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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."
Next on the list... Zune.
Frank Zappa tells all.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I thought it was still used?
It was a REAL problem despite this revisionist attitude that some now have that it was nothing at all. You know why you get to think that? Because a lot of people spent a LOT of time fixing the problem so it wouldn't be a problem. What you see is a sign of success. Sheesh.
What next? The polio vaccine was a flop, too?
What's Y2K got to do with tech flops? While there's no way to know one way or another, it could well be that nothing major happened precisely because people made effort to remediate and test any issues prior to 1/1/2000.
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.
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.
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.
Y2k isn't on the list because it was a HUGE success for the consulting firms that flogged it. (That, and it was the COBOL programmer full employment act for a few years.)
A flop to the writer is a product that had more hype than users. For example, he notes that DAT is used in pro arenas only and that OS/2 has a user base but one that has never reached the hype it had...
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
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.
DAT might have flopped in the consumer sector (I blame CD for that), but it was the bee's knees for audio professionals, considering that it was the lowest cost and most convenient PCM format at the time. Prior to DAT, digital masters meant using a Sony 1630, PCM audio on a large videocassette. There were digital open-reel solutions, but these never caught on for mixdown and mastering.
As for the rest of this list, it seems to me that a lot of these entries (Newton, PC jr, VR, Qube) were just inadequate hardware/software implementations of valid concepts. Consider the Newton: ahead of its time, it just needed sufficient CPU/RAM/display tech to become the Palm/Blackberry/smartphone that it should have been. The IBM PC jr was unarguably a flop, but the concept of an affordable home PC lives on in the $299 Dell or $399 Mac Mini. VR was a whole lot of hype (and yes, I bought into it, seeing as I was a 3D animator back in the mid-'90s), but now look at WoW or Second Life. And Qube? One word: TiVo. I realize that Qube was meant to be a more interactive product/service, but the web co-opted the e-commerce aspect of the Qube. I think the only interactivity people want from their TV is to watch what they want when they want.
Finally, the paperless office is not dead. It just smells funny. I worked with a number of law firms and mortgage companies who are carrying decades of paperwork around, and are either using solutions that allow them to scan/index/search/retrieve these documents or are looking for one. It's a really big deal in the real estate industry considering that each mortgage closing generates a package that can be a couple of hundred pages. Multiply that by a typical mortgage company's 2,000 to 10,000 closings a year and consider that these documents need to be retained for as long as thirty years.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Quecat - major bomb. Shitty scanner too.
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.
... *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.
2. Virtual Reality. This hasn't happened
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I work at a music store and I see people buy DAT tapes on a weekly basis... they're certainly not flying off the shelves, but they're not exactly sitting there collecting dust either.
Maybe DAT wasn't a huge worldwide phenomenon, but they certainly aren't a "flop"!
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They give a few reasons why they think DAT failed, but it seems to me that there is a big obvious one right in front that was overlooked -- sequential access. I think CD's were immediately attractive only partly because they were digital. The killer feature was random access.
The Newton paved the way for PDAs, and the Newton in certain ways compares more than favorably with existing PDAs today.
DAT has been a staple of industry professionals for ages. As an indie filmmaker, I've found cheap digital audio equipment which is supposed to be superior to be rather poor in comparison. I'd kill to have good DAT equipment.
eBook readers are perhaps a flop in that few will invest a device that does solely that, but eBooks as a whole gain in popularity every year.
The PCjr entered an area when IBM-based PCs had hardly become the norm, and many critics believed a personal computer in the home would never become a reality. It was a step in the right direction, and people forget that there were MANY alternatives back then. The fact that 99% of home computers are based on IBM standards today is not a flop.
Internet Currency? Last time I checked there are several "points" programs on the web where you can earn and use points that aren't currency themselves. This business model still operates today. Furthermore, the concept of a firm handling transactions across multiple borders for online currency paved the way for one of the most successful websites ever, Ebay/Paypal.
Just as the article states, Iridium is still in business.
Bob was a flop, and one I commonly mock. However I promise you, that the concept will be revisited and better marketed the second time around. Honestly, I imagine that Second Life will become, or inspire the next generation of Bob, allowing us all to make virtual spaces, which in turn will link to applications and activities within this virtual world.
The NetPC? I still know people who own Web TV, and the market might have continued if Microsoft hadn't bought them out. People forget that Net PC devices were a threat to people whose business depended on the PC model. People also still make homemade Net PCs out of things like XBoxes and such.
Push technology? The article fails to mention that while Desktop channels were obtrusive and filled with advertiser content, this concept is very successful today. RSS feeds, AJAX technology and the like are very much staples of today's web. The article also fails to mention that Push technology preceeded and eventually became streaming media as well, and was largely developed for and by the porn industry. You'd be surprised how much technology comes from the porn industry.
I could go on and on and on, but I have to head out the door.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
How hard is it to link the the single page print version...m mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9012345
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
AC to avoid the whoring of karma.
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
From TFA:
Over the years, Bill Gates (among others) has repeatedly predicted that speech recognition will be a major form of input, but it hasn't happened yet.
That's not true. I'm posting this comment using a Windows Vista speech recognition software and Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
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.
Quote: proving once again that in the warped universe of techno-hype, one plus one can equal zero.
In the techno universe, we do binary, and 1 plus 1 will always yield 0 with a 1 in the overflow bin.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
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.
It was as big a flop as DAT, only better. I suppose the incredibly cheap price of blank CD media can be held responsible for both these failures...
Some of the loudest hype has been for DRM, which is a major ongoing flop. It required US legislation (DMCA) just to artificially prolong the flop.
This had to be one of the biggest flops in history. Essentially a LP record that played movies they started to degrade after the first few playings and were never that good to begin with. RCA lost something like 60 million on that turkey and today it's all but forgotten.
It got Bill Gates laid, and a wife. That, alone, was worth the cost of development.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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.
During the late 1980's, Radio Shack declared that they were creating the first writeable CD. Called THOR-CD, they were a couple years before CD-R of any kind, and there was a whirlwind of press. Years went by, no product ever arrived.
m l
Read more here: http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/thorcd88.ht
Design for Use, not Construction!
Damn straight! It wasn't a bug, it was a feature!
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.
"within five years it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America" - Bill Gates 2001
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Well, although it would never appear in a list like this because it's just too obscure, if you're an audio geek, one of the biggest early-digital flops was the DBX Model 700. (Full disclosure: I wrote the linked WP article.)
It was similar to the Sony PCM F1 in function -- basically a box without any moving parts, that took an audio signal at one end, and put out a composite video signal at the other that you recorded using a VCR. But rather than using PCM recording, it used a system that's a lot more like SACD. It was a very high sample rate (~600 kHz) but with one-bit samples; each sample basically was a "shift up" or "shift down" relative to the last sample. There's a lot more to it than that, but in essence it was digital recording but without many of the downsides to early PCM: the need for "brickwall" filters to eliminate high frequencies, the hard clipping, etc. It was a digital recorder for people who had cut their teeth on analog tape, and it sounded really, really good.
Unfortunately it was much more complex and expensive than PCM, and the rise of CDs as a format was the nail in its coffin (it made a great mixdown format if you were going to vinyl, though, and they even had a special add-on for it that let it interface directly to a vinyl-cutting lathe, to compensate for the fact that you can't 'undercrank' a digital tape directly). But in terms of cool 80s audio technology, IMO it stands alone.
As a plus, it has the coolest switchable peak-reading LED meters on the front of it. I keep one in my rack just for that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Bob was, however by far the most innovative UI MS ever produced. It just innovated in a direction that nobody wanted to go!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You went to the Midvale School for the Gifted, didn't you?
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
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.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I am soooooo fucking tired of hearing people say that Y2K was a "flop" of some kind. Ya, the world didn't grind to a halt, but that's NOT because there wasn't a HUGE NUMBER of VERY SERIOUS PROBLEMS. It's because a HUGE NUMBER OF MAN-HOURS WERE SPENT making sure the problems were fixed on time.
I personally tested systems that simply FUCKING BARFED when the date rolled over. Entire systems. Important systems. In some cases they actually had to be REPLACED because it wasn't possible to fix the problems.
So don't ridicule the hype that preceeded Y2K. Without the hype many PHB's would not have approved funding for the testing, fixing and replacements that ensured your sorry ass didn't get stuck in an elevator or a traffic jam or whatever.
Not the one that's around now, but the first one from back in 1994. The Internet was just starting to take off, and Microsoft wanted to kill it. The Microsoft Network was a non-TCP/IP non-Internet network that was supposed to be a Microsoft controlled version of the internet. I saw a presentation on it by some Microsoft manager back in 1994/1995 at some Washington Software Association event. They did a demonstration of an "MSN-brower" connecting to an "MSN-site" to view some "MSN-pages" and buy some toner cartridges. Supposedly it was real, but who knows.... Someone asked if Browser X (that would be Netscape) could use the Microsoft Network, and the answer was "No, only Microsoft will be able to create software for the Microsoft Network." I predicted it would be an utter failure, and it was. Microsoft couldn't innovate their way out a paper bag, much less out innovate everyone on the Internet. Microsoft's thinking was that there was nothing else one could want with the Internet but one store where you could buy toner cartidges.
Are you kidding me? That Circuit City disaster was fantastic. I was able to pick up a really good DVD player really, really cheap because it had DIVX support and they were end-of-lifing the product due to lack of sales. It was like $50 at a time when DVD players were still $200 or so.
Although Iridium failed commercially, it's not quite fair to call it a flop. The military makes extensive use of Iridium phones. Sea-faring vessels, aircrew, ground forces, you name it. In many cases, Iridium phones are replacing medium- and long-range radio communications altogether. I've no idea what the phones or service cost. But for what civilian companies usually charge the government for well, anything, I'm sure it's more than enough to keep Iridium afloat for a good long time.
Also the external Iridium antennas look like dildos.
Mike: Maybe you shouldn't have poured that washing up liquid into it.
Vyv: But the manual said: "Ensure machine is clean and free of dust before use."
Mike: Yeah, but it didn't say: "Ensure machine is full of washing up liquid."
Vyv: Ah, but it didn't say: "Ensure machine isn't full of washing up liquid."
Digital Audio Tape wasn't a flop. Althou it never made it into consumer space, it was and still is used extensively in music production. It is very efficient storage, archival and transport media.
Today ofcourse everything is moved around on DVD's, through FTP or other "consumer grade" medias, because they are as bit-perfect-copies as anything. Back in the 90's it was the standard to move the tracks from reels to DAT's for transportation from recording studio to the mixing/mastering studio. And then from there to CD plant for press mastering.
DAT's also have the advantage of magnetic media. It doesn't deteriorate as fast as optical media. (I'm going off topic here but give me some slack.) For example, I never reuse my MiniDV video tapes. I just rip to harddrive what I expect to use in near future and stash the original to my safe box in a bank vault -- A humidity controlled, cool, dark place. This way, I expect to be able to access the originals for decades to come.
Bot Assisted Blogging
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.
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.
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.
Best Slashdot Co
...didn't flop. It was repurposed and renamed MMORPG. The huge revelation was that people (today, at least) don't want to work in virtual spaces, they want to play in them. As far as tomorrow goes, who knows?
So, instead of Gibson's cyberspace, we have WoW, Second Life, Lord of the Rings Online, etc, etc, etc.
My memory must be faulty.
...and Clippy, and the stupid search dog... will Microsoft fucking GROW UP already?
DAT
I distinctly remember that the problem with home DAT was that the music industry dictated a rediculously low sampling rate (22khz, 1/2 CD IIRC) that made digital tape sound worse than cassette. And cassette's problem wasn't that it sounded bad, but that it needed rediculously expensive equipment to sound good.
DIVX
IIRC (and I must not as my memory doesn't match the writer's memory) the DIVX DVDs cost seven to ten bucks, while a DVD rental was/is two or three. Plus they sold them as your buying something, and it seemed stupid to "buy" a movie that you could only watch for 2 days that cost three times what a rental was.
Dot bombs
No, it is NOT hard not to "not see them as one entity". That's just stupid. "Dot bombs" aren't "a" tech failure, they were multiple BUSINESS failures.
E Books
"...are still being developed." Perhaps reports of their death are, to misquote Clemons, "greatly exagerated?" It's a little early to judge these dead; if someone does them right they could work. DRM isn't the way, though.
Microsoft Bob
The paperless office
The Christian Science Monitor is wrong. They were talking about it in the middle 1980s, it was coming "any day now", much like pot legalization a decade earlier.
Smart appliances
The article and the press at the time always gave the internet fridge (which was a tech failure) as THE example, but I have plenty of "smart" gadgets. My TV shuts itself off after a preset time I tell it; my thermostat warms the house before I get up; my car "knows" when to turn on the headlights and locks the doors when you go faster than 15mph; there are vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers that run themselves! The list of "smart" gadgets that AREN'T flops is endless and getting longer. But the "smart refrigerator" is and was a stupid idea.
Virtual reality
"Or maybe virtual reality worlds were less real and compelling than our own imaginations" Two words: second life. Two more: Sim City. Need a few more pairs?
Speech recognition
I can dial my daughter on my Razr by saying her name, and there are voicemail syetems that use it. Speech recognition didn't flop, electronic dictation did.
TFA's author seems to be a big tech failure IYAM. And the biggest tech failure of all? The "Star Wars" missle defense system, billion$ poured down a rat hole.
-mcgrew
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.