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Tech That Failed To Fail
itwbennett writes "There are tech fads that flare up quickly and then, pouf, they're gone (Tamagotchi, anyone?). And then there are technologies that industry bigwigs predict will follow that familiar pattern and instead end up withstanding the test of time. The Internet, for example, has famously failed to implode, despite dire predictions by Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe. And what about TV, the cornerstone of the American living room? Inventor Lee DeForest, known as one of the 'fathers of the electronic age,' declared TV a commercial and financial impossibility, a sentiment that was shared by 20th Century Fox exec Darryl Zanuck. And FCC engineer T.A.M. Craven was absolutely certain back in 1961 that there was 'no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.'"
Despite all the problems, using an ATM machine beats standing in that long ass line trying to cash a check.
Why are banks open only from 10-3, the sort of hours they know everyone is at work? And why is it that at least one bank teller is on break or on lunch?
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They(OSX and Linux) have utterly failed to "destroy Windows on the desktop", and will continue to do so.
I don't think Windows has failed to fail. It fails pretty well.
TFA phrases things slightly differently and makes it clear that DeForest was *an* inventor who criticised TV, not the inventor of TV as the summary suggests.
Also, Philo Farnsworth probably deserves more credit that John Logie Baird for the TV we know and... erm... know today.
To be fair, a lot of the quote sources are businesspeople being dismissive of their competitors. That doesn't necessarily mean they believe what they're saying: of course Microsoft is going to say that Apple isn't a competitor. Doing anything other than that would give Apple an advantage in the marketplace.
The ______ Agenda
The x86 CPU architecture would be a good candidate too.
Dont agree. 2007 was loong ago.
Take a look at the development hence: http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/19721_large_fpsales.jpg
10 years ago it sales were basically 100% CRT. Now, its 15%, worldwide.
Alive and well? More like sick and dying
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
From my reading of these. All the technology was fine the failure predictions were based on not understanding the socialogical impact of the technology.
Google -> search
Internet -> sharing and remote access
ipod -> really personal applications
TV -> advertising
The most important part of these technologies seem to be the humans in the loop and what the technology does for the humans. The predictions failures seem to be failures in understanding the sociology. The message seems to be understanding the sociological market for the technology.
The fashion was (and is). Really the tech for MP3 players has never been a big deal for most users. "Plays my music," is as far as they care about anything. Please remember that people were happy with discmans and walkmans and shit like that.
What the iPod did was make MP3 players cool, it made them a fashion accessory. The best way to notice that is the white earbuds, with cord hanging out front where it is visible. Their commercials show this and it is the style that sold. An iPod is fashionable and has thing like the white earbuds so that you can proclaim ownership and show off the fashion. Heck when the iPod came out all of a sudden high end earbud manufacturers suddenly had a demand for white earbuds. They'd always been a darker colour before since being understated was what people wanted. However white earbuds were a fashion statement. People wanted better sound, but only if they could still have the iPod fashion going.
That is why the iPod was so successful. Other MP3 players were just music players so people really didn't give a shit more than they had before. However the iPod was a fashion accessory that you had to have.
Then of course once it started to take off you got one of those nice positive feedback loops. People didn't know about MP3 players, they knew about iPods. If you wanted a music player you got an iPod simply because that was all you knew, even if there were no fashion concerns. An "Everyone uses it because everyone uses it," sort of situation.
Technology was never the big factor, and in consumer electronics that can sometimes be the case.
Take a gander at this paper on the subject. Most people have about a 50/50 shot or worse at accurately predicting binary events. The worse part is interesting--that some people are just consistently terrible.
The truth is, you have to have incredibly detailed knowledge about a subject and a philosophic outlook on it that's appropriate. Technological change is especially hairy because there's a lot exciting technology that ends up getting killed by socio-cultural or political reasons. For instance, in the late 70's it was unthinkable that we wouldn't have a moonbase by 2010, but no one was looking at a little defense project called ARPANET. Ooops.
I'm no expert on this shit, so I can't speculate about what's going to be hot in the future. I thought the iPad was stupid, and I think Dark Matter is a bunch of bullshit. I also think Kurzweil is awfully optimistic about the Singularity. That said, I'm aware of my own track record,on prognostication, and unless it's about healthcare IT (my field), I'm ready to be as surprised as IBM was when they ended up having a worldwide market for more than 5 computers.
No, it wasn't necessary at all. I was tipped off by the humorously false subject line.
Did Tamagotchi fail? Or did it just *ahem* evolve into Pokemon and Nintendogs?
And what kind of an example is Tamagotchi in the first place? Tamagotchi wasn't a tech, it was just a particular application of an existing tech that had been around a long time, in fact by that point it was practically retro. All it did was make the little hand-held LCD games that had gone out of vogue around the release of the GameBoy briefly popular again by coming up with a novel new style of game.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I would say the iPad.
There was nitpicking about general features of the first iPhone (and still, not being available unlocked in the USA still is one of them) but mostly everyone recognized it would be a success. Only the people bitching about lack of physical keyboard were pretty shrill.
OTOH, if you went by the /. on the iPad before it was released, you would have thought it would have sunk like a boat anchor or G4 Cube:)
First of all, Metcalfe is a self-important asshole. He's up there with Dvorak in the most inept prognosticators category. The Internet, as we call it, had a couple of decades under its belt by the time Metcalfe made his rude noises about it. The Internet existed for a long time, it was the introduction of the ISP that was ultimately needed to get it to a wider audience. I'll wager you could find without too much difficulty a half dozen futurists and SciFi authors who foresaw a global information network.
As to satellites, maybe I'm looking at this from the point of view of a half century of satellite technology, but it strikes me as being pretty frigging obvious that once you can get a transmitter/repeater into orbit, you're in the game.
I don't view guys like Metcalfe and Dvorak as futurists, I just view them as contrarians who attack any new(ish) tech in the hopes that maybe they'll be right and look really smart. Ultimately, of course, they just look like contrarian morons.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What annoys me more is the equally sick and dying 4:3 flatpanel industry.
The ridiculous economies of scale involved in producing LCD TV panels mean that a decent computer panel is harder to come by. As long as you don't mind a low vertical resolution of just over 1000 pixels, you're in luck, because they are cheaper than ever. But if you actually want progress, you need to splash some serious cash.
I mean, FFS, I was using a 1600x1200 panel when my laptop had Windows NT on it. I'm searching through the HP website looking at laptops. I can't seem to find a screen with a vertical resolution above 768 pixels on anything less than £1000 ; and it's a bloody struggle to even tell what the resolution on most of the higher end models is. "HD"? Well, some people claimed 768 was HD, so forgive me for not trusting that that means anything... grrrr.
What the iPod did was make MP3 players cool, it made them a fashion accessory.
No, it made them easy and practical for ordinary people.
Before the iPod, the only people who bothered with MP3 players were geeks who already had all their CDs ripped to MP3s (or had pirated them from Napster.) Ordinary people were perfectly happy with their existing portable CD players and CD collections, because pre-iPod MP3 players were a world of hurt.
Most MP3 players before the iPod had barely any more capacity than portable CD players. Those that did have large capacities had only USB 1.1 connectivity, so they were way too slow to load up. Those large capacity players were also too huge to fit in a normal jeans pocket. Most didn't have screens that could show song names or playlists (only six-segment numeric displays.) Most didn't have playlist capability at all. All of them had frustratingly slow controls with arrow-key navigation. All of them required clunky software to load up. (Yes, worse than iTunes. Much worse. You'd have one program to rip music, and a seperate program to load it onto the player. Neither was aware of the other.)
Apple succeeded because it got the MP3 player right. Large capacity in a small form factor with fast FireWire (later USB2) loading. Quick and easy navigation with a big screen and scroll wheel. Integrated ripping and loading software on the PC side.
This is the sort of thing geeks don't notice and don't remember. If it's not a numeric specification, they forget it exists.
the idea that a 5gb mp3 player was at all unusual at the *time the ipod was launched* is BS. There were lots of players. Focusing on hardware you totally miss the whole jobs shtick: (1) make it look nice; from the time the 2st cave man or cave woman put red dye on their hair, people have been willing to pay a premium for "luxury" whatever that happens to be at the time; (2) create an app that does something - in this case, easy to do music; prior to the ipod, it was hard (in the sense of the proverbial slashdot grandmother) to put mp3s on your player - with itunes, it was click and play.
If you look at apple, the term gilded cage really applies; jobs understands the number one rule of sales people are lazy, if you cater to their lazyness you will do well.
Tellers (or phone customer service reps) don't have to guess if you are a profitable customer; the computer tells them this outright. Many years ago, I was reading about a shift at a FirstUSA (now Chase) call center, and every rep had a "traffic light" appear when the customer's file came up. That light would tell them if it was a "good" customer (and therefore deserving of obsequious (and time consuming) service, fee waivers, etc.) or a "poor" customer (and deserving the bare minimum of efficient service, no waivers for anything, etc.)
Naturally, "good" was either high-volume pay-every-month (and therefore a source of fee income), or maxed out (and paying on time.) "Bad" was small-volume, paid every month (and therefore expensive due to account overhead) or an erratic payer (and therefore likely stuck no matter how ruthless the bank was with fees.)
Once iTunes was available for Windows, it was all over. (Prior to this, MP3 players were still a competitive market.) When I replaced my first MP3 player (a discman-shaped Nomad), I first replaced it with another Nomad. Nasty hardware problem, so back to the store it went. Next attempt was an iRiver unit. Absolutely fantastic hardware, a remote with a display, great battery life; absolutely crap software. No ripping program, no organizing software, strange filename limitations, limited tagging support, no progressive-speed scrolling. At that point, I just gave up and bought an iPod and haven't looked back since.
Article says the following products/concepts succeeded when they were predicted to fail.
1) iPod (Portable Digital Media Player)
2) Internet
3) Personal Computer
4) Television
5) Google (Minimalist Internet Interfacing, unobstructive advertising)
6) Android, iPhone (Smartphones)
Anyone who predicted the failure of the above was obviously WAY too far removed from the target audience to be worth his/her salt.
1) Portable Digital Media Player -- This was an obvious predictable survivor. The first realistic portable music device was the cassette player (Sony Walkman, notably). It was a hit and widely emulated. Then came the portable CD player (Sony Discman, notably). It was a hit and widely emulated. It was better than the cassette player because it offered higher-quality sound and greater convenience (if at the initial cost of "skipping" risk). Then came the MP3 player-- a device that stored CD-quality music on flash memory. It had no moving parts and great battery life. Apple then put forth the iPod (early iterations had moving parts) which was a fashion smash hit. Its staying power came from the need for the next step in portable music evolution and, surprisingly, because of its unforeseeable status as a fashion accessory.
2) The internet, even at its earliest incarnation, was a means of connecting people of similar minds and interests for communication. Advances in communication always survive and this advance combined the opportunity for well-thought letter-style communication at telephone speed. Furthermore, it became a marketplace for wares and a means of education. Yes, and adult entertainment. Its survival was a no-brainer.
3) Whoever said the PC wouldn't survive did not understand what a PC nor what digital computing was. It's the same as someone saying "books" would not survive because the person didn't understand that paper could transmit information beyond the death of a writer.
4) Television... jeez. People love entertainment. Jokes, stories, gossip, games, races, drama, fantasy -- all were hits on stage, in person, and in books. The person who said TV wouldn't last had no understanding of people.
5) Google survived initially because while everyone was annoying users with massive front-page bloat and forceful marketing/advertising, Google was simple. Google provided what the intelligent and focused internet user market wanted- a simple and efficient search engine. Word of their apparent search honest spread like wildfire and thus came the demise of the all-encompassing "web portal".
6) Smartphones survive for a few reasons: the popularity of social exhibitionism/voyeurism, new generation reliance on internet connectivity to provide solutions, and the wow-factor of touchscreens and pretty UIs. They will continue to survive so long as the touchscreen remains the best affordable visual interface... though I'd really prefer the return of buttons... they just work.
You had 41 characters left, I used them.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Way back when, in my undergrad days, I earned a bit of extra money by working in the university library. One thing that was always made clear was that you had to put books and stuff back on the shelf in the right place, because if you put them in the wrong place it was unlikely anybody would ever find them again. You might as well throw them away.
The key is searching, finding things. I thought it was pretty obvious that anybody who could come up with a better way to find things on the internet would make a buttload of money. That better way, for the moment at least, is Google.
...laura
Philo Farnsworth invented Television.
...a year after John Logie Baird did.
Telephone pole-mounted fire alarm boxes should be gone by now. Telephones should have killed them. Then cell phones. But they refuse to die off completely, and the fire departments of some cities fight to keep them.
They exist not simply because of nostalgia, but because they just work. Quite well, actually. The system in Boston has experienced uptime of over a century. Nothing has ever managed to shut it down. Even when the telephone systems fail, cell phone towers stop working and there is absolutely no other way to communicate, the boxes remain functional and the ultimate insurance policy. No matter what happens, or where you are at any given moment, you will be able to get help if you need it. All thanks to 19th century telegraph technology. If your city is considering getting rid of them to save a few bucks, you might want to consider asking them not to.
They're not just useful for fires. Many NYC boxes offer the user a choice between fire / police and medical options.