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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.
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
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.
Quecat - major bomb. Shitty scanner too.
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.
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.
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.