some googling to find out what happened to her.