Researchers Study "Harbingers of Failure," Consumers Who Habitually Pick Losers

AmiMoJo writes: Is your favorite TV show always getting cancelled? Did you love Crystal Pepsi? Were you an early adopter of the Zune? If you answered yes to these questions, researchers say you might be a "Harbinger of Failure." In a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, researchers identified a group of consumers whose preferences can predict products that will fail. “Certain customers systematically purchase new products that prove unsuccessful,” wrote the study authors. “Their early adoption of a new product is a strong signal that a product will fail.”

Comments

Bought a "Adam" android tablet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I make the list?

Re:Bought a "Adam" android tablet.

[AndyKron]

Maybe if you had bought a Newton.

Firefly

[RobinH]

I thought we just called those people Browncoats.

Re:Firefly

[itsdapead]

I thought we just called those people Browncoats.

As a wise fictional character once said, "May have [picked] the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." Not sure that applies to the Zune, though, although it was brown...

Presumably "Crystal Pepsi" wasn't brown (and, hopefully, wasn't so pure that it had a slight blue tint...)

Re:Firefly

[meta-monkey]

Brown? Brown?! Thanks, but I like to see my food.

Re:Firefly

[Frequency Domain]

As a wise fictional character once said, "May have [picked] the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one." Not sure that applies to the Zune, though, although it was brown...

The problem with the Zune wasn't solely that it was brown. It was brown and it squirted!

Re:Firefly

[beastofburdon]

The mp3 player that really failed badly (and should have been the successful one) was the Creative Labs Zen Vision M.
I got one of them in the early 2000's (2003 or 2004 I think) and loved it. While all my friend's ipods were failing left and right my Zen worked perfectly until it was stolen around 2008 or 2009. The quality of sound was no comparison, the Zen beat the ipod hands down, it had a much larger storage capacity, video was available on it, which was long before ipod had video capability, and the battery lasted much longer.
The difference in sales had everything to do with where money was invested. Apple invested the majority of their money in advertising while Creative Labs invested their money in creating a great mp3 player.

"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[sjbe]

Is this just another term for hipsters? People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[smittyoneeach]

"Hipsters are the leading edge, and HoFsters are the trailing edge, of the adoption curve," he said, reaching for his MS-DOS boot disk. . .

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually more about identifying people who continue to look down on hipsters, since they're failing to accept that this is a popular development and therefore a profitable niche market.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[hey!]

Is this just another term for hipsters? People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.

No. Because the "good reason" usually is "most people aren't doing that anymore." The article is about things that *never* become cool, not things that were cool in grandpa's day.

The real problem with being a hipster is that the ideal of non-conformity is inconsistent with the idea of fashion.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hipsters are the leading edge of sweet FA. They move in on existing microcultures, not because they are actually interested in what they center around, but because they perceive it to be cool. And then proceed to ruin it for the existing members of that culture. It's why they are universally despised and hated, and rightly so.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[BasilBrush]

I thought that the meme was that Hipsters buy Apple products. Yet they are usually outstanding successes.

If you're looking for harbingers of failure in the tech world, I imagine it's probably neckbeards who call you people "hipsters" and keep on believing that this will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[SQLGuru]

My wife has terrible luck with products and she is *NOT* a hipster by any means. She's very particular about things and many of them get cancelled causing yet another search. But I suspect it's her particularities that don't match what people commonly want that leads to their demise (for instance she has a big issue with scents, so finding unscented make-up is important for her --- other people probably don't care and have other priorities).

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[smittyoneeach]

In defense of hipsters, if your microculture is so vulnerable to a hipster dweeb infestation, maybe it was ready to go? Hipsters, in that sense, are the flies in the cultural ecosystem.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microcultures would be small by definition, and Hipsters are a large same-acting crowd (ironically?). I think any microculture that would not be vulnerable... would not be a microculture. YMMV

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

In defense of hipsters, if your microculture is so vulnerable to a hipster dweeb infestation, maybe it was ready to go? Hipsters, in that sense, are the flies in the cultural ecosystem.

Yep, when the hipsters move in it's your signal to cash out.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[swb]

I think you have the concept of hipster exactly backwards. Usually hipsters seem to cluster around emerging trends and often seem to be influential enough that an ironic embrace of vintage/past products often produces a resurgence of that product.

It's debatable whether hipsters even exist, or whether it's a group that identifies products before they become popular or whether it's a group that's defined as clustering around products that became popular.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been the case before the term hipster was recycled into the lumberjack-ironic-beard, iDevice-wearing goofball of today.

What happens is that a subculture forms, it gets mainstream, gets mocked, effectively destroyed, then 10-20 years, it essentially forms again. Punk, for example. Goth is another example.

The problem now is that there are no new genre setters. The 1990s produced industrial, techno, house, and many other genres. These days, there are no new genres, but musicians trying to play in existing, stale ones without pushing the edge and carving out a niche. This is why you don't see any Trent Reznors or Skinny Puppies in concert these days.

I wouldn't blame hipsters for the death of style or music. I'd blame it on the stagnation of the music scene in general, why the modern hipster even evolved.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Grishnakh]

I think the failure in the popular music industry is probably a pretty complex topic. I believe it comes from two big sources: the internet, and the whole Napster debacle in the late 1990s (and specifically, the music industry's response to it). I have two theories: 1) Basically, they killed the golden goose with Napster. People had a new way of sharing music and finding things they liked, and even despite all the "piracy" they were selling more music than ever before, but then the record industry whined and got it shut down, so people stopped buying much music at all. 2) With the internet and iPods (and later smartphones capable of holding your entire collection), people stopped listening to the radio and only listened to music they already like.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Grishnakh]

What are some examples of things she's purchased and which got canceled this way? Or other choices she's made which have turned out to be duds?

Did she buy a Pontiac Aztek?

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[rtb61]

Cheap ass people who buy stuff on special at end of life expecting miracles ie believing the lies they are told because they want to believe what favours them. That distorts the measure because of course by then many people believe the product is a failure. Now if they were early adopter failure selectors, hmm, now isn't that what early adopters who pick the right product are, people who have figured out what the losing products are and picked the winner.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using Linux on my desktop since 1995. It was amazing, unlike the microsoft crap it replaced. It had full desktop color dirting, a real ip stack, a build-in firewall and a real C compiler (qbasic suck).

WTF is this 'year of Linux on the desktop' you retard keep babbling about?

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[AmiMoJo]

I thought hipsters all owned iPhone and Macbooks, and shopped at The Gap. I.e. they are all about conformity, fads and Buzzfeed.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheap ass people who buy stuff on special at end of life expecting miracles ie believing the lies they are told because they want to believe what favours them.

That's me Sir. I prefer to give product 1-2 years to mature before buying - Take PC computers - instead newest, greatest , High price gadget I prefer to buy nice workstations or small servers after their 3y life cycle. Tested, patched and there is already enough information about their quirks.
Please convince me that small workstation based on 2 socked E5520 and space for 96GB RAM worse than new shiny iToy.

You are learning best on your own mistakes, but if you are clever you can learn on somebody else mistakes. :-)
Cars? The same - the less advanced design the better -> longer life, cheaper repairs. Let's not start Prius vs Hummer ....
Guns? The same - 1911 and AK - because they are working every time. Just point and click.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem with being a hipster is that the ideal of non-conformity is inconsistent with the idea of fashion.

Hear, hear!!

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[xevioso]

Ah yes, the much vaunted "Hipster-Hate" of the Slashdot neckbeard crowd. Quick, get on board the Hipster-hate train before it leaves the station! It's cool to hate on "hipsters" now, dontchya know...that's the new trend!

Of course, slavishly following the new hipster-hate trend might make you...wait for it...

a hipster.

Although maybe you neckbeards were hating on hipsters *before it was cool*, in which case you are still hipsters.

See, the great thing about all the stereotypical hipsters I know, and I know quite a few as I live in San Francisco, is that not a single one of them gives two shits about what people on the internet say about their love of organic, artisan food, their facial hair, or their Prius or whatever people think defines a hipster.

Which makes them TRULY cool in my book.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Aighearach]

They're just still confused by all this open source and free software stuff. They can't comprehend that I'm using software written by people, not by a company, that sales don't matter, and that it doesn't help me if they use the same software. They just can't comprehend that we would be able to tolerate linux "on the desktop" if we're less than 1% of users. To them that sounds like it is a "failure" because it isn't cool or popular. They just don't understand where our software comes from, and why having low overall end-user adoption doesn't impact us negatively, or prevent us from having new software.

After all, if a proprietary OS had the adoption rate of (end-user) linux, there would be almost no software being written for it, and you couldn't use it for most general business tasks.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem with being a hipster is that the ideal of non-conformity is inconsistent with the idea of fashion.

Actually the exact opposite is true.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[hey!]

I thought hipsters all owned iPhone and Macbooks, and shopped at The Gap. I.e. they are all about conformity, fads and Buzzfeed.

No, those things are actually anti-hip. As soon as something gets big enough for Buzzfeed it's for a different audience.

"Hip" implies arcane knowledge possessed by a select few. A great band with a small local following is "hip"; when they make it big they're no longer "hip", although they may still be "cool". The iPhone is pretty much the antithesis of hip, no matter how cool it may be. If I were to guess what hipster phone model might look like, it might be something low-cost Indian android phone manufactured for the local market and not intended for export -- very rare and hard to get outside of India. Or even better, hard to get outside of Gujarat. Or even better only a few hundred were ever manufactured then the company went bankrupt and the stock was sold on the street in Ahmedabad. Provided that the phone is cool. Cool plus obscure is the formula for "hip".

It follows there is no such thing as "hip" retail chain. It's a contradiction in terms. A chain may position itself in its marketing as "hip", but it's really after what the tech adoption cycle refers to as "Early Majority" adopters.

Hipsters reject being the leading edge of anything; as soon as something becomes big, it is no longer hip. This means they're not economically valuable on a large scale, which some people see as self-centered and anti-social. Compare this to cosplayers; the media always adopts a kind of well-the-circus-is-in-town attitude when there's a con, but while they're condescending toward cosplayers the media can't afford to be hostile because those people are the important early adopters for economically valuable media franchises.

Let me give you a more authentic hipster trend than the one you named. Last year there was a fad for hipster men to buy black fedora hats from Brooklyn shops that cater to Hasidic men. While as soon as something gets big enough to draw media attention it's dead to hipsters, this fad illustrates the elements of hipster aesthetic: (1) resurrecting obscure and obsolete fashions; (2) exoticism or syncretism; and (3) authenticity.

Now from an objective standpoint there's no good reason to favor or disfavor fedoras as opposed to, say baseball caps. It's just a different fashion. Likewise there's no practical reason to value a hat from a owner-operated store in Brooklyn over an identical one purchased from Amazon. But it does add rarity value, and that's the key. Something has to be rare and unusual to be hip. As soon as hipness is productized it appeals to a different audience.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Penguinisto]

I thought hipsters all owned iPhone and Macbooks, and shopped at The Gap. I.e. they are all about conformity, fads and Buzzfeed.

Not quite, at least insofar as the Gap.

Living here in Portland (which is somehow an outpost of hipsterdom), Most of the hipster types buy local clothing brands wherever possible (e.g. Keen, Archaeopteryx, etc), usually shift OS/laptop allegiances as needed (the apparent new thing now is to have a laptop running Linux with Docker atop it so you can run any x86 OS you want in order to impress your buddies), and the phones are nowadays either an iPhone or a phablet (the bigger the better).

There are points of conformity but only to an extent, as they seem to want enough minor differences between themselves - to generate interest in them, and/or to generate conversation points.

Mind you, this is only initial/light observation from a graybeard, but it seems to hold up.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[hey!]

Actually the exact opposite is true.

Which is necessarily true in any kind of fashion, even if it's anti-fashion. Hipsterism is a kind of contrarianism; the attraction is having things that most other people don't even know about. But strict contrarianism is morally indistinguishable from strict conformism.

Now outside of major metropolitan centers like Manhattan when people say "hipster" they mean something else; there's not enough of a critical mass of non-conformity to cater to an actual "hipster" class. What they're really talking about is "kids taking part in trends I'm not included in." In other words its the same-old, same-old grousing about kids these days, only now by people who've spent their lives as the focus of youth culture and can't deal with their new-found cultural marginalization.

As you get older the gracious thing to do is to age out of concern, one way or the other, with fashion.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[SQLGuru]

Sonia Kashuk loose powder -- they've resized the package (smaller) and increased the price twice and then finally changed the formulation that it isn't the same product

She's had to change deodorants a couple of different times

Most of her favorite shows get cancelled early

A lot of household goods, but I don't remember them all. It's not all about the electronics.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Grishnakh]

It might not be about the electronics, but the things you talk about sound like really low-value products. The special thing about electronics is that they're high-value; maybe not as much as in the 80s when a VCR cost $1000 (a large fraction of the price of a car back then), but still usually a lot more than a stick of deodorant.

And TV shows don't get canceled because of lack of popularity, but because of idiotic network executives. It's not like they actually poll viewers to see what's popular (how many Nielsen families do you know?), especially in an age when people use DVRs, Hulu, and Netflix.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

2) With the internet and iPods (and later smartphones capable of holding your entire collection), people stopped listening to the radio and only listened to music they already like.

I would actually add a corollary to this: (2a) with the rise of youtube and others video sites, you can go find the music that suits your particular taste. This gives the consumer tremendous power to explore a wider range of music, rather than gulp down the offal that the record companies and radio stations desperately try to shove in your face. Honestly, I think the recording labels could see obscene profits by learning how to monetize this opportunity, but instead they seem intent on killing that which they don't understand or have direct control over. Eventually someone will figure out how to make a buck off this; at that point the record labels will either adapt or be driven to extinction.

Re: "Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[xevioso]

Shut up, hipster.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[ezdiy]

Fair explanation, but the criticism still stands - hipsters as a group are no longer hip, theres too many of em. It's no longer few oddballs seeking the weird, think kramer from seinfeld, but whole subculture of kramer clones which define themselves through volatily weird hip things.

The core of the throuble is the scorched earth. Without hipsters, the given obscure hip thing would remain hip much longer - hipsters giving it exposure often propel it into mainstream culture.

This is often bad, when some closed circlejerk is suddenly disturbed by the masses, but by same amount, it's often positive when the exposure is desired. Cool obscure, silly and goofy vietnamese android game? Sure it's hipsters spreading the word. Hipsters and more broadly, the millenial culture of short attention spans and seeking of anything new are the frontiers of hype. They will perhaps destroy whole traditional advertising industry (there will be only professional hipsters for hire, look up pewdiepie vs flappy bird saga), which can be only good.

At that point, hipsters will evolve into their next stage, the natural calling - they'll become hypesters.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not because they perceive it to be cool, but because they perceive it to be esoteric. Hipsters are all about counterculture and going with niche products because they think it makes them look different and they can tell others that they "don't get it" because they aren't "cool" enough. Deep down, the hipsters don't even like the shit that they choose, they only pretend to in order to uphold the charade.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Struck a nerve, eh?

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[RandomAdam]

WTF there is a train now; and here I have been walking for the whole time! Where do I get on this hate train?

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[formfeed]

... the ideal of non-conformity is inconsistent with the idea of fashion

That would make a great fashionable T-Shirt.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[Jack Griffin]

Ah yes, the much vaunted "Hipster-Hate" of the Slashdot neckbeard crowd. Quick, get on board the Hipster-hate train before it leaves the station!

I was a hipster in 2007, got over it by 2010, and am already on the next cool thing which I can't tell you about (for obvious reasons). If you're living in 2015 and either a hipster or hipster-hater then you are most likely closer to the Walmart end of the spectrum.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[AK Marc]

Hipsters reject being the leading edge of anything; as soon as something becomes big, it is no longer hip.

Beard contests and skinny jeans on guys are "hip" and a sign of "hipster". A hipster, is like a Goth. Both trying hard to not fit in, by finding a subculture, and blindly following it without their own identity. Their identity is anti-mainstream, by trying hard to fit in to something perceived to be anti-mainstream, making their choice mainstream.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[tehcyder]

I was a hipster in 2007

That is so 2006.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[tehcyder]

I'm pretty sure that most hipsters couldn't even tell you the names of two different Operating Systems, never mind install them on the same computer.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[beastofburdon]

I hope this is true, because I really want to watch Apple crash and burn.

Re:"Harbinger of Failure" = Hipsters?

[RockDoctor]

People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.

I suspect that TFA is looking for precisely other people. But to make the point, I'll voilate Slashdot's normal procedure by R-ing TFA ... and then to TFA's TFA ... which has dumped the article. Well, [SHRUG] then. At least I tried.

Some of us think carefully about tech trends, but get it wrong. When I was looking to replace my trusty 386 with a 486 (WITH a co-processor this time), I thought carefully about whether to go for VL-bus or PCI. I thought about it for months. Went for VL-bus.

A while later (2 years?). mindful of the increasing clarity of the VL-bus mistake, I wanted more hard drive space. MFM had done it's stuff, and I'd reaped the 50% capacity increase from switching to an RLL controller (and of course running the firmware routines associated) .. .and Idecided that the way to go was SCSI. IDE drives were out, but I thought SCSI was the way to go for the commodity desktop. [Bzzzt!]

What came next? It was probably graphics card wars. Endless struggles to get a nice jiggle to Lara Croft's tits. I deliberately ducked that one (besides, it would mean going form Dos 6.22/ Win3.11 "up" to Win 95. Well, I resisted that for several years. And decided to go for an OS/2 system. (Actually, the boot manager for that re-paid my efforts quite profitably. But that's a side-line. Incidentally, I was also wishing for a reliable system for mounting/ dismounting hard drives, because I was also experimenting with Linux at the time too.) For that, I stuck with the SCSI gear I'd still got. I also started writing CDs, also on SCSI. That all worked, but commodity technology had gone the other way by the time that the burglars relieved me of the hardware.

I pretty much gave up after that. Laptops + USB, and stay a long way back from the cutting edge.

If you see me with a new technology, don't follow.

Answers:

[Anonymous Coward]

A) Yes.
B) Don't know what that is.
C) Hell no!

Re:Answers:

[behrooz0az]

This,
because fucking TV companies are retarded for canceling Heroes and Forever, I'm not a harbinwhatever

Re:Answers:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't know what "harbinger" means then you might actually be one...

Re:Answers:

[behrooz0az]

I was too lazy to finish the sentence, You insensitive clod

Re:Answers:

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is there no verb to harbing?

As in, "the boss told me to harbing our competitor's strategy".

Re:Answers:

[Anonymous Coward]

verb (used with object)
to act as harbinger to; herald the coming of.

Re:Answers:

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.google.com/search?...

No results found for +harbing verb

Re:Answers:

[Anonymous Coward]

Using google instead of dictionary and brains - really? OTOH no brains could mean no knowledge of invention called dictionary. Ok continue then.

Re:Answers:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think the word harbinger traces its root to a *verbing" of the the word herberge (apparently meaning a shelter used by an army), but it morphed into usage as a person that finds such shelter (thus needing yet another verbing to close the loop)

Links to the actual study?

[SLOGEN]

An online summary of a newspaper pay-walled newspaper reporting on an article... quoting the original with sentences like "At least, according to a group of researchers ..." and "n a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, researchers ...". Anyone have an actual link to the actual paper? I have a nagging suspicion that this may actually be an artifact of how the analysis is done.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[alexhs]

Anyone have an actual link to the actual paper?

The study is only available on HD DVD.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[parallel_prankster]

Here, the above link and the chicago tribune links are horrible. Sorry about the link format! https://www.google.com/url?sa=...

Re:Links to the actual study?

[alvinrod]

Here's a link to the study in case anyone is interested. I don't have the time to go through it in detail right now myself, but perhaps someone else could pick over it.

You'd think that Slashdot editors would try to include that kind of link in the summary as if there's anything worth reading it's the source itself.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[AmiMoJo]

Sorry, I looked for a non-paywalled copy but couldn't find one. I thought the story would be a good opportunity to mean about stuff we like that was cancelled/discontinued, and how if online advertisers could identify these people they could spam them with adverts for competitor's products.

I'm trying to keep Slashdot alive here with a light story and a chance for some good old geek nostalgia/venting.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[SQLGuru]

You'd think that Slashdot editors would try to include that kind of link in the summary as if there's anything worth reading it's the source itself.

I've been here a few years....I wouldn't think that at all.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[Anonymous Coward]

Betamax

Re:Links to the actual study?

[Anonymous Coward]

or Betamax.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[CronoCloud]

You'd think that Slashdot editors would try to include that kind of link in the summary as if there's anything worth reading it's the source itself.

Double checks that your UID is newer than mine so that I can give that classic Slashdot response:

You must be new here.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[Anonymous Coward]

Betamax

Proving, once again, that the key to judging the long-term success of technology is whether it helps or hinders access to porn.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[0100010001010011]

I'm trying to keep Slashdot alive here with a light story and a chance for some good old geek nostalgia/venting.

Me too. >serious<Wanna make a new site?>/serious<

Re:Links to the actual study?

[AmiMoJo]

Wanna make a new site?

Soylent News tried... In some ways it's good, but in other ways it really didn't take long for the trolls to take over. It's getting better again now, slowly.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[Jayson]

Back in my day, you were lucky to get a gopher link and you liked it.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[DutchUncle]

HD DVD? Pshaw. Now, if you had HD Betamax, maybe we could talk . . .

Re:Links to the actual study?

[tlhIngan]

The study is only available on HD DVD.

You jest, but the real truth has shown what really decided the HD format wars - money. And lots of it. The better part of a billion dollars paid out by Sony to the studio.

Because consumer acceptance of HD-DVD was quite strong - it was anywhere from 10:1 HD-DVD to Blu-Ray to 2:1 at the lower end.

In the end, what really happened was Sony was getting quite worried because Blu-Ray was performing poorly. So poorly a lot of studios were actually thinking of switching away. Warner was telling the HD-DVD camp if they could get another studio to switch, they will switch. HD-DVD knew Fox was going to switch, so that would cause Warner to switch exclusively to HD-DVD as well.

A week before Fox was to make the switch official, they canned the deal - it was later revealed Fox was paid $120M to stay Blu. Warner was also paid $500M to stay Blu.

So yeah, Sony was pretty desperate and threw a lot of money around.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[jsternbe]

I heard you could rent it in DIVX format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Links to the actual study?

[slew]

Short story, some people just have bad tastes and marketing people should keep this in mind.

Summary. Results limited to repeat purchasing of consumer products. With total sales held constant, as the percentage of sales identified from these so-called harbinger-of-failure customers rises from 25% to 50%, the probability of success of that product decreases about 31%. If these customers have repeat purchase, the relative probability of success decrease even more (2 repeat purchases: success decrease 37%; 3 or more purchases: success decreases 56%).

Longer story? The paper describes their data set as follows:

This paper uses two datasets: a sample of individual customer transaction data, and a sample of aggregate store-level transaction data. Both datasets come from a large chain of convenience stores with many branches across the United States. The store sells products in the beauty, consumer healthcare, edibles and general merchandise categories. Customers visit the store frequently (on average almost weekly), and purchase approximately four items per trip at an average price of approximately $4 per item. The store level transaction data includes aggregate weekly transactions for every item in a sample of 111 stores spread across 14 different states in the Midwestern and Southwestern portions of the US. The data period extends from January 2003 through October 2009. We use the store-level transaction data to define new product survival, and to construct product covariates for our
multivariate analysis. We exclude seasonal products that are designed to have a short shelf life, such as Christmas decorations and Valentine's Day candy.

The individual-customer data covers over ten million transactions made using the retailer’s frequent shopping card between November 2003 and November 2005 for a sample of 127,925 customers.

The analysis defines a successful product as one that continues sales after 3 years (and a flop otherwise) based on aggregate sales. But they use data from loyalty card scans to identify groups of customers to test their hypothesis, and they limited their analysis to products that survived at least 1 year to avoid the "noise" associated with no chance to purchase products. FWIW, they do level some suspicion that the use/non-use of loyalty cards bias the data somewhat, however, the analysis was based on the following methodology...

Repeat purchase rates may therefore provide a more accurate predictor of new product success than initial adoption rates. For this reason, we use both initial adoption and repeat purchases to classify customers. Specifically, we ask whether customers who repeatedly purchase new products that fail provide a more accurate signal of new product failure than customers who only purchase the new product once...
First, we use a sample of new products to group customers according to how many flops they purchased in the weeks after the product is introduced. We then investigate whether purchases in the first 15 weeks by each group of customers can predict the success of a second sample of new products.

Note they don't attempt to predict out-of-the-gate flop products (like the Zune), they merely note that it seems like some people's tastes for consumer items that are subject to repeat purchase are likely not indicative of ultimate retail success and for some reason this is unexpectedly correlated across different products. Their conclusion is that the preferences of these harbingers-of-failure customers for items are indicative of a negative preference in the greater population and that will likely limit the ultimate growth potential of a product, and stores shouldn't waste precious shelf space on such items favored by these people.

Re:Links to the actual study?

[tbannist]

You jest, but the real truth has shown what really decided the HD format wars - money. And lots of it. The better part of a billion dollars paid out by Sony to the studio.

You shouldn't forget that Toshiba was paying (or trying to pay) studios to switch to HD DVD. The Warner defection effectively ended the format war because Toshiba thought it had a deal where they would pay $100 million to Warner and $120 to Fox and they would both switch to HD-DVD exclusively. That deal would probably have fatally wounded Blu-Ray. However, you should know that after a slow start (plague by higher prices and hardware and software defects), by late 2007, Blu-Ray disks were outselling HD-DVD disks 2 to 1 overall. So it was Toshiba who needed to pull off a major victory and that's why they were offering money to both Fox and Warner to go exclusively HD-DVD.

To understand why things shook out as they did you have to understand that Warner probably didn't care which format won as long as one of them did. They were losing money because DVD sales were dropping but most customers were waiting to see which HD format would win. Warner, as the studio with the largest library of titles, figured it was losing the most money from the format war. I think when they evaluated the choices, they could see that going to HD-DVD wasn't going to end the format war, it was going to prolong it. That why they specified that Toshiba had to convince another major studio to defect. Warner wanted an immediate decisive victory. So, when the Fox deal fell through, Warner made their decision. So while they certainly took the money from Sony, they it wasn't the money from Sony that made them choose. And it's reasonably to believe them because 400 million is not that much compared to their estimated yearly profits (billions instead of millions) from their back library sales once the format war was over.

So, your narrative isn't entirely correct, the deal ended the format war decisively because Blu Ray was already winning, this back-room deal ended it in the direction it was already heading. That's not say that Sony wasn't desperate to win, but both sides were throwing money around and Sony was already winning.

Zune

[NIK282000]

My Zune still works fine and I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro, some products that do their job well just don't sell (in this case because of the worlds worst marketing).

Re:Zune

[johanw]

Most users of windows phone can be added to that list too. Except those where MS-indoctrinated company MCSE's pushed it on them.

Re:Zune

[Mr D from 63]

My Zune still works fine and I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro,.....

So, what new products have you bought recently?

Re:Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

"My Zune still works fine and I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro, some products that do their job well just don't sell (in this case because of the worlds worst marketing)."

Or because the products were just shit and people realized this and they failed.

But I understand the need for Microsoft apologists, even on dying tech sites.

Re:Zune

[SQLGuru]

Yep. I love mine, but the general populous hasn't bought in........I don't know if Windows 10 will help the situation, but I'm still hopeful.

Re:Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

My zune still works as well. I use it every day.
Good battery life, large amount of storage.
Only downside is that you have to use the stupid zune software.
I'm sure the apple fanbois will be shocked that I don't buy a new mp3 player every year when this one still works fine.

Better call Intel, samsung and nvidia. Looks like their products are all about to fail.

Re:Zune

[Lumpy]

Notice he is typing it on a first gen surface pro WITH THE KEYBOARD.

As all generations of the surface are pretty useless without the keyboard. (I own one, I know this as a fact)

That is why the surface is not a success, Microsoft's inability to get user interfaces right. The hardware is sound and great. It's the steaming crap OS that is installed by default that is the problem.

Re:Zune

[johanw]

We are hearing that excuse since windows phone 7: "but wait until the next version". It will fail too, since running Android apps won't be flawlessly (see Blackberry how that works out) and "universal apps" won't be developed outside MS since desktop users, where windows is large, are not interested in mobile apps but in full-sized desktop programs. The usage stats of the included windows 8 apps were dramatic, even among the windows 8 adepts.

Re:Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the choice between Android and Windows, I'd choose Windows every time. Google likes to let features get popular and then cancel them. Google likes to introduce major showstopper bugs into their point releases and then only fix them in the next major release, forcing everyone in the US market to choose between buying a new phone to get an Android update or alter their work life to accommodate Google's bugs.

Any enterprise that banks on Google products is shortsighted and stupid. Google has no vested interest in making sure your enterprise keeps functioning with their products.

Re:Zune

[GuB-42]

I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro.

The Surface Pro was good. The real bomb was the Surface RT. Now that they got rid of it (the Surface 3 is x86) it seems that the sales are picking up again.

Re:Zune

[NatasRevol]

You remind me of the Dell rep who insisted that the Dell Phone would wipe out the iPhone with in a year. In 2009.

Re:Zune

[hduff]

My Zune still works fine and I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro, some products that do their job well just don't sell (in this case because of the worlds worst marketing).

Many good products fail. Success in the market often has little to do with the usefulness or quality of the product.

Re:Zune

[hduff]

even on dying tech sites.

Slashdot is NOT dying.

It has been dead for a while.

Re:Zune

[SQLGuru]

The Streak was mocked as a phablet and yet here we are.....5" phones are common.

But I recognize that Windows Phone won't be besting iOS or Android any time soon.....I just want it to be big enough that I don't have to worry about it being killed off any time soon......

Re:Zune

[Tipa]

Do you squirt the social on your Zune? That was the most bizarre thing ever.

Re:Zune

[NIK282000]

I do not, they have some serious naming problems there at MS.

Re:Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

My Zune still works fine and I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro, some products that do their job well just don't sell (in this case because of the worlds worst marketing).

You're right, but I think for the wrong reason. When you say "worst marketing", I think you're meaning "worst advertising". In fact, the real problem is in fact marketing. Both the Zune and SurfacePro entered a crowded market and tried to leech users off the low end (for which MS wouldn't compete on price) and the high end (for which people had already traded a higher price for the sheer dominance and availability of the current leader and all third party support). Instead of trying to enter a market with a successful leader and being a "me too" or trying to win out the low end (and suffer horrible profit margins), perhaps MS should have focused on a market that was actually being under-served by the leader or for which there simply wasn't a market in the first place.

But, nah, that'd require innovation. MS's history has been heavily on undercutting the competition on a medium (software) that has near zero unit costs that allow them to subsidize the costs in the short term and in the long term make a profit. Hardware is difficult to make that way, and MS has had very limited success in that arena. I can only imagine MS's "software as a service" will fail because in the long term people will demand "free" software and advertising revenue to pay for this "free" software isn't near the same as OEM licensing fees.

Re:Zune

[tsa]

Hasn't MS always been about the next version?

Re:Zune

[Cafe Alpha]

Typing this in Microsoft Bob.

Re:Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a working Brown 30GB zune which was brilliant. The Zune software is better than anything else available for desktop and still works. I bought a crap ton of HD-DVDs when they were 99c each and a HD-DVD player for $30. I bought a first Gen Surface Pro as well and sold it for a Surface Pro 2 which I've been happy with.

I don't think of it as picking failures so much as picking great products regardless of their success in the market.

Re:Zune

[MoaDweeb]

Absolutely, Betamax is a superior product to VHS.

Re:Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the choice between Android and Windows, I'd choose Windows every time. Google likes to let features get popular and then cancel them. Google likes to introduce major showstopper bugs into their point releases and then only fix them in the next major release, forcing everyone in the US market to choose between buying a new phone to get an Android update or alter their work life to accommodate Google's bugs.

Funny, what you describe seems (to my eye) to be the modus operandi for MS. Are you astroturfing?

Link to original paper

[AthanasiusKircher]

Here

Re:Link to original paper

[AthanasiusKircher]

Screwed up the link to the PDF -- better link to abstract here, where you can get PDF.

Other examples

[Anonymous Coward]

Nintendo Power Glove & Virtual Boy, SEGA Game Gear, numerous CCGs that tried to make it like Magic The Gathering, sauce-stuffed frozen pizza, Tab cola... That's all I can remember at the moment.

Re:Other examples

[ihtoit]

Game Gear was huge in the UK, M:TG is still going after what, twenty years?

Re:Other examples

[ZygnuX]

If you had read better, you would've noticed that it says "CCGs that tried to make it LIKE M:TG" :D

Re:Other examples

[Sique]

We don't need examples of failed products (for each successful one, there are ten which failed).

The point of the article is that the same people constantly prove to be early adopters of products that don't succeed in the market.

Re:Other examples

[ihtoit]

and if you'd read better, you'd see that I utterly refuted that claim, as Magic: The Gathering has been going strong for two decades averaging four new expansions per year and the trade in individual cards is doing better than ever.

Re:Other examples

[Anonymous Coward]

These are all awful examples - the power glove and virtual boy would have been bestsellers if they hadn't sucked. The zune on the other hand was decent hardware..... Sega Game Gear was hugely popular at the time, not a gameboy but the 2nd most popular handheld. Sauce-stuffed frozen pizza is *still* sold and made, and Tab.............Tab cola is still around with a serious cult following and is profitable.

Try Betamax, Neogeo Turbografx 16 and the 3D0, but the OP's examples are some of the worst I've seen.

Re:Other examples

[ZygnuX]

Man. What the guy is trying to say is that he chose other games that are NOT M:TG. And these games FAILED, unlike M:TG. He is an adopter of failed projects, like those M:TG wannabes.

Re:Other examples

[budgenator]

Tab Cola had several problems, one it tasted like cola unlike Coke and Pepsi, much more like RC Cola, it was purchased to compete with RC's Diet Rite cola, It used sodium saccharin, which has been the target of several attempts to be listed as a health hazard, but those commercials killed them, https://youtu.be/DJL4yQn_7qQ, everybody remembers the commercial, few remembered the product.

Re:Other examples

[hackwrench]

Wrong definition of "like". I read that as CCG that are similar to Magic:The Gathering, but not M:tG itself, while you seem to have interpreted it to mean CCG, one of which is M:tG.

Re:Other examples

[BurgEnder]

And again, Power Glove was a Mattel product, officially licensed by N* - like many other useless accessories released for the NES.

Re:Other examples

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is actually quite simple. Because 9 out of ten products fail, people that tend to be early adapters will fail to choose correctly 9 times out of ten.
So no surprise really.

Re:Other examples

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine someone who buys every new product in a given category. If most of those products fail that guy would have a track record of "predicting failure" for the category but all he really did was buy every new product irrespective of later success. Imagine a guy who has a particular, fairly unique need and who buys every product that serves his need. They work well for him but since his need is fairly unique they never take off in the market. Is that a failure? The way you define the study population has a huge impact on what the statistics you calculate actually mean, so it's insensible to say "we don't need examples".

Re:Other examples

[artur9]

How many of them are tech reporters?

Losers are for cows.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOOO! Moooooo cows MOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU COWS!!

Re:Losers are for cows.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOOO! Moooooo cows MOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU COWS!!

You are all meat. Wolf says ARH-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Now try to run you fat bellied behemoths, but i'll catch yo and eat you ARH-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Prediction after the fact.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Maybe those "harbingers of failure" are just people who are a bit more persistent in their choices and less fickle, or they are the normal ones: people who pick stuff because they like it, not because their friends do. If a large majority of the population are dedicated followers of fashion, then the remaining group will be over-repesented amongst the buyers of unfashionable items. Watching that group is a great way to predict failure after the fact: if you see a large portions of "harbingers" buying your stuff, then you are probably already looking at slumping sales. That group does not flock to failing products, they are simply the ones left over after the rest has moved on.

A better way to predict success is to do what some companies are already doing: watch who sets the trend, and follow them.

Re:Prediction after the fact.

[Mr D from 63]

I think there are folks that just buy 'the newest thing' and don't really think much about its real world usefulness. Nothing wrong with those folks, but they are certainly very likely to buy stuff that eventually fails because most new products do fail, and many truly innovative products get outclassed by following products.

Re:Prediction after the fact.

[93 Escort Wagon]

Maybe those "harbingers of failure" are just people who are a bit more persistent in their choices and less fickle, or they are the normal ones: people who pick stuff because they like it, not because their friends do.

You're taking this WAY too personally...

Re:Prediction after the fact.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the more general question is whether or not they controlled for other signals. For example if someone buys products on sale then they would presumably be buying more losers than winners. The customer could be predictive of failure but if they were responding to pricing then the directionality of the cause is backwards.

Re:Prediction after the fact.

[alvinrod]

After reading the actual paper a bit, it seems likely that this is just an outcome of how the market works more than people being good predictors, especially considering this piece of data from the report:

In Figure 1, we report a histogram describing how long new products survive using the full sample of 8,809 new products. Of these items, 5,301 (60%) did not survive for 3 years (12 quarters). The average survival duration for these failed items was 84.68 weeks, or approximately 21 months.

If you have a person, who for whatever reason dislikes a big brand (e.g. Uncle Barry drinks Coke and he's a fuck head so I won't drink it) they're likely choosing among products that have a 60% failure rate, which makes it more likely than not that there will be some people who have histories including several failures. Another thing that makes this even more likely is that they mention even failed products often enjoy good initial sales due to retailer incentives, coupons, or other promotions, which suggests that some of this group may simply be price-sensitive consumers who are always looking to get the most value for their dollar, which you typically never get when dealing with established brands. The study even points this out:

The findings in Table 7 reveal that on average Harbingers purchase more items but visit a similar number of stores. They tend to buy slightly more items per visit, but make slightly fewer visits. Although statistically significant, the differences in these measures are relatively small. There are larger differences in the prices of the items that they purchase and the categories that they purchase from. Harbingers tend to choose less expensive items and are more likely to purchase items on sales and items with deeper discounts. They purchase a higher proportion of beauty items, but a lower proportion of healthcare items.

It seems to me that what they've found are people that care more about value than brand loyalty, so these people are naturally going to pick more products based on sales, discounts, etc. and given that ~60% of new products fail within 3 years, these people are more likely to try them out than a typical consumers. You practically expect that there will be people from that group on the tail-end of the curve who have purchased more products that fail than not, much like if you get enough people to flip ten coins, some of them will have 8+ come up tails.

Re:Prediction after the fact.

[swb]

I think your analysis is insightful (...and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter).

I feel like I either have very strong preferences or none at all. Things that I like I tend to have a kind of complex rationale for why I like them. Cost enters the picture, but only as a tail-end constraint, and usually if the cost is extreme. Generally I'm willing to pay more -- or not buy at all -- because the less expensive products fails my preference rationale.

This being said, I'm always surprised at the people who always seem to prefer lowest cost first, even when the price difference is negligible. I'm always struck by people who buy cheap first and then are disappointed/frustrated when their choices end up inadequate.

I'm even more surprised with people who seem to be cost only driven -- seeming to have no preference and seeing all choices as equal and only differentiated by price.

With regard to harbingers, I wonder if some of them just have unusual tastes that differ from average. They may just be buying new products more often because new products almost by definition differ from current popular products as vendors seek niches. As old niche products "fail" and disappear, these people just end up buying whatever is new because they want what's different. It's not a failure prediction as much as it is a market failure to provide consistent alternatives to mainstream tastes.

Re:Prediction after the fact.

[Grishnakh]

I thought the article was talking about people who are early adopters of stuff which fails. If you buy something on sale, that usually means the product has already been around for a while, and the retailer is trying to get rid of it because it's failing.

Re:Prediction after the fact.

[Anonymous Coward]

the thing about statistics is that you can limit your data set and produce the entire spectrum of possible conclusions.

did anyone research the toilet paper, food, medicines, doctors, clothing, shoes, cars, beverages they purchased?

were they all failures?

what level of selective zooming, and simultaneous ignoring of the rest is needed to arrive at a "harbinger group fallacy"?

Re:Prediction after the fact.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are right then watching these ‘harbingers’ isn't going to be very useful when introducing new products and you'll only know who of those old ‘harbingers’ still are the new ones after the fact.

I've read the study though and the analysis is sufficiently sloppy that I cannot even be sure it shows anything at all, let alone the existence of harbingers of doom.

But suppose for a moment that it were true, what the study says, that there are people who just have different tastes, and apparently in all areas of life, no matter how silly and unreasonable that sounds? Suppose it were true... aren't we doing those people an enormous disservice by pulling all their favourite products from the shelves? To me, this sounds both extremely unfair, preventing a group of people from enjoying life just because there are less of them, and economically unsound since there is good money to be made in catering to niche consumers.

And the latter given again makes me question the validity of the study.

please EA Windows 10

[ihtoit]

I don't want to live in a world where I can't watch DVDs out of the box through Media Center.

I'll get right on it ...

[MacTO]

I'm installing Windows 10 right now, just so that we can watch Microsoft's empire crumble ...

Re:I'll get right on it ...

[budgenator]

I'm installing Windows 10 right now, just so that we can watch Microsoft's empire crumble ...

Microsoft's empire has been crumbling since August 24, 1995 when Win95 was released, and that's slight before netcraft shown the demise of netBSD, and Linux was predicted to take over the desktop; and on a lighter note, Duke Nukem Forever has been released and we'll have fly cars any year now.

failure is short-term

[turkeydance]

consumer goods can "come back": Febreeze, for example. http://www.forbes.com/sites/pe...

Or Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat has a pretty solid track record of picking failed technologies for use in their Linux distributions:

RPM: Of all of the package formats and management tools available for Linux and similar systems, RPM is by far the worst. (dpkg + APT are the best for Linux systems.)

GTK+: Of all of the GUI toolkits available for Linux and similar systems, GTK+ is the worst. (Qt is the best for Linux systems.)

GNOME: Of all of the desktop environments available for Linux and similar systems, GNOME, and especially GNOME 3, is the worst. (KDE and Xfce are the best for Linux systems.)

systemd: Of all of the init systems available for Linux and similar systems, systemd is the worst. (Just pick any other init system. It doesn't even matter which one. It's better than systemd.)

PulseAudio: Of all of the sound daemons available for Linux and similar systems, PulseAudio is the worst. (Again, just pick any of the others, and it will be better.)

NetworkManager: I still don't know what exactly this is supposed to actually do, other than fuck up my networking constantly. (Just uninstall it.)

Re:Or Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

> (dpkg + APT are the best for Linux systems.)
Dream on. Portage is much better.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Portage is just a half-arsed imitation of pkgsrc. The smart thing to do is to use pkgsrc directly.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trying to defend any of the things you listed, but I do want to point out that all of that is based on personal opinion, not fact.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[GuB-42]

You may not like the choices made by Red Hat but all the technologies you cited except maybe GTK+/GNOME are widely successful in term of market adoption.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[CronoCloud]

I've been running Redhatty distros for 13 years and I haven't had too much trouble with any of those. Well, not until Gnome 3 anyway.

RPM: If you're using RPM to install your RPM's instead of yum or dnf, you're doing it wrong.

PulseAudio: Was a bit quirky a few versions ago, now it just works. It can do things that Alsa/OSS can't

NetworkManager: It's always just worked for me, but I have heard that it had issues with wifi in it's early days. I didn't have that trouble since I used wired with it.

.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[hduff]

RPM: If you're using RPM to install your RPM's instead of yum or dnf, you're doing it wrong.

Mandriva/Mageia's URPMI is an excellent RPM wrapper.

A distro update is as simple as adding the new repositories and performing an update.
http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.co...

Re:Or Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing, most of those things you mentioned are pretty big successes. How much *you* like it or how well it works are not measures of success.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[Grishnakh]

Unfortunately IMO, from what I can tell, GTK+ is easily much more popular in the Linux market than Qt, mainly because most distros use it (either with Gnome or with one of its forks). Qt is very popular in certain markets (especially embedded Linux devices), but if you're looking at the Linux desktop market it's all GTK+. Of course, there's probably a lot more embedded Linux devices out there than there are desktops running Linux...

As a programmer, Qt is far and away a much nicer toolkit to work with if you need to do GUIs with C++ (or even if you're just using C++, GUI or not). Why anyone bothers with GTK+, I have no idea.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not like the choices made by Red Hat but all the technologies you cited except maybe GTK+/GNOME are widely successful in term of market adoption.

Well, "Market adoption" is not so relevant in the linux world. Linux is not the os with the successful "market adoption", but then it does not aim for "markets" anyway.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[rainmaestro]

PulseAudio still can't handle USB headsets properly. I had a bitch of a time getting mine to work at all, and it still won't play volume below 20%. It also still crashes more than any other service on my machine.
NetworkManager has this ungodly habit of forgetting/losing access to all of my VPN passwords at seemingly random intervals. This has been happening for over a year with more than one distro.

They are both far more stable than they were many years ago, but in both cases they only just border on being usable.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except systemd, that is.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[Aighearach]

You listed RPM, Gtk+, Gnome, systemd, PulseAudio, and NetworkManager. Aren't all of those still in active use? Aren't they all still some of the most popular solutions for what they do?

If that is failure, you didn't comprehend the story. It wasn't about things not being your personal favorite.

Then again, if you think RPM, Gtk, or systemd are "failures," you might be one of the people in the story.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[sfcat]

As a programmer, Qt is far and away a much nicer toolkit to work with if you need to do GUIs with C++ (or even if you're just using C++, GUI or not). Why anyone bothers with GTK+, I have no idea.

I write a C/C++ app that uses Qt. But people use GTK+ because its C and not C++. Sometimes that's a factor. Other than that, I prefer Qt when I don't have to make the code pure C.

Re:Or Red Hat?

[Grishnakh]

I write a C/C++ app that uses Qt. But people use GTK+ because its C and not C++.

GTK+ has C++ bindings and is used in C++ projects.

Re: Or Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you ducking high on meth? RPM + Yum = easy mode package management?

apt is misnomer (actually aptitude it, but whatever).

I didn't mean ducking, stupid auto correct

Re:Or Red Hat?

[greenfruitsalad]

i once tried to be trendy and do the following in network-manager instead of interfaces.conf:
- 4 physical interfaces merged into an 802.3ad trunk
- put a bridge on top of that trunk
- create 3 vlan interfaces on that bridge
- give each vlan interface several IPs (both ipv4 and ipv6)
- make sure this works after a reboot and that you can shut down/start up individual vlan interfaces

HAA HAAAA laughed the computer in the voice of Nelson Muntz

Speaking of TV shows

[MikeRT]

Family Guy and Firefly were more or less sabotaged by politics. The reason Family Guy came back was Fox executives looked at the sales numbers of the DVDs and basically said "WHO THE FUCK CANCELED THIS?" With Firefly, they wouldn't license it to the Sci Fi channel under any terms, even though they had a commercial success with the Stargate franchise. Even when they pitched a home run with Battlestar Galactica, they wouldn't reconsider.

Not long ago, Longmire was canceled by A&E for bizarre reasons. It had good ratings and was pulling in a few million viewers. They said "the demographic is too old." Uh, ok, anyone in your marketing department notice that young viewers (ie millennials mainly) are the poorest generation in the market right now?

A show getting canceled is not necessarily indicative of anything about its quality or marketability. A large part of the problem is just the delivery mechanism. If all TV were content on demand, you'd probably see a lot more quality shows and many shows currently on getting canceled.

Re:Speaking of TV shows

[mister_playboy]

Family Guy and Firefly were more or less sabotaged by politics. The reason Family Guy came back was Fox executives looked at the sales numbers of the DVDs and basically said "WHO THE FUCK CANCELED THIS?"

Now Family Guy has the opposite problem. Everyone knows the show has run its course (Seth especially), but new episodes keep coming out.

Re:Speaking of TV shows

[Chris Mattern]

Not long ago, Longmire was canceled by A&E for bizarre reasons. It had good ratings and was pulling in a few million viewers. They said "the demographic is too old." Uh, ok, anyone in your marketing department notice that young viewers (ie millennials mainly) are the poorest generation in the market right now?

The older demographic may have the money, but the common marketing wisdom is that they're set in their buying habits--advertising to them won't generate sales. They want the younger audience, because they feel that that's the one they can hook.

Re:Speaking of TV shows

[Anonymous Coward]

Not long ago, Longmire was canceled by A&E for bizarre reasons. It had good ratings and was pulling in a few million viewers. They said "the demographic is too old." Uh, ok, anyone in your marketing department notice that young viewers (ie millennials mainly) are the poorest generation in the market right now?

You fail to understand the business of television. The business of television is to sell advertisements (I imagine you understand this already). As it turns out, the people who want to buy advertising time on television greatly value reaching the 18-49 demographic over all others. Apparently they are difficult to reach. The other demographics, in particular older demos, are easy to reach via other, cheaper means.

So that means advertisers pay the highest rates for the 18-49 (or younger) demos. So the television networks endeavor to deliver as much of that demo as possible. That is why older skewing shows get cancelled - there is more money to be made from younger skewing shows.

Re:Speaking of TV shows

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows the show has run its course (Seth especially), but new episodes keep coming out.

Is there anything they won't steal from the Simpsons?

Re:Speaking of TV shows

[phorm]

You think Family Guy is bad for that... I'm amazed that the Simpsons is still going!

Re:Speaking of TV shows

[ahaweb]

That implies they care about anything more than short term profits.

This is why I'm not an early adopter

[DNS-and-BIND]

To this day I remain a late, late adopter of technology. I wait until the market has sorted out the winners and losers, then go and buy the most standard piece of equipment I can find. I was deeply scarred as a youth by Betamax video tapes and the Intellivision game console. My family owned both. Both were clearly superior to their competition. It was visible to the naked eye and owners of competing systems admitted without shame that it was so.

However, back then it was considered a flippant waste of money if you had more than one standard, so that was what we had. I couldn't trade games with anyone but this one kid whose parents wouldn't let him trade games. I couldn't rent most of the tapes in the video store. I couldn't copy tapes and give them to friends. AND THEY WERE BETTER SYSTEMS! In every measure, technically, visually, flexibility-wise, the list goes on and on.

Ever since I moved out of the house and bought my first VHS, I've mistrusted my ability to judge what will win. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. Otherwise, I'd probably be one of the people they quoted for this article.

Re:This is why I'm not an early adopter

[Grishnakh]

Betamax was *not* "clearly superior to [its] competition". The sound and video was supposedly better, but it had an Achilles' Heel: the first generation tapes could only hold an hour of video. So any typical movie would require two tapes, and having to change the tape in the middle. VHS had 2-hour tapes from the start. Later, Beta made a 2-hour version, but it was too late.

suckers born that have $$$

[Danathar]

What it tells me is that no matter how bad your product is, SOMEBODY (evidently a large percentage) will buy it.

Hmm....there's a money making lesson here somewhere (if not for my morals..)

Re:suckers born that have $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Modded down for no reason, nice

Sometimes the difference between products that sell and products they don't is the box they are wrapped in, so people who pick the "loser" products don't fit the advertising demographic and therefore are the "harbingers of failure" what a load

I have Firefly on HD-DVD do I make it?

[Ecuador]

I am just kidding, I only have Serenity on HD-DVD. Strangely, I could not find any of my favorite series on HD-DVD, e.g. Firefly, Futurama, Odyssey 5, Space: Above & Beyond, Twin Peaks...

Re:I have Firefly on HD-DVD do I make it?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot Threshold....http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460686/

Then you woud have hit all of my faves as well haha

Among the harbingers of doom

[phayes]

The people who like Timothy's editing of stories on the weekends & the changes that Dice has been bringing to /.

Some people have minority tastes vs majority taste

[Anonymous Coward]

You will always find some people having a minority taste for something. Like food, media content, people, jobs, and the list goes on. I've always been raised to be more open to more things and not be so set in my ways. I still have a few foods I dislike, but so much more I am willing to try and be adventurous. The failure or success of almost anything is to attract the most people to it. So if you open a restaurant or make a movie, or build a product. You want it to attract the most people possible. The failure comes when you have a minority taste in something but think its something more popular.

Clickbait

[Hognoxious]

The actual report is in the Chicago tribune, behind a paywall. Fuck that and fuck the idiot who submitted this non-story.

Bill Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

If we need to pick a 'celebrity' to represent this crowd Bill Gates would be the perfect shoe-in

Other than his first venture - Microsoft - none of his other investments make sense

Furthermore, when Bill Gates stepped down from MS he picked an absolute loser, Steve Ballmer, as his replacement

Re: Bill Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

Bettmann archive is doing great as part of corbis

Re:Bill Gates

[tehcyder]

Other than his first venture - Microsoft - none of his other investments make sense

"Other than being one of the richest men in the world, he's poor".

Why nobody cares about Zune

[sjbe]

My zune still works as well. I use it every day.

Maybe you do but if so you are a good approximation of the entire user base. I'm not sure I've ever actually even seen a Zune in the wild.

Good battery life, large amount of storage.

That's not exactly a compelling argument to buy one over the competing products. Nobody cared about the Zune because there was nothing special or compelling about it. It was a me-too product introduced several years too late to matter. It's most compelling selling point (and compelling is a stretch) was that it wasn't made by Apple. Since people mostly like Apple better than Microsoft that is an argument without very wide appeal. The only way Zune would have had a chance would have been to be technically WAY better than the iPod and it simply wasn't.

Only downside is that you have to use the stupid zune software.

That's a pretty huge downside considering it's basically abandon-ware at this point.

I'm sure the apple fanbois will be shocked that I don't buy a new mp3 player every year when this one still works fine.

Since standalone mp3 player sales are falling like a rock I doubt the apple fanbois you seem to want to sneer at will be shocked or even care. Basically everyone listens to music on their smartphones now. Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[NatasRevol]

Rage on into that good night.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

As another purchaser of the Zune, and generally speaking, I guess I'd consider myself a HoF, I wanted to weigh in.

The Zune as a product was solid. It played MP3's as intended, offered all of the correct features, and the UI wasn't unpleasant. Battery life was good. I purchased it for my wife, as a gift, and had it engraved.The primary benefit that it offered over the others was an Digital FM Receiver. She used the zune up until her laptop died and I purchased her a macbook pro to replace it. I did this mainly because during the vista era of PC's it made sense.

Thinking about this as a larger point, I at least look at a product to fill a need. generally I do a lot more research than most, to find the product that checks all of the boxes without glaring reliability or quality issues. I rarely buy crap, but it's not always popular. In some cases, it works out, like the Black and Decker first gen lithium Ion power tools that no one bought and I got for free with a bunch of accessories and extra batteries. No idea why that didn't catch on.

As a result, I'm very VERY selective with things I kickstart. just because I know that things I like are doomed to fail.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[pr0fessor]

I had a phillips mp3 player for about a decade it was dropped multiple times, stepped on, submersed in water, left on top the car while I drove away, put through the washer 5-6 times. I picked it specifically because it didn't require any software to get music on it but was very pleased with it especially after buying my sons a few ipods and saw how easily they cracked the screens and broke them. The later versions were more cheaply made I bought my wife one it worked well and though more durable than most competitors was no where near as durable as the original. It still didn't require any software to get music on it and had more storage. No idea what the new ones are like since everyone has a smart phone that can play music and much, much more.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[Grishnakh]

No, he's exactly right. Who actually listens to music on a Zune or an iPod now? Smartphones have made standalone MP3 players completely obsolete.

I used to have not an iPod nor a Zune, but an iRiver H320 (which I upgraded to a 30GB hard drive). I haven't used it in years; I just use my phone for that stuff now. Any smartphone these days will hold my entire music collection easily.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[mlts]

I have a Zune as well, with a docking station. Price? $0, since it was a prize. I will say this: It is surprisingly well made, and its UI wasn't bad, although the ring is just a four position switch, and not usable in the same fashion as the iPod's swiping.

However, there is one thing that absolutely killed it, and it was as described above: The requirement to use special software to copy files to it. It also make the Zune pointless for schlepping files between places. The fact it used an oddball connector (very similar to the Apple 30 pin... but different) didn't help either. Yes, an iPod required iTunes (well, after MusicMatch was killed), but it mounted as a HDD and one could copy files to and from it at will.

One thing that took me by surprise with MP3 players was the initial capacity growth for a bit... then towards the end, all but the Zune and iPod Classic with 160 GB stayed in production. There were other players that had a good amount of capacity, but wound up being discontinued after a while. Good players which required zero drivers, and could either mount as a USB drive or use MTP to copy files.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't figure out how people use a phone for music; my phone has 16 GB capacity, and I have 105 GB of music. Constantly re-syncing my phone based on what I feel like listening too gets to be very tiring. I'd rather just carry my iPod (160 GB capacity) and not worry about changing what songs I have with me and I can always listen to what I want.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[rainmaestro]

Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?

Sometimes you don't want to carry a $400 phone around when the risk of damage is high (though given how often my friends crack their iPhone screens, standing still in a carpeted room is apparently dangerous). I wouldn't go for a bike ride or a hike with an expensive phone in my pocket given the risk of breaking it, but I don't give a damn if my $40 no-brand MP3 player breaks out on the trail.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the iriver and several zunes, still love the zune, wife uses my old brown one on the treadmill, it is a rock solid little work horse and the battery is still holding. That zune was great in combo with my media center, I could record shows and sync them to my zune and take them along for the kids (did not have to pay for any stupid itunes bullshit and there was no drm that I was aware of), I think this is an example of marketing making people buy the shitty choice. Zune was good stuff!

Although I did have an hddvd player, multiple pocket pc's, I run multiple surface pro's for my business (they work great by the way and when they were clearanced for less than 500 a windows pro workstation with an i5 and a backup battery is a wonderful deal. My life is littered with "failures", but you know what a lot of them are still kicking and do what they were supposed to do well!
At the end of the day what wins was what was chosen by the majority (you dont want to be aligned with the majority anyway, most of the time they are broke, chose crap which breaks or which costs them significant cash). Revel in your harbingarity of failure, most of the time you chose the right choice.
Fuck the Corporations

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[sjbe]

I can't figure out how people use a phone for music; my phone has 16 GB capacity, and I have 105 GB of music

Really? You can't figure that out? My phone as a 128GB capacity and my music library is less than that. No disrespect intended but you have what is basically a cheap phone by today's standards. I never, ever need to sync my phone to change the music on it and honestly I couldn't be bothered even if storage capacity were an issue.

Constantly re-syncing my phone based on what I feel like listening too gets to be very tiring.

So don't. I never have. Buy a phone with a large enough capacity and get on with life.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[chispito]

Nobody cared about the Zune because there was nothing special or compelling about it. It was a me-too product introduced several years too late to matter. It's most compelling selling point (and compelling is a stretch) was that it wasn't made by Apple

I'm going to say it: I loved the brown version. It was beautiful. Whether it was ahead of its time, or behind its time, or just too niche, I don't know. I just know it looked fantastic in person and literally like crap in pictures. As for other compelling reasons: the Zune had better sound quality, better software, and a better screen than the iPod.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[Nyder]

No, he's exactly right. Who actually listens to music on a Zune or an iPod now? Smartphones have made standalone MP3 players completely obsolete.

I used to have not an iPod nor a Zune, but an iRiver H320 (which I upgraded to a 30GB hard drive). I haven't used it in years; I just use my phone for that stuff now. Any smartphone these days will hold my entire music collection easily.

I listen to music on my iPod and I happened to own a dumb phone. And while a new phone would be great, not only can I not afford it, the amount of eavesdropping that can be done on a smart phone really makes it a stupid purchase this day & age. The convenience of a smartphone, does it really outweigh the negative aspects of having a device that records everything you do?

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[Nyder]

I can't figure out how people use a phone for music; my phone has 16 GB capacity, and I have 105 GB of music. Constantly re-syncing my phone based on what I feel like listening too gets to be very tiring. I'd rather just carry my iPod (160 GB capacity) and not worry about changing what songs I have with me and I can always listen to what I want.

Well fuck dude, I have over 1TB of music on my computer and my iPod is only 120GB, so I feel your pain.

Actually I don't, because anyone with half a brain knows they do not need their full music collection, and not only that, they can only listen to so much time of music per day. So you figure out how much time a day you need music, convert the music to a format size that will fit what you need, and boom, you have enough music every day.

I don't put all my music on my iPod, I only put songs that I like, because when I'm out and about, I like rocking to familiar good stuff, when at home, I'm more down to listen to new stuff.

Shit, my first mp3 had 128 MB (yes, that is MegaBytes) space on it. I survived.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[slinches]

There's also the option of using Google or Apple's streaming services. They'll host all of your music and stream it to you for free so it doesn't have to take up all of your storage space. If you want the ability to listen offline as well, you can just select the songs or playlists you want to keep locally on the phone and they'll auto-sync in the background.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[rogoshen1]

I have my smart phone in my pocket at the gym, and my 30 dollar mp3 player in my arm band.

Bluetooth headphones seem to either be wicked uncomfortable (plantronic backbeats) or exquisitely sensitive to sweat (Motorola). So it's nice being able to listen to music over corded headphones, and still have the smartphone available to do whatever in between sets.

Also the mp3 player just fucking 'works' on demand. Spotify seems to crash about 50% of the time and requires a reboot of the phone.

Also having the headphone jack come out, then having my phone broadcast my horrible taste of music over its speaker after accidentally touching the screen/volume buttons -- was embarrassing enough to ensure it happened just once :)

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[Grishnakh]

Bluetooth headphones seem to either be wicked uncomfortable (plantronic backbeats) or exquisitely sensitive to sweat (Motorola). So it's nice being able to listen to music over corded headphones, and still have the smartphone available to do whatever in between sets.

I don't know about your phone, but every decent smartphone I've ever seen has a standard 1/4" headphone jack. It doesn't keep you from doing other things with the phone.

Also the mp3 player just fucking 'works' on demand. Spotify seems to crash about 50% of the time and requires a reboot of the phone.

Every decent phone I've seen lets you just put MP3s on it (or even Oggs with Android phones) and play them directly.

Also having the headphone jack come out, then having my phone broadcast my horrible taste of music over its speaker after accidentally touching the screen/volume buttons -- was embarrassing enough to ensure it happened just once :)

Ok now this is definitely something I don't know how to fix on a smartphone...

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

At the end of the day what wins was what was chosen by the majority (you dont want to be aligned with the majority anyway, most of the time they are broke, chose crap which breaks or which costs them significant cash). Revel in your harbingarity of failure, most of the time you chose the right choice.
Fuck the Corporations

Indeed. Running with the pack is not always the right choice. On a somewhat related note, I bought an ASUS netbook several years ago. At the time, one of my colleagues at work sneered at my choice of a net book. "The screen is so small! You can't play video games on it! You will never be able to run autocad on it. Etc." Screw that! It did exactly what I wanted it to do (check email, surf the web, edit simple documents, etc.). And it only cost me ~$300. And it was small enough and lightweight enough that I could carry it around everywhere all day like an ordinary book. It also had a SSD so that it was able to take being dropped a couple of times too. Eventually, it gave out and had to be replaced. So I bought another ASUS netbook. I'm sure my colleague still sneers at my choice but I don't care. At least I won't have to deal with the backaches of carrying around a laptop with jumbo screen and all the attendant peripherals all day, every day.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[tehcyder]

I'm going to say it: I loved the brown version. It was beautiful. Whether it was ahead of its time, or behind its time, or just too niche, I don't know. I just know it looked fantastic in person and literally like crap in pictures. As for other compelling reasons: the Zune had better sound quality, better software, and a better screen than the iPod.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think what you just said is illegal.

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[chispito]

Which parts?

Re:Why nobody cares about Zune

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the phone doesnt work anywhere near as well as an Ipod Classic, My classic plays music, for days on end with no recharge, it lives in my car playing music and has to do nothing else. My phone has to make calls, tell me where Im lost. The interface on my phone is many times slower, both to start up and to start playing, it doesnt sound as good. And I chew up the battery If I listen to music watch videos etc. So no its not a choice for some, just you and your asshat comments

Then watch me closely...

[WhatHump]

because I bought PC's with Windows ME, Windows Vista and Windows 8 pre-installed.

Quality programming

[sjbe]

If all TV were content on demand, you'd probably see a lot more quality shows and many shows currently on getting canceled.

Judging by the popularity of the Kardashians I very, very, very much doubt that.

Groceries

[Anonymous Coward]

In my locale there is a chain of stores specializing in clothes and food. Often they were also slightly more expensive on identical items than other stores and thus known as a "premium" store. Although that was not always true in practice - their fresh produce is usually of a better quality (and keeping fresh for longer) than from other stores, and oftentimes at the same price or lower. As a single person that does not use up a package that fast, this mostly translated to money being saved (not being thrown out halfway through).

For non-produce groceries, they also often carried options that I preferred: organic and/or without all sorts of preservatives and other additives (yes, I'm snobbish that way).

A few years ago I started noticing that if I found an item there that I liked, and bought regularly, a few months down the line the item would either be discontinued, or its makeup would have been changed (additives added) to something that is similar to what I could buy for cheaper at the "normal" supermarket.

Much the same thing happened in their clothing lineup. I would be able to buy clothing with longer sleeves/legs (that fit me better), 100% cotton (preferred by me due to body odor generation by plastic blend clothing in warm climate), and quite sturdy and well-made - I still have some items somewhere a decade old. Not any more.

I guess this was due to economizing - selling stuff made cheaper somewhere in China for the same "premium" price, and banking on the large client base that is attached to the status of buying at the "premium" store, regardless of the items sold.

Now I hear I'm a "harbinger of failure".... Should warn those stores I buy from now. Although I don't have any favourites any more, and I've moved to a lifestyle where I buy even less packaged groceries - I even make cheese and yogurt from scratch (raw milk) these days. As for clothing, seems one can buy much more decent and still cheap stuff over the Internet, shipped all the way from the USA after it was made in some Eastern country/island.... go figure.

67% is 75th percentile

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Group 1: Between 0% and 25% flops (25 th percentile) in the classification set

Group 2: Between 25% and 50% flops (50 th percentile) in the classification set

Group 3: Between 50% and 67% flops (75 th percentile) in the classification set

Group 4: Over 67% flops in the classification set

(Emphasis mine)

The study, available in MS-Word format in a link posted by a kindly slashdotter, contains this gem. 67% is 75th percentile? People who trust the findings of such articles are the harbingers of onslaught of stupidity.

Study seems to based on popular household products like swiffer, arizone iced teas, diet crystal pepsi, etc.

Re:67% is 75th percentile

[gnasher719]

The study, available in MS-Word format in a link posted by a kindly slashdotter, contains this gem. 67% is 75th percentile? People who trust the findings of such articles are the harbingers of onslaught of stupidity.

Careful complaining about stupidity.

Less than 25% bought more than 67% flops, and 75% didn't. That makes people picking 67% flops or more the 75% percentile.

Re:67% is 75th percentile

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Opps, so I am stupid. What a way to start the week.

It's OLD NEWS

[Anonymous Coward]

The date of the publication of the original article ( http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2420600 ) was April 4, 2014

Date of today - July 6. 2015

Has Slashdot become a museum of obsolete news?

Re:It's OLD NEWS

[Anonymous Coward]

The date of the publication of the original article ( http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... ) was April 4, 2014

Date of today - July 6. 2015

Has Slashdot become a museum of obsolete news?

No - AmiMojo is just a fucking idiot.

Re:It's OLD NEWS

[Anonymous Coward]

No - AmiMojo is just a fucking idiot.

Understatement of the year.

I would like to volunteer as the chief harbinger

[NotDrWho]

I have anti-charisma and whenever I zig, everyone else in the universe zags. If I like something, that means that 99.99% of the rest of the world doesn't. If I hate something, it's probably going to be a big hit.

Mind you, this isn't just contrarianism. I usually don't even pay much attention to what the rest of the world thinks about something. I only find out after-the-fact that every other human being on planet earth else disagrees with me--on EVERYTHING.

Want to win a political campaign? Hire me to campaign for your opponent.

Re:bit like Muslim's morals

[Anonymous Coward]

Mahoundians is closer to the truth.

Last three their own horse

[dbIII]

NetworkManager, PulseAudio and systemd were internal Red Hat projects run by a guy called Lennart who will tell you that they are all far better than linux itself, which he would apparently have done himself only far better if he was only a little bit older. Red Hat didn't pick them from a list, they did them and were stuck with them.
The others were surrounded by the most noise.

Re:Last three their own horse

[Aighearach]

Lennart is professional programmer who has had great success. You sound jealous. The software packages you list are actually the most used solutions, not failures. Failure doesn't mean, "I don't like it, waaaaa."

And I'm sure Lennart would tell you that applications are different than kernels, and you're comparing apples and oranges. I know he'd see that, because he's a programmer.

RedHat has huge resources, they have a war chest, they're not in trouble or "stuck with" anything. They've written software in the past that they don't still use. They're not known as being irrational or emotional, they're known for being the business-and-oss-friendly distro. They make pragmatic decisions.

Hate away. But remember, attacking the man is a logical fallacy, not a rational point. You will be understood accordingly.

How to apply it?

[MagickalMyst]

If only we could apply this to candidates in federal elections...

Great Article

[avandesande]

Maybe you should avoid it.

is it problem with falling for products or ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

The study should go deeper.
Perhaps particular type/style of adverts attract these people and repell mass customers?

So - study should check correlation of these failures with particular media houses and even particular copy writers (as some might have channged jobs bringing their lame advert style to new palce).

Betting on the wrong horse

[Jason Levine]

For awhile, I refused to become interested in any new TV shows. I had some shows I loved and they kept getting cancelled one after another (Futurama, Pushing Daises, etc). Meanwhile, reality shows like Survivor kept getting season after season. The one reality show that I liked - The Mole - was cancelled as well. That was the only show where using your brain was rewarded more than physical challenges and backstabbing. I've been slowly getting interested in shows again, but now that we've cut cable it's on my terms. I'll find a show on Netflix/Amazon/Hulu and will watch a bunch of the episodes back-to-back. I've found some really good shows this way and I know in advance how many episodes there are (at least) so there's no "oops, that was the last one" surprise.

In the political sphere, my mother used to be a Presidential race harbinger of doom. Everyone she voted for for President lost. She voted against Carter and he won. Then she voted FOR Carter and he lost. She voted against Reagan in his re-election and he won. I believe her streak was broken in the Bush-Gore race. She voted for Bush which I felt meant that Gore was assured victory. We all know how that turned out. Since then, she's voted for Bush again in his re-election and against Obama twice so it looks like Bush might have been the only anomaly in her voting streak.

Re:Betting on the wrong horse

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Gore did get half a million more votes than Bush.. So..... yea. not an anomaly on your mothers voting streak..
Just an anomaly in black robes sitting in the supreme court.

What nonsense.

[Kuroji]

There will inevitably be a group of people who seem to always pick things that don't work, it's the nature of huge numbers. If you get a hundred million quarters, you'll find that there are probably close to a million of them that flip tails a dozen times in a row. Human nature would skew this somewhat, but I doubt this demonstrates people who are attracted to trends that fail - more like they're simply not following the mainstream trends.

Re:What nonsense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. This was actually my first thought, and I don't know if they've addressed this.

Harbingers? or just early adopters?

[Geoffrey.landis]

Certainly some early adopters pick products that don't take off, and mathematically some of these will have done it multiple times.
But the article claims that some people are actually predictors-- that their product choices have predictive value for product failure.
Is this actually true? It's easy to select out a set of people who have bought failed products, and then cull out of that set the ones who have not also sometimes bought successful products. But is this group statistically able to make future predictions?
I'm doubtful. Clearly, the way to not select products that don't grab a market niche... is to not be an early adopter. Lots of products fail; if you're an early adoptor, you're likely to be adopting failed products. If you instead wait to see where a product is going before buying-- you never buy products that fail a month after launch.
FWIW, the original article is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...

Re:Harbingers? or just early adopters?

[sjames]

According to the study's authors (as quotyed by the Chicago Tribune) "Certain customers systematically purchase new products that prove unsuccessful,". Also: "Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom that positive customer feedback is always a signal of future success."

So they are saying that this sub-group's purchases of new products is indeed predictive of failure.

Re:Harbingers? or just early adopters?

[mlts]

Exactly. Sometimes products fail because they there isn't a mass market for them at the time.

Take the Creative Nomad Jukebox which came out in ~2001, which is about the size of a CD Walkman, and shipped with six GB of space for tracks. It was a quite usable unit. However, it didn't really have a market because of its size, and lack of battery life. The original iPod was an incremental improvement over it... but brought decent battery life and a smaller size to the table, which is why Apple was initially successful with it.

Another example are smartphones. Windows Mobile was a very popular smartphone OS, but because it was designed around using a stylus, it became outdated the second the iPhone was announced. Even though it did more than the original iOS revs did for a few iterations, it wound up on the wayside eventually because the people coming into the smartphone market had expectations of finger-friendliness, online App Stores, and other items.

Re:Harbingers? or just early adopters?

[Tipa]

AKA "Early Adopters"..... early adopters necessarily adopt things before they have had a chance to fail or succeed in the marketplace. Unless they can show these people also don't ever adopt successful products, this seems like selecting the data to prove your theory. Or, maybe these people just recently discovered McDonald's....

Re:Harbingers? or just early adopters?

[sjames]

I'm just the messenger. I didn't perform the study.

But yes, early adopters will sometimes pick losers inevitably. I don't see why it would be so surprising that some would pick the losers more often than others.

Re:Harbingers? or just early adopters?

[forand]

This is easily testable with whatever dataset they used to do the research. * Come up with a hypothesis based on a subset of your data * Test your hypothesis on the remaining data It seems like they had bunch of data so they could have selected data before the last N choices were made them see how their model predicts what the "Harbingers" would say or not.

Re:Harbingers? or just early adopters?

[PPalmgren]

Its not early adopters, its a specific subset of early adopters. I highly suspect that this subset is drawn to these products for one of two reasons: First, anti-advertising, meaning that they are attracted to products whose advertising campaigns suck and something about that suckitude or quirkiness draws this subset in. Second, the underdog lovers. Because of bad advertising or press, writing is on the wall early that the product isn't going to launch well, and this subset then looks to buy the "underdog" product.

Come one, study me

[Anonymous Coward]

If you find a cure maybe I could stop reading Dice's Slashdot.

Yeah, that's me, at least for TV

[kaybee]

If I really like a TV show there is a great chance it will be canceled. I'm not sure if this applies to consumer goods though. But I think it just because I've got vastly different interests than the average American (just like many of you do as well).

Brand/product persistance seems dead anyway

[swb]

I don't know if its my perception or not, but it seems to me that very few products anymore have any persistence. It's not just a question of picking a loser -- it seems like so many products have an initial run and then disappear to be replaced by something else.

I suspect it's a byproduct of easier product design using computer aided design and the heavy use of contract manufacturing overseas. CAD makes it easy to tweak a design to create the new-car-model kinds of changes or just something different. Contract manufacturing lets vendors shop designs around for the best production cost and it wouldn't surprise me if the tooling/setup costs get eaten by the manufacturer.

Re:Brand/product persistance seems dead anyway

[Grishnakh]

Contract manufacturing isn't going to magically make tooling and setup costs just disappear, and some manufacturer isn't going to just eat those and go without a profit. Newer tools (CAD) and processes do make it easier and cheaper to make new designs though. The thing CM is good for is allowing smaller companies to get products to market, because they don't have to have their own factory (which requires a lot of capital), they just pay an existing factory to make it for them. It increases the market size and the number of players in the market. However, it doesn't lower costs; the CM has to make a profit too. It's always cheaper to have your own factory, but only in the long term. Companies obsessed with short-term numbers will sell off their factory and move to CM because in the short term it shows up as a positive, but in the long term they're paying more for manufacturing and also losing out in flexibility (it's easier to make changes, or do exactly what you want, when you control your own manufacturing processes). As an example, there's a good reason that Intel fabs all its chips, and doesn't just farm them out to TSMC like some other chipmakers.

Re:Brand/product persistance seems dead anyway

[swb]

The setup costs don't disappear, but when you have a system dominated by contract manufacturing the competition forces manufacturers to basically eat a lot of setup costs in order to compete against each other. The costs don't go away, but become reduced profit margins for manufacturers.

Re:Brand/product persistance seems dead anyway

[Grishnakh]

Competition reduces profit margins, but not to zero. It might force them to work to make their operations more efficient though. But still, they're not going to bother staying in business if they're not making a profit, and that generally makes CM more expensive (long term) than making things yourself.

picking 67% flops puts you in the 75th percentile

[Geoffrey.landis]

# of flops chosen (position in set)

Group 1: Between 0% and 25% flops (25th percentile) in the classification set

Group 2: Between 25% and 50% flops (50th percentile) in the classification set

Group 3: Between 50% and 67% flops (75th percentile) in the classification set

Group 4: Over 67% flops in the classification set

Those particular numbers (one in four, two in four, two in three, >2/3) are indicative: the study set consists of people who made only three or four choices. (If it were larger numbers, the cut points wouldn't be such even numbers)

This is not significant.

And, more significantly, that's way too few to tell if membership in a set is predictive.

Is this for real?

[Tribeca1248]

Something about this study sounds vaguely phony to me - 130,000 consumers at a national convenience store chain, and 13 per cent would persistently buy doomed products... Something about that 13 thing...

Sounds weak

[Anonymous Coward]

That remind me of the usual scam with stocks option : scammer sent stocks tips (or horse tips) to a few hundred victims, every time a different one, then once the results were in, he simply reduced to sending "I made another good prediction" to the group having the correct one, and dropped the group having no correct prediction. Then so forth until he reduced the group to something manageable and could show them a flawless (or nearly flawless) prediction power. Then invited them to invest and was never heard again of.

Same effect here I belief : from the totality of the people, a certain group by cheer chance will be the one for which products are not the good one. But it is an a postiori selection, and from the number I wonder if it is not the same here : that those people are not harbringer of anything , just of weak statistic.

aka GM Customers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've owned 2 Saturns and now a Chevy Sonic. Do I count?

Other habits

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this crowd that lick losers also attend SciFi Conventions and Rennasance Faire?

Product testing applications

[PPH]

Pay me to use your competitors' products.

Re:Crystal Pepsi

[markhb]

It was clear. There was a "clear soda" trend running around that time that didn't even last as long as the "dry beer" craze.

Vault

[operagost]

While Crystal Pepsi would be fun to bring back for the 90s college years nostalgia, it's really Vault Zero I miss. That stuff was killer. I liked the strawberry Pepsi Jazz too. I guess I'm good at picking losers in soft drinks, at least.

Elections

[coolmoe2]

If this also applies to elections I have an awesome talent for picking losers. In 22 years of voting I have yet to have one of my picks win.

Re:Elections

[innerpeace]

What about people who vote libertarian. County commissioner might be their most recent high water mark. In presidential elections, the best they have ever done is about 1%.

Re:Elections

[coolmoe2]

"What about people who vote libertarian."

Im sure they know what im talking about because you are only on a winning side if you pick one of the two main parties.
Anything else and you are pretty much destined to failure.

Damn two party system.

Hipster tactics

[sjbe]

I think you have the concept of hipster exactly backwards.

Not really. I'm just querying whether this is a particular subset of the use of the term, particularly with respect to those who intentionally pick products slightly outside the mainstream. If someone bought a Zune in a (lame) attempt to be trendy that would seem to be "hipster" behavior. Buy the unusual product which is likely doomed to failure and look down your nose at people who buy the more mainstream products. More of a social tactic than a demographic.

Usually hipsters seem to cluster around emerging trends and often seem to be influential enough that an ironic embrace of vintage/past products often produces a resurgence of that product.

Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product. I've seen some legitimate attempts to bring back old products or aspects of them but the successful ones are pretty much never ironic.

It's debatable whether hipsters even exist, or whether it's a group that identifies products before they become popular or whether it's a group that's defined as clustering around products that became popular.

I think aspects of what we call "hipsters" exist in society though I think you'll have a hard time finding a canonical example of one. People who are seriously into fashion sort of fit the bill. They're always looking for the next trend to jump on. You can find corollary examples with other products - movies, technology, etc. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone who adopts that worldview for everything they do.

Re:Hipster tactics

[schnell]

Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product

How about Pabst Blue Ribbon beer? Or the otherwise inexplicable growth of vinyl record sales?

True to the nature of hipster-ism, these things will decline again at some point. But the presence of cool tastemakers interested in retro stuff is a real thing that impacts sales beyond just their own ranks. God help us all if these people rediscover fax machines.

Re:Hipster tactics

[swb]

Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product. I've seen some legitimate attempts to bring back old products or aspects of them but the successful ones are pretty much never ironic.

1970s fashions? I think this got embraced by hipsters early and became very mainstream. I have a friend who was in the vintage clothing business and he can define where he could buy 1970s fashion clothes in bales by the pound one month and the next he was having to negotiate prices by the item from his suppliers. Not long after that they become unobtainable except as yard sale or Goodwill finds and new iterations of the same fashions were showing up new in department stores.

Beer also seemed to be kind of like this. 10-15 years ago, there weren't many craft beers -- you had a bunch of mainstream domestics, some well-known imports like Heineken or Becks. Hipster bars of the era tended to focus on "vintage" brands like PBR or Rolling Rock and this embrace of older, niche products seem to have something to do with the rise of craft alternatives (well, and quality, too..).

My last 4 cars :-(

[TomGreenhaw]

I hope this pattern does not hold...I really hate being the kiss of death.

My last four car purchases were a Pontiac, an Oldmobile, a Mercury and a Tesla.

The Pontiac Grand Am and Old Alero were good cars. I still have the Mercury Mariner and Tesla Model S.

And yes, all my favorite TV shows usually bite the dust :-(

Re:My last 4 cars :-(

[TomGreenhaw]

Oh, I forgot. I have a Google Glass and an Apple Watch.

I like the watch.

Wait a minute.....

[grumpyman]

But doesn't that mean that 'failing' product can capture a potential 13% market share? iPhone market share is somewhere around there worldwide?

Popularity matters sometimes

[sjbe]

The Zune as a product was solid. It played MP3's as intended, offered all of the correct features, and the UI wasn't unpleasant. Battery life was good.

That's the problem though. Nobody ever really claimed that Zune was terrible. But there were very few reasons to buy one instead of an iPod. It wasn't better value for money for most people. It didn't have meaningfully better features, didn't cost a lot less, and by the time it came out many people who really wanted an MP3 player were already locked into Apple's ecosystem. Microsoft didn't make a horrible product but being solid isn't good enough when you are that late to the party. You have to be substantially better or substantially cheaper and Zune was neither.

Thinking about this as a larger point, I at least look at a product to fill a need. generally I do a lot more research than most, to find the product that checks all of the boxes without glaring reliability or quality issues. I rarely buy crap, but it's not always popular.

I do the same thing but I do consider whether the popularity of the device or feature will matter in time. For example I could get a cordless drill from a no-name manufacturer but then 5 years later I won't be able to get replacement batteries most likely. Sometimes popularity and the network effects it generates matter as much or more than the more tangible aspects of the product design. Sometimes it doesn't matter but you have to consider whether it will.

Re:Popularity matters sometimes

[tehcyder]

For example I could get a cordless drill from a no-name manufacturer but then 5 years later I won't be able to get replacement batteries most likely.

Say you have a choice between a cheap cordless drill for GBP50 that will last 5 years, or an expensive one for GBP200 that lasts 30 years. Clearly the latter is a better choice.

But your choice is actually determined by how much cash you have at the time.

That's why it is so horrible being poor. You know that not only do you have crappier stuff than other people, but it's actually costing you more.

How ironic Slashdotters

[Old97]

Except for a couple of defensive posts, it's interesting that few of the posters seem to recognize that they are part of the 13%. I'd wager that where 13% might be the share of the general population, here at /. the share - based on comments on all topics - seem to be about 70%. The year of the Linux desktop. Symbian was sooooo great. Gnome versus KDE. Zune. Apple is doomed. Google is such an innovator and friend of open source. Etc.

Ironic use of vintage?

[sjbe]

How about Pabst Blue Ribbon beer?

Not obviously ironic though a reasonable example if true. The evidence is ambiguous and seems mostly anecdotal. Still I'd need a LOT more evidence to start to buy the notion that ironic embrace of vintage is a meaningful way to cause old products to see a resurgence. Not saying it can't happen but I just don't really see examples of it happening in the real world.

Or the otherwise inexplicable growth of vinyl record sales?

Nothing ironic there that I can see. There are people who earnestly believe that vinyl sounds better and the audiophile crowd is willing to spend absurd amounts of money chasing even the chance of "better sound". Personally I think that the supposed superiority of vinyl wouldn't stand up to double blind testing like so much other nonsense that comes from audiophiles but that is a separate issue.

Re:Ironic use of vintage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always assumed meaningful double-blind testing of vinyl was impossible, because it's too easy to tell the differences. You're not trying to trying to tell subtle differences between high-bitrate lossy encoding and an uncompressed original. So instead of trying to figure out if you can tell the difference between Evian and Daisani, it's more like trying to figure out whether Mountain Dew or water taste "better" -- if someone prefers the sound of vinyl, they prefer the sound of vinyl, even if it is less "accurate".

Re:Ironic use of vintage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Over @ Hydrogenaudio, they have conducted this test (I'm not going to dig out the link). The test is conducted the other way from what you are thinking - start with a vinyl source and then digitize it. If the idea that digital cannot accurately replicate the sound quality of vinyl, it should be easy for the test taker to pick out the difference. Except no one can.

Re:Ironic use of vintage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Double blind test only work when you are trying to compare products that are the same.
vinyl or CD have distinct sounds, some people like one.

Re:I would like to volunteer as the chief harbinge

[Grishnakh]

Mind you, this isn't just contrarianism. I usually don't even pay much attention to what the rest of the world thinks about something. I only find out after-the-fact that every other human being on planet earth else disagrees with me--on EVERYTHING.

It really depends. Are you picking stuff which is crap, and the general populace correctly realizes is crap? Or are you picking stuff which is too high-quality for the general market?

A good example of the former is the Pontiac Aztek (though admittedly, its main problem wasn't utility or even quality, but its horrendous appearance). What kind of cars have you picked?

Another good example of the former is probably the Microsoft Surface RT.

A good example of the latter is watching anything besides The Kardashians.

So, does this mean ...

[PPH]

... moving my Confederate flag printing business offshore to Greece was a bad idea?

Re:So, does this mean ...

[Anonymous Coward]

And let me guess... you paid in bitcoin back before the bubble burst? :)

Where is the irony?

[sjbe]

1970s fashions? I think this got embraced by hipsters early and became very mainstream.

Where is the irony? There are all sorts of resurgences of old fashions all the time. But it isn't obviously ironic. I was alive during the 70s and trust me when I say that they haven't brought back 70s fashions in any meaningful way. Fashions cycle in and out all the time and I've seen stuff from previous decades brought back multiple times. Thin ties were in during the 80s and they are back again now. Happens all the time but it's rarely ironic.

I have a friend who was in the vintage clothing business and he can define where he could buy 1970s fashion clothes in bales by the pound one month and the next he was having to negotiate prices by the item from his suppliers. Not long after that they become unobtainable except as yard sale or Goodwill finds and new iterations of the same fashions were showing up new in department stores.

That's the way fashion works but I'm not seeing the irony here. Throwback fashion is routinely a thing. There's even old jokes about wearing something so long it comes back into fashion.

Hipster bars of the era tended to focus on "vintage" brands like PBR or Rolling Rock and this embrace of older, niche products seem to have something to do with the rise of craft alternatives (well, and quality, too..).

PBR and Rolling Rock are just cheep beers. There may be a bit of irony going on with PBR though I'm not entirely convinced.

Re:Where is the irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

PBR revival isn't true vintage, it's just PBR taking accidental commercial advantage of David Lynch's stand on bullshit product-placement in movies (i.e., the anti-Heineken theme in Blue Velvet). In other words, it's basically Lynch's attempt at irony in a screenplay adopted by the wannabe hipsters...

Palm Pilot

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a smartphone (=mobile tracking and spying device), so I still use a Palm Pilot to manage my calendar and contacts (jpilot interface on Linux).

Re:Palm Pilot

[tehcyder]

I don't have a smartphone (=mobile tracking and spying device), so I still use a Palm Pilot to manage my calendar and contacts (jpilot interface on Linux).

That is so old fashioned and needlessly awkward that it must make you some sort of hipster.

posting in the buff

[goombah99]

You must be nude here.

Other explanations for the data

[allquixotic]

The article offers a few speculations for why the data is skewed this way, but none of them are backed up by hard evidence, and there are numerous other possibilities that are no more or less plausible:

  - Maybe these early adopters are just the *wrong kind* - if there is some correlation between their buying habits and social attitudes, maybe these early adopters are not very social? A product becomes mainstream when it has word-of-mouth viral marketing. If the people you reach initially tend not to speak to others advocating products they buy, you're not getting the "multiplier" effect, where one early adopter can lead to 50 or 100 or 1000 second or third-generation adopters who buy it because a friend told them it was good. If this virtuous cycle never gets started, you rely on much less effective external marketing, like TV ads - people are bombarded with so many ads that we treat them with a natural skepticism and disdain now, so many people actively dislike the ads.

  - Maybe you determine who your market is by advertising? Some subtle cue in the advertising you're putting out, intentional or otherwise, could be attracting certain types of people while having attributes that strongly turn off the mainstream audience. If you're targeting the mainstream audience, your commercials cannot contain any feelings or opinions or even visual cues that the mainstream dislikes.

  - Maybe it's just random luck.

harbingers of failure are we nerds

[dillee1]

We nerd *know* tech, and trend to pick technically superior product. Layman pick items with seemingly better benefit-to-cost ratio(cheaper), with their limited knowledge. Just think of Firewire VS USB battle if you need example.

technical superior product(Firewire) -> higher manufacturing cost -> more expensive product -> less market share -> lose out

technical inferior product(USB) -> lower manufacturing cost -> cheaper product -> larger market share -> economy of scale+ecosystem effect -> win

TLDR: we pick a product because its better, but the same reason cause the product lose out to a cheaper competitor. Thats why we just can't have nice things.

Re:harbingers of failure are we nerds

[sfcat]

Perhaps ubiquity is a good thing for a plug? I agree with your premise but I disagree with your use case as I prefer USB and find it better for what I need usually. Plus firewire always seemed like yet another Apple tax.

Fallacy?

[coldsalmon]

There are billions of consumers in the world. Some of them will always pick failures just by pure chance. It doesn't mean that the next thing they pick will also be a failure. This is the same fallacy that leads us to venerate mutual fund managers that outperform the market. Even if everyone picked stocks randomly, some funds would still outperform the market for 10 years straight by sheer luck. There are actually fewer funds of this kind than random chance would predict, indicating that entrusting your money to a fund manager is worse than picking stocks by random chance.

Re:Fallacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same fallacy that leads us to venerate mutual fund managers that outperform the market. Even if everyone picked stocks randomly, some funds would still outperform the market for 10 years straight by sheer luck. There are actually fewer funds of this kind than random chance would predict, indicating that entrusting your money to a fund manager is worse than picking stocks by random chance.

And the lesson here is not to try to outperform the market, but rather to track it. Much of my money is in S&P 500 index funds. I will likely never be a billionaire, but I might have a decent chance at being a millionaire someday. And the management fees on index funds are very low (typically less than 1%). So, your analysis is correct: don't try to find a fund manager to beat the market, instead join the market.

Not just tech products, consumer products too.

[Guppy]

It's not just tech products. I have a habit of picking consumer products that get pulled off the market, for some reason. Examples include:

Hefty Serve and Save Plates: http://www.amazon.com/Hefty-Ev...
Novel chemical and heat-resistant material (some kind of polypropylene composite, vastly superior to Styrofoam or coated paperboard) and large enough to boil a full meal's worth of soup or ramen in the microwave, yet cheap enough to dispose of. You can snap one plate upside down on top of another to form a lid for leftovers, too. These were perfect for eating bachelor chow out of, when they got closed out I bought a shelf-full of the things. The product kind of felt like it was an engineer's dream of what disposable plastic-ware should be like (and it functioned really great), but guess it didn't sell well to house-wives.

Zip-loc bags with pleated bottoms and a stiffer plastic material, allowing them to stand upright by themselves. I used to make bulk batches of sauces and stuff to freeze, these were great for that purpose. They still make a "marinade" bag that's kind of similar but more expensive and not as useful to me, but the model I preferred is now gone. Couldn't find a link to the product.

Palmolive "Sponge-Fresh" dish detergent, also disappeared soon after I started using it as my favorite dish soap. It had a funny (but not unpleasant) fruity-solvent scent to it, but worked really well at suppressing microbial growth in the sponge. Discontinued within a few months, I stocked up of course:
http://www.amazon.com/Palmoliv...

Vaseline Intensive Care waterproof lotion, greatest thing ever for the laboratory or hospital (due to constant hand-washing). Some psoriasis and eczema patients swear it helps them more than anything else out there. Still a few sellers offering bottles from hoarded stockpiles at a sharp mark-up out there, I bought a case from one of those guys:
http://hard2findbeauty.blogspo...

Not nonsense: coolers.

[mveloso]

I know someone who had an IBM PC Jr, a Coleco Adam, and a bunch of other things that died quickly.

Just like it's hard to consistently pick winners, it's hard to consistently pick losers. It's not about liking one or two bad products, it's about consistently picking products that will fail in the marketplace. And that picking is done via actual purchases, not the "talking out of your ass" picking.

I'm sure at some point he bought an Aztek as well.

That's what they said

[Geoffrey.landis]

So they are saying that this sub-group's purchases of new products is indeed predictive of failure.

Yes, that's what they said.

However another explanation of the data is that many products fail early, and thus many of the people who buy products early in the release cycle ("early adopters") will buy many products that will fail. Is the set of "early adopters who adopted products that then failed in the market place" a set that can predict future failure in the marketplace? Well, they didn't show that.

It's easy to predict the past.

Re:Crystal Pepsi

[Anonymous Coward]

whoooooosh

This was an interesting study

[FrodoOfTheShire]

I taped it on my Betamax machine.

Lots of harbringers here,

[Anonymous Coward]

look at how many use Linux.

Re:Lots of harbringers here,

[Anonymous Coward]

look at how many use Linux.

Hardly anyone here uses a Windows Phone, so only very few could really be Harbingers.

Re:I would like to volunteer as the chief harbinge

[NotDrWho]

It really depends. Are you picking stuff which is crap, and the general populace correctly realizes is crap? Or are you picking stuff which is too high-quality for the general market?

How the fuck should I know? I only know that whatever I think or like is not what everyone else does. Whatever I do is not what everyone else does. Whatever I say is not what everyone else says.

Happened again this weekend. Let me explain.

I liked Terminator Salvation and Terminator 3. T3 was a little redundant, but I liked the humor and its much darker, fatalistic take on the future. I thought Salvation was good when I first saw it. And I've come to like it more and more as I've watched it since. Christan Bale's performance is excellent (I knew it would be, since he had already done and excellent job playing basically the exact same role in Reign of Fire), as is Sam Worthington's. The series finally dispensed with that tired old time-travel cliche and moved into the very real war that had been hyped to death repeatedly by previous entries, with only teases that we might one day actually see it. The story was strong. The conclusion was powerful, and raised some interesting questions about what it really means to be a "human." And I really loved the closing shot of John Connor on the radio encouraging humans to keep fighting.

So this weekend, in wake of the new Terminator movie, I saw a whole series of videos of everyone and his brother talking about how awful T3 and Salvation were, and how T2 was so incredible. Now, I liked T2 mind you, but I wouldn't rate it nearly as good as the original. And frankly, I would rather sit down and watch Salvation again than T2. T2 has been shown so much it's become like that song on the radio that you really liked at one time, but you got sick of hearing the 1000th time it was played.

So here we are again. Everyone in the universe hates T3 and Salvation, and thinks T2's shit doesn't stink. Everyone except me, of course. And it's not like I set out to disagree, I just did--yet again.

Re:Crystal Pepsi

[Anonymous Coward]

I never tried Crystal Pepsi, but the citrus successor Crystal From Pepsi was a favorite of mine during the brief period that it was available. ...And I owned a Zune, too.
It was a free pack-in with a laptop, I swear!

I liked the movie

[paiute]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:I would like to volunteer as the chief harbinge

[blind biker]

I'm like that, too. Unfortunately, my anti-charisma (to use your nice term) spilled over into my financial investments as well - every single company I bought shares of, tanked.

What defines failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Some things chosen that never "succeeded" were actually better products. Some of the best reviewed shows "failed." Some of the most technically sound products "failed." A lot of these failures were actually because they didn't gain popularity with the masses. The masses are stupid, they take what is convenient or what is fed to them.

Bring them to Slashdot

[SuperKendall]

Slashdot is the ultimate mecca for the "Harbingers of Doom", a site literally ripe with people who will vociferously back the worst of products that obviously have no future. In fact I use this very site myself to predict failure for some things, as there are a lot of repeat posters here that spend 24x7 backing future failed products.

Re:Bring them to Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Such as slashdot itself, thanks to the new Dice overlords...

Re:Bring them to Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit. Don't tell this guy about Linux.

That's totally incorrect

[SuperKendall]

Although you meant it to be funny your statement is really wrong - I'd say a good 90% of Browncoats didn't find the show until way after it was off the air. A number I know of didn't get into Firefly until well after the movie even...

Only correlation shown?

[SLOGEN]

I've read through the paper (draft) now, and it seems like they really only show correlation between a group they call Harbingers and "Failure" of products.The group of Harbingers is characterized by purchasing at a discount. soooo,

I would lean more towards a conclusion like: "Stores that experience low sales apparently place products on discount and there is individual price elasticity".

The figure on page 38 shows that "Avg. Profit relative to existing Products in the Category" has a strong bias against "products that flopped" already at *Week1* relative to "Products that survived". That is *right* away, there is a systematic bias that seems constant so if I were to look at data after that I would be *highly* suspicious about directions of causality.

In addition, most of the article is vast amounts of bread-text that seem to support circular reasoning.

Can anyone find a place where they actually come up a direction of causality?

Proving the direction of causality being *from* the "harbingers"-group picking loosers could be supported by

• 1. Define the set of Harbingers
• 2. Introduce a number of new products.
• 2a. in half the shops at fixed prices
• 2b. in half the shops let the shop set the price
• 3. Show that the Harbingers from step1 purchase the same relative amount of the products in scenarios 2a and 2b.

Note, Separating the two parts without interference may be hard :)

Could we predict the supply-side version of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me it'd be much more useful to be able to predict when a wildly popular product will be purposefully steered into oblivion by its owners, like Nokia or Star Wars--that way consumers know well in advance to either hoard or make for the exits. Knowing that some fringe product will die before it reaches the mainstream doesn't really help that many people, relatively speaking.

Fuck your paywall

[Anonymous Coward]

To those complaining to RTFA, it's behind a fucking paywall assholes.

Zune was a bad value not a bad product

[sjbe]

I loved the brown version. It was beautiful. Whether it was ahead of its time, or behind its time, or just too niche, I don't know. I just know it looked fantastic in person and literally like crap in pictures.

The Zune wasn't a terrible product. It was a terrible value. The iPod rules the market at the time. For Zine to matter it either needed to be substantially better than the iPod or substantially cheaper to get people to care about it. It needed to be a better value proposition. Instead it was roughly comparable for a similar price. If your choice is between two effectively identical products, people are generally going to pick the one that is more popular and better known. People already knew the iPod worked pretty well and it already had the mind share. Microsoft hugely overestimated the value of their brand and provided nothing more than a me-too product with little to set it apart.

As for other compelling reasons: the Zune had better sound quality, better software, and a better screen than the iPod.

I think it's pretty much safe to say that almost nobody agrees with you on this. Even if all those things were technically better like you claim, they weren't enough better that it mattered. The sound from an iPod and the screen quality was more than good enough for all but the pickiest of customers. Zune did not change that. As for the software Zune being "better", I think you'll have a hard to proving that objectively even allowing for the fact that iTunes is widely regarded as rather poor quality. It certainly wasn't better enough to matter and I cannot recall any press proclaiming it to be even the slightest bit revolutionary or superior.

Re:Zune was a bad value not a bad product

[chispito]

They were compelling reasons to me. The market obviously judged the player a colossal failure, but I loved mine.

Re:Zune was a bad value not a bad product

[tehcyder]

As for the software Zune being "better", I think you'll have a hard to proving that objectively even allowing for the fact that iTunes is widely regarded as rather poor quality

I have never even seen a Zune, but I can say with a six sigma level of confidence that its software is better than iTunes.

My cat fell asleep on my keyboard and wrote a piece of software as it was dreaming about hunting birds that was better than iTunes.

I'd love to be one

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine being that consumer, instant profit: "So, Mr. Pepsi, you want to sell this new Cola? Let me introduce myself, Harbinger of Failure. Do you know what would happen to your brand if my neighbors would see me buy it? Don't you remember Crystal? Here's the deal: you send me a lifetime supply of regular Pepsi and I won't touch the Crystal."

Put away the tinfoil hat

[sjbe]

I listen to music on my iPod and I happened to own a dumb phone.

Your choice and that's fine but it puts you firmly in the minority these days.

And while a new phone would be great, not only can I not afford it, the amount of eavesdropping that can be done on a smart phone really makes it a stupid purchase this day & age.

Strange that I have nearly minimum wage employees working for me that somehow manage to afford a smartphone. Maybe you should use some of your time to seek a better job instead of posting here. Anyway it's quaint how you think that not having a smartphone makes you immune to eavesdropping. I think you might have a little of the paranoia. Here's a clue, "dumb" phones are just as easy to track as smartphones.

The convenience of a smartphone, does it really outweigh the negative aspects of having a device that records everything you do?

Once you put away your tinfoil hat the answer is yes.

Re:I would like to volunteer as the chief harbinge

[NotDrWho]

I wish there were a better term for it. But "anti-charisma" is the most accurate way I can think of to express it. People naturally seem to hate me, disagree with me, etc. I seem to naturally repulse people, no matter how sociable or nice I try to be. I'm not some autistic asshole with no sense of social convention, etiquette or emotional cues, mind you. I work hard to be nice to people and follow every social norm. But if I advocate for something, no matter how careful I am not to come on too strong, it actually hurts the cause I'm advocating for. The LAST thing you want is my support.

If you fill a room with people and ask them if they like chocolate, 80% will probably tell you they like it. But the second *I* step into that room and say openly that I think chocolate is great, you can bet that the next poll will show that most of those people suddenly don't like it. I wish I were exaggerating.

When I meet people, they often act like Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone when he shakes Martin Sheen's hand. They'll get this look in their eyes like they just subconsciously realized that satan is saying hello to them. I've actually had people reach out to shake my hand and suddenly jerk their hand away without consciously realizing they're even doing it. I'm the opposite of the cult of personality.

I do wish there were a way to leverage it into some kind of career, the way that charismatic people leverage that skill. But damned if I can figure out how. At least then it would be good for something besides making me feel like a fucking freak of nature, or some alien stranded on the wrong planet.

Re:I would like to volunteer as the chief harbinge

[Grishnakh]

Ok, so you don't agree with most people about the Terminator movies, but we're really talking about manufactured products here, not art (which is what movies are, a form of art). Lots of people have very different opinions about artwork. Some like Picasso, some like Rembrandt, some like Dali, but I doubt this maps very well with whether you'd buy a Zune or iPod, or whether you use a PC or Mac or Linux, or whether you use Android or iPhone or Windows Phone, or what kind of car you drive ; these choice, while there is some subjective component to them, also have a significant practical component, plus a big price component. As a Dali fan, I can buy Dali prints for a couple dollars easily, but if I like Ferraris, I can't afford one of those, plus I need a vehicle with some cargo space, so I have to buy a more practical vehicle. Movies don't have a price component: they all cost the same at the theater, whether you're watching a Terminator movie (good or bad), or a stinker like Gigli.

Do you have any actual examples of things you've bought that were duds?

I miss Sunkist Solar Fusion

[Sowelu]

...and a whole bunch of other things. I'm pretty sure I'm one of these people.

Seriously, what's not to love about caffeinated orange soda?

I know a software guy who fits this for companies

[EmperorOfCanada]

Basically if the company hires this guy then they die. I am not saying that they don't do well but that they die a horrible death. If the did a proper check and asked people like me I would say something like, "Are you serious, do you want any staff that work with him to get angry and leave? Do you hate your customers because he will piss them off and they too will leave. As for his product all I can say is that it will be way over documented. Not well built but way way way over documented. So a few upper managers will be happy with the project right up until they realize that he has turned it into complete crap.

Then when they look at the project they will realize that the three stooges would have run it better by accident.

The horrible thing with this guy is that people drink his koolaid until it is way too late. Then they realize that on a simple and not mission critical project that it might not have been a good idea to have a 7 to 1 ratio of QA people to developers.

Re:I would like to volunteer as the chief harbinge

[grumpy_old_grandpa]

Like the other guy said, you're talking about art forms here. And if you go by the mainstream opinion on art, you'll get average stuff. It's simple really, if something has to appeal to everybody, it cannot be very special or left-field, rather it becomes repetitive and cliché.

Talk to people who are actually into a particular form of art, like movies, and you'll most likely get a different opinion than the mainstream. On the original Terminator: Great movie, and actually very well done effects for a (relatively) low budget production. It's been 31 years, and it has aged surprisingly well.

Re:I would like to volunteer as the chief harbinge

[sfcat]

I wish there were a better term for it. But "anti-charisma" is the most accurate way I can think of to express it. People naturally seem to hate me, disagree with me, etc. I seem to naturally repulse people, no matter how sociable or nice I try to be. I'm not some autistic asshole with no sense of social convention, etiquette or emotional cues, mind you. I work hard to be nice to people and follow every social norm. But if I advocate for something, no matter how careful I am not to come on too strong, it actually hurts the cause I'm advocating for. The LAST thing you want is my support.

I think there are several possibilities happening to you, probably several at once if its as bad as you report. Either: 1) you have a habit of making people feel dumb (or at least reminding them of how truly wrong they can be) or 2) you are suffering from the Double Burden at the low end of the scale for social cues or 3) you are offering your opinion too frequently given the size of the group (the larger the group, the more you have to share the "speaking stick") Try this for awhile, don't try to persuade anyone in a specific group of anything for a predetermined period of time (you don't have to do this at work but consistently with a specific group of people). Then after a period, wait for one group decision and chime in with what you want but just say you think it will be fun or that others will enjoy it. Don't give a long winded, logically based argument, just something short and breezy. You might be surprised with the response depending on the group of people. Obviously this probably won't work with engineers but other social groups it might weirdly work.

speaking of fail

[Anonymous Coward]

site literally ripe with people

The word you were looking for is "rife". You fail at big words. Please stop using them.

link to actual journal article, please

[Anonymous Coward]

The link is to an article, that's to another newspaper (where I can't actually see the article). Maybe we could have a direct link to the actual journal paper, so we could actually read the study for ourselves, rather than read a journalists interpretation?

Re:Crystal Pepsi

[Anonymous Coward]

Crystal Pepsi was nasty, as was Coke II and Zima.

Too long

[tsotha]

"Harbingers of Failure" is sure a lot of letters to say "dork".

Just not fond of his work or attitude

[dbIII]

Lennart is professional programmer who has had great success. You sound jealous

Yes to the first, but why did we have to be subjected to them for so long when they were still alpha quality? The second, no, I took a different path so cannot compare myself to him even when he's done stuff I would have considered utterly stupid at the age he did it at despite not being so much of a professional programmer.
Pulseaudio mostly works, which is about what you can say about computer audio on most platforms so that's a shining success. NetworkManager is a good fit for laptops, servers not so much but apart from odd glitches it works, which is more than can be said for MS networking so it's a success. Systemd - still not as good as what it is meant to replace and the non-professional bits of Lennart's behaviour mean it's deployed where it shouldn't be and many valid bug reports are discarded as if they are irrelevant.

Buy what works for you

[sjbe]

They were compelling reasons to me. The market obviously judged the player a colossal failure, but I loved mine.

Nothing wrong with that. I've bought some products myself that were a bit off the beaten path. You have to buy what works for you.

The truck I drive right now is probably the slowest selling pickup on the US market but it was excellent value for money and fits my particular needs almost perfectly. I've always been mystified why people aren't more objective about their actual needs versus buying something that is popular but a bad fit for them. For example the Ford F150 is the best selling vehicle in the US but most people that buy them would actually be better served by a different vehicle based on what they actually do with it. People want bad-ass off-road trucks but only something like 5% of drivers ever leave the pavement.

Re:Buy what works for you

[q4Fry]

What kind of truck do you have? You've piqued my curiosity.

Just a guess

[tehcyder]

But this is probably not the time to boast of being an early Linux adopter?

Underdog supporter.

[Anonanonaon]

When I see small businesses or other collectives start up which have a lot of heart, brains and a good products, but which are probably going to fail, I'll often throw support under them.

Most of the time it doesn't prevent ultimate failure, but sometimes it does and the result is a powerful and positive entity. -At which point I'll usually lose interest and find somebody else to help out with my support.

The chances of success for decent people is going to be lower in a system skewed toward psychopathy. I like to help out where I can because psychopathy sucks.

Also, success can be measured in ways other than mass market acceptance.

I own a lot of cool products and books and such which I wouldn't otherwise if I didn't keep an eye out for awesome people trying to add light to the world.

This has been known a LONG time

[BubbaJonBoy]

We've all met those people that nothing goes right. Then there are the people that as soon as they show up shit starts working.
Back in the days of Bell Labs, Dennis Ritchie recounted how these types of people were rated as "jinxes" or "healers".
During critical testing or a demonstration jinxes were told to stay away and healers were invited.

Well...

[fuzzy2k]

All TV shows get cancelled. Except The Simpson's, and even that may get the axe, one day. Crystal Pepsi is a stripper name I am not familiar with. I am sorry to hear she died, but I was not a fan. Microsoft is not a hardware company, so the Zune was never a good investment.

On the other hand, I did love my Betamax by Sony. Does that count?