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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?
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.
Absolutely, it still sees a lot of use. .wavs or .aiffs (many "computerless" DAWs only bounce to Red Book) it obviates all of the jitter and other issues associated with audio CDs as a master for duplication.
It's still the standard way to take music to a mastering house for cutting, and even in the digital domain when people aren't burning data such as
Consider mastering DVD audio with a 48kHz audio sample rate - you can't burn an audio CD at anything except 44.1. And the StellaDAT and some Pioneer decks support 88.2/96k on conventional tapes (use DDS to be sure).
I haven't even started on DDS drives for archival. DATs aren't going away.
P.S. The audio world is waiting for the "killer app" that allows you to stream in an audio DAT faster than real-time. DDS drives read up to 8x, and quite a few drives have audio-capable firmware. Remember when you could first rip a CD faster than it took to play? It seems archaic to pay hundreds an hour for mastering and waste the first hour striping in the album in real time. Perhaps the fact that this hasn't been addressed for a niche market with money to burn indicates that DAT is effectively "unsupported" nowadays..
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
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.
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
All over the world, DAT tapes are being inserted into servers for the nightly backup....
Yeah, but it didn't succeed as a consumer audio product. Good idea, but never caught on.
Newtons... great devices, a bit ahead of their time. 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.
Lisa? Great concept machine. Totally amazed me when I first saw one. But cost too much to sell many. Evolved into a Macintosh.
OS/2 2.0? A brilliant OS for it's time. It gained a good deal of support. Just not quite enough to survive against the MS beast.
Dreamcast?
None of these products were "bad". They were all quite innovative and gained fans, but they just didn't quite crack the economic threshold.
Uhh no. The Lisa was more advanced than the Macintosh.. Apple had to take a step back to make something that they could actually sell to the mainstream. Unfortunately they took YEARS to get back the baseline of the Lisa cause, hey, if you're onto a winner, don't screw with it right?
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
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.
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.
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. "
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.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
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.