Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever

cuppm writes "Yahoo! News has an article on the The Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever. 'What distinguishes a simply bad product from the truly awful? Sometimes it's a dreadful user interface. Other times it's a product that successfully addresses a particularly daunting problem - yet one shared by relatively few people. And often competitive or financial pressure forces new products to market before they're ready - full of bugs and horribly unusable. Still other times, the products arrive too early. Eventually they become a success, but often after the founding company has been ruined.'"

Mistake on Clik! Drive

[BWS]

The Clik! Drive is 40MB, not 40GB as the article states!

MMmmmmm

[sparkes]

So the biggest tech flops all happened relatively recently and in america?

There is an easy solution to this lets not only stop using technology, not only from the USA, but from since the americas where discovered by modern europeans!

I'm blogging this right now on my own printing press and if anyone laughs I will get medieval on their arse (ass is such an americanism and is banned)

or alternativly we could find something better to do than look at year end reviews, year coming previews and over hyped journalistic endevours.

I can't wait for slashdot to leave the post holiday period and start getting good again ;-)

oh, and my fav techno flop is the Sinclair C5

Cue Cat

[G4from128k]

The Cue Cat [computer-society.org] was a glorified privacy-invading bar code scanner that flopped in the markeplace (even though they gave away 1 million of these beasties). I still have 3 of these things given to me through various magazine subscriptions. If I ever find the time I will have to hack the cat [cexx.org].

Re:Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2 may be dead now, but in its day it certainly was no "flop". Hell, OS/2 is still installed on millions of PC's around the world, in fact my day job is migrating OS/2 machines to Linux (for banks and insurance companies and stuff).

IBM Commercial

[SuperKendall]

Actually that was on an IBM commercial with Commander Sisko well before the 70's show. And it was a lot funnier, like everything the 70's show rips off.

Re:Toll Collect

[Lispy]

Yeah, TollCollect really should be on the list. Here's some information about it for non german audiences that want to share the laughter:

TollCollect [toll-collect.de]
Fosters Article [fosters.com]
They were also given the "BigBrother Award" [google.com](google translation)

Re:Cue Cat

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

If I could just get my CueCat to work with Windows XP...I've tried Catnip and YourCueCat drivers with no success yet. (I wonder if it could have anything to do with how I use a USB keyboard, so just have the 'cat plugged into the PS/2 slot without any keyboard attached to its other end?)

I have never seen a cuecat, but back when I was an undergraduate in ... 2000? I used to write point of sale software for a small house. I spent a lot of time screwing around with barcode readers. Now, if the Cuecat is a standard PS/2 or AT wedge device, the following idle speculation might be of some use to you.

Every now and then I run accross finicky motherboards that once you unplug the keyboard from them, absolutely refuse to recognise that there's one there until you reboot them, no matter how many times you plug it in again. One of my linux boxes used to do this, and it pissed me off because I wanted to use it with an input switcher. So I assume that at boot-time, and thereafter, the host occasionally 'pings' the keyboard to see if there's anything there, or checks a line voltage, or whatever.

I assume that the barcode reader does not mimic these responses so as not to confuse the host, so if you have no keyboard, the port is probably reporting back as 'unused'. So yeah, I'd plug a keyboard in ( in fact, I would have tested this in the first five minutes - surprised you haven't either ), and if it works, bust open a cheap keyboard to just separate the controller pcb, which is tiny, and the lead, and hook those up as a kind of PS/2 terminator.

Let me know how it turns out. Don't know what this deal is with drivers you mention, by the way, nearly all scanners of this type just pretend to be hitting buttons on a PS/2 keyboard - no drivers required.

YLFI

Holy crap, is it really 4am?

Re:Also missing ...

[zulux]

Iridium is still going.

After bankrupsy they were able to change their price structure to somthing more sane. I use mine at $1.50 a minuite - and the phones are now under $1000.

I highly recomended Iridium if you spend any time in the wilderness. With the serial calble and a old Psion Revo - I can telnet to any of my servers from anywhere and the whole package is under three pounds.

Re:Dataplay

[pla]

Meta-comment here...

In case people can't tell (and judging by an "informative" rating, they can't), the author of this one meant it as a JOKE.

You don't get higher-than-CD quality in 2/3rds the size, and a green marker does nothing* to any form of digital media - You don't get better or worse quality, you get bits.

Green bits don't sound better than clear bits or blue bits or red bits, although a little too much green might mean you get no bits (ie, render the media unplayable).


* - Relating to making it unplayable, the Sharpie trick to remove the copy protection from some CDs works by making the invalid data track unreadable. It doesn't "improve" the cd, it just breaks it in a way that happens to fix it, ironically enough.

Re:Clik, Zip, superdisk/ls 120, and what not.

[Tony Hoyle]

Bad things about USB drives...

1. They're expensive - 32MB = 40 (~$60) (not sure where you get $40 for 256MB the cheapest I can find is around $150).
2. 99% of Computers have USB ports at the *back*, meaning that you have to crawl around the floor to get the thing in. Floppy drives are (almost) universally at the front.
3. You need drivers. If you have to boot into DOS they stop working... For a similar reason they're not bootable, so you can't carry around a 'boot pen' to rescue systems the way you can a floppy.
4. They're not durable - electronics is too easy to break. If you get a floppy wet it'll usually keep working. If you get a pen drive wet then that's $40 (or $150) down the drain.

Re:Anyone went to their site?

[-kertrats-]

No, I didnt get that annoying popup. Its called Mozilla [mozilla.org]. Helps immensely. The fact that you were most likely using IE revokes your Nerd license. Now, you have to leave.

Sorry.

WebTV and Internet Appliances

[Radical Rad]

Internet Appliances
PC component prices plunged during the Internet Appliance heyday, so a full PC wound up costing just a few dollars more than the truncated Applicances.

WebTV:
But when sales stalled at around a million users, someone woke up and realized that low-resolution TVs are lousy at displaying emails and web pages

If these are really the reasons for their failures then both may experience a resurgence. I say that because of the new TV's that are in the stores today. Plasma/LCD TV's were a big seller for Christmas and their price has been projected to drop to half what they are today by next Christmas. Their crisp, bright, HDTV capable pictures will cure what Louderback says ails the category. It is just a matter of time. And Microsoft makes so much money in its monopoly markets of OS and Office S/W that it has all the time in the world for WebTV to take off.

Secondly, WebTV IS an Internet Appliance just not in the form that Ellison was pushing with the "Internet Computer". People will continue to buy TV's for their livingrooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and the backseat of their SUV's not PC's. And once those TV's are capable of displaying high definition images, then the asian commodity manufacturers will jump into the market and bring the prices down along with a multitude of features. I can imagine settop boxes competing year after year with new features like voice and gesture recognition instead of a clumsy remote controls, DRM, long term storage of data in Internet connected facilities, access to grid computing, MMORPG, biometrics, etc. all for $199 and the effort of connecting a few cables to a preexisting TV.

Within a few years I think we will finally see the success of both of these categories.

WebTV's founder just died

[PollGuy]

Interesting that WebTV is so honored, because the co-founder of the company, Phillip Y. Goldman, died this week at 39 [nytimes.com].

Re:How can you forget the entire .COM boom/bust?

[binaryDigit]

The newton and others sold well at first and are still around; In fact, the newton would be going strong if not for Jobs killing it to throw support behind MacOSX.

I was referring to the early attempts at pushing pen computing into the mainstream. As a technology obviously pen based computing is alive and well (Palm/CE) and many of todays systems benefited from the lessons of those early systems.

While, Pink/Taligent went nowhere, Be, Next, and OS/2 enjoyed long (but small) market. OS/2 was used heavily in ATMs, banks, and hospitals. Next is basically OSX

I have a more detailed reply to one of the other people who mentioned the same thing. But the gist of it is that all those OS's were cool and to an extent sucessful. However, similar to pen computing above, the entire concept of trying to develop the "next" (no pun intended) great OS is what has flopped.

Transmeta is alive. Not doing great, but growing slowly.

This is more of a flop similar to my statement about the .COM boom/bust. Obviously the web is alive and well, the "flop" was the blown out of proportion expectations vs reality. Transmeta promised a lot, and delivered little.

Actaully, Lotus 1-2-3 (windows version) did just fine

It was late and it didn't innovate. It ended up being a decent product, but Excel by then was flashier, and waay to long of a head start. I don't remember Office being "given" away. I do remember when they first started shipping "Office" and the price was indeed significantly cheaper than the original cost of Word and Excel seperately.

Lisa was always about a prototype. It was never expected to last long in the market. It formed the foundation of the Mac.

No, they were developed pretty much concurrently. The Lisa was the business machine, the Mac the personal computer. Lisa flopped because it was too expensive and people didn't understand the value proposition of a gui. Even when they converted the Lisa into the MacXL it went nowhere. It was the original 128k Macintosh that set the foundation.

Actually, PS/2 did just fine except for lack of cards (and their high prices).

I'm talking bigger picture here. PS/2 was a reactionary strike by IBM to try to reign in the clone market. While it was technically superior, the area where it flopped, and this is one of the biggest flops ever, is that it had the exact opposite effect that IBM was trying to achieve in that it caused the rift that IBM could never recover from. IBM spent a lot of time and money while the rest of the PC market was left to mature on it's own, and the rest they say, is history. IBM has NEVER recovered from this attempt.

In a way, Iridium is a success

[Animats]

The US Government bought a big share in Iridium, for which they basically get all the airtime they want. When the Government bought in, Afghanistan and Iraq were still in the future. After the US bombed, invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, the people on the ground needed communications. Iridium is providing them. Without Iridium, the US probably would have spent more money frantically setting up communications systems than Iridium cost.

Iridium handsets seem large by cell phone standards, but military radios with long range capability are still a backpack item or worse. There's more network capacity in the Iridium system than in military commo nets, and you can call any phone in the world.

Think of it as an instrument of empire, like the British East India Trading Company, not a business.

Re:The biggest flop ever..

[hamtux6]

As I understood it, Commodore's problems weren't with the machine--it was truly some amazing hardware for the time--but rather with their marketing and business practices. I think the far-and-away superority of the Amiga is what kept them alive as long as they were.

You are misinformed

[G27 Radio]

RS232 used both 9 and 25 pin connectors. The 9-pin serial ports on your computer are RS232*. As far as only using 4 pins, that is incorrect as well. Data was transmitted over two pins. If all you wanted to do was send/receive data you only needed those two pins. Other pins were used for useful stuff such as hardware flow control, carrier detection, and other out of band signaling. RS232 has been around forever, has been extremely widely used, and will be around for a long time to come (though not likely for much longer on consumer PC's)

RS422 is a whole different animal and has nothing to do with 9-pin connectors.

* Note: most new computers seem to be doing away with RS232[c] ports in favor of USB these days.

Lots of NeXT stations were sold & used

[zaytar]

The US Navy bought hundreds of these, the NSA *has* hundreds of them, and a particularly large telcom provider in the southwest US used them for all of their billing systems. They were never intended to be used as a home user system so you're comparing apples and pickles.

Not to mention that NeXTStep was a good OS - it now lives on in OSX.

Re:Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

He is the lamer who used to work for TechTV.

WebTV really that bad?

[blanks]

Honestly, the only experience I had with WebTV was at my parent's house many years ago.

For them this was better then any computer. You sign up, you get your email account, you get access to weather, channel listings (they have WebTV with cable) You can program it to switch to specific channels at specific times. No worries for viruses, worms, corrupted file systems or bloated registries.

For people who just wanted an email address, gamble online, check news, weather, and program their tv/vcr, it was amazing.

Sure low res, and most of these features are in many products, but at the time it was a great idea.

Click of Death

[CrazyTalk]

What the article failed to mention is, once you had a bad Zip Disk, if you inserted it into another perfectly good drive, it would ruin that drive as well. Sort of a mechanical virus. This was a pretty common scenario, since if your disk doesnt seem to be working, what do you do? Find a friends/co-workers drive and try it out there (thus destroying your friends drive in the process).

NeXT OS ran on m68k, SPARC, HP RISC, and Intel

[zaytar]

The core OS was based on FreeBSD/NetBSD was easily portable, the microkernel also made ports easy. Fat binaries that ran on any platform were also the norm.

Lots of the technology from NeXT OS (aka NeXTStep) went into Mac OSX - from the NetInfo database, the dock concept, to the file system layout.

Re:UH NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 3.1 DIDN'T have real multitasking, at all. The contemporary Amiga had real preemptive multitasking and much better UI design, but commodore america where complete idiots and marketed it as a games machine, even as amiga swept through europe as a PC (in the "personal computer" sense, not the "ibm compatible" sense, obviously)

Re:Wait a minute

[HeghmoH]

Feh, get a clue. The original Mac OS ran on m68k too, does that mean it can't run on my computer because I have a PowerPC?

Mac OS X draws from three sources, Mac OS, BSD, and NeXT. From BSD it draws a lot of low level stuff and part of the kernel. From NeXT it draws some other low level stuff and the rest of the kernel, along with a bunch of interface ideas. From Mac OS, it draws inspiration.

Yes, Apple did lots of work. But that doesn't mean there isn't a ton of NeXT code still working away under the surface. As just one minor example, look through any random Cocoa headers, and you'll find #ifdefs for WIN32, which are left over from Yellow Box's Windows NT days. Just look at the progression of developer releases, from Rhapsody on forward, all the way through to Mac OS X. The early developer releases were basically NeXT with a Mac-looking interface, ported to the PowerPC. The system evolved from there until you get what we have today.

Re:Dataplay

[onomatomania]

You don't get higher-than-CD quality in 2/3rds the size

While the statement that Dataplay is of lesser quality than CDs is true, the above reasoning is misleading. The size of the media, or the number of bytes it can store, are irrelevant to judging its quality. If I had a dataplay disk that stored 100MB, and used it to store a single song at (say) 24bits 60kHz sample rate, it would definitely be "higher-than-CD quality", whatever that means.

Re:UH NO

[gozar]

Myth. By the time Windows took off, with version 3.1, it was technically as sophisticated as the MacOS of the day, and the hardware it ran on was faster and cheaper. It lagged in UI design and stability - but don't you realise that one of the reasons Windows was less stable than MacOS was because it was doing more? It had real multitasking, for one thing, and virtual memory.

Win 3.1 had the exact same cooperative multitasking as Mac OS 7 at the time, meaning one application could still take over the whole computer. Windows didn't get cooperative multitasking until Win95, with NT allowing old 16 bit Win3.1 programs to preemptively multitask.

Re:Ubiquitous "That 70's show" quote

[Bob Uhl]

As snopes notes [snopes.com] (look towards the end), the 'forty acres and a mule' nonsense is just that: nonsense. General Sherman handed out land that wasn't his to black camp followers in order to give them something to live off of for the duration. It wasn't his to give, and President Johnson returned the land to its proper owners after the war.

Re:Push (Off-Topic Question)

[firewrought]

if a site owner uses meta refresh=30 seconds (or whatever), does that contribute to overall page views for the page when site stat programs totals up the results?

If the browser respects the refresh and intervening proxies don't try to short-circuit it, the requsted page will be re-transmitted from the server. This event will be logged and it will show up a new page view if your log analyzer is dumb.

I don't actually play with web logs, but it should be easy enough to make them "smart" enough to filter out repeated requests from the same IP address. I imagine that most analyse software could handle this, but check your documentation... Also, depending on what information you want, there are smarter ways to get it than by analyzing the logs.

Hit counters and other graphics that get loaded with a page are a different story. I would imagine that most browsers don't reload these on a META-refresh request.

As a side note, most hit counters are not smart... you can hit the manual refresh and watch them increment.

Re:PC Jr.

[Firehawke]

It's funny how IBM managed to trash the PC Jr design-- at least two of the design CONCEPTS gave another company the crown of the PC market for a number of years-- Tandy. The Tandy 1000 line was a Tandem-originated (Tandem was a manufacturer of floppy drives back in the day; not sure if they're still around) PC Jr clone that was sold to Tandy and rebranded.

Until the advent of VGA and superior audio solutions, the Tandy graphics and sound options (really originating in the PC Jr) were king..

I'm sure someone at IBM must've been kicking themselves over it.