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.'"

Yet... DivX missed how?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Not talking about the codec, but the Circuit City "rentable" DVD scheme) Easily a bigger flop than WebTV or the Clik drive.

Re:Mistake on Clik! Drive

[Greger47]

And if it had been 40 GB it would never made the list, cause the drives would have been selling like lemonade in Sahara.

/greger

Also missing ...

[Wingchild]

Iridium [iridium.com], one of Motorola's biggest all-time money losers. I think the DoD still has a contract with them though, even though their original concept (that of public market penetration) crashed and burned quite hard. The nifty air-droppable and instantly deployable solar satellite phonebooths they proposed for low-lying Africa and other places without appropriate infrastructure likewise didn't come into being, as far as I know.

Re:RIAA?

[Seth Finklestein]

As a long-time Apple, I have to disagree. Forbes magazine, one of the United States' foremost authorities on technology, named iTunes Music Store its Product of the Year [slashdot.org] for 2003. Now, I know several people who use Windows, and all of them are of the opinion that "if you can download it for free, then you should download it for free." This attitude is highly destructive to the intellectual property industry, and will only lead to such initiatives as "Trusted" Computing gaining a foothold.

To address you're so-called "complaints."

1. "that's a huge flop" -- Apple has sold over 25 million songs on iTunes. That's a huge flop?
2. "DRM'd to hell" -- You can burn your songs an infinite number of times, as long as you change the playlist every 10th time. Apple permits you to have your music on up to 3 computers (does anyone even have more than two nowadays?) and as many iPods as you want (which is good; I own five).
3. "harder to use than going online and downloading a blah blah blah" -- Not true. Maybe if you're Joe Sixpack and you enjoy listening to payolaed Top-40 dreck, you can find what you're looking for on the so-called "free" networks. (Many of those networks use proprietary, closed-source software with spyware such as Gator.) I went on the KaZaA and searched for Leonard Cohen, my favourite artist. After five minutes, I could have used my high-capacity Speakeasy DSL to download Leonard's entire catalogue!

Frankly, I consider you little more than a troll. Run along, troll. Go beat rocks together, you sissy!

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Long-Time Apple

My Personal Observations

[osewa77]

The funny thing is that many of these failures could probably be predicted. What makes them "big" is that they had the backing of bodies who could afford to spend so much money on them before concluding that their projects have failed!

Re:RIAA?

[Sage Gaspar]

Gee, let me think. First the problem is that their business model is all messed up. How can we reasonably be expected to buy CDs from stores when all we want to do is listen to them on the computer and there's no digital retailer set up?

Now that companies are finally moving on it, the problem is that it doesn't meet our exact specifications, and instead of trying to work with them we continue to pirate. Hmm, sounds like somebody wants a half-brained excuse to take a five-fingered discount.

UH NO

[dave1g]

While the article was titled "Biggest Tech Flops" it clearly should have been title "Worst Tech Market Flops"

Marketing wise, Windows is the biggest success in the history of mankind. Bill Gates strategies and tactics, however illegal or immoral they might have been, led to the rise of this operating system over the much more powerful Macintosh of its day.

I know we all hate Microsoft, but as far as being a product that was marketed perfectly, windows gets that prize anyday.

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

[binaryDigit]

This should be #1 IMHO. It far dwarfed the whole early pen based computing infatuation. Also ...

He breaks out MagicCap/Go seperately. Why? Throw in the Newton and a few others and just say that the early days of pen computing as a general purpose input device was a complete flop.

How about failed OS ventures. Pink, Taligent, Be, NeXT, OS/2, etc.

WebTV? It may have been a flop, but one of the biggest, I think not.

TransMeta anyone?

Windows version Lotus 1-2-3, it's failure helped to change the landscape of application isv's and helped to firmly root Office as defacto.

Apple Lisa/III. Nuff said.

PCJr, NOTHING compared to PS/2, the system that helped IBM lose the PC market.

not to forget:

[Lispy]

- WAP/UMTS
- Tablet PC
- AmigaOne
- Sun JavaDesktop
- Laserdisc

Clik! drive?

[darien]

From the article:

Iomega Clik! Drive: In 1999, just as recordable CDs started getting really cheap and popular, Iomega released its own proprietary way to write nearly 40 gigabytes of data to a removable disk. ... it was just too expensive to compete with either CDR or flash memory. The blanks alone cost around $10. Worse, the Clik drive was doomed by a problem with Iomega's popular Zip drives. Those devices had an annoying habit of spectacularly failing - taking a user's data along to the grave, as well. Before failing, the drives emitted an ominous clicking noise, quickly dubbed the "Click of Death." The Clik! drive didn't have the Click of Death, but it quickly followed the Zip drive into hell.

Cheap shot I know but... $10 for a 40 gigabyte disc in 1999!? (These were of course 40 megabyte devices.)

But the actual thing I wanted to say was: I wonder why the author says the Clik! drive was doomed by the click of death, given that (as he points out) the problem was specific to Zip drives! OK, if the click of death had actually bankrupted Iomega then it would be a fair point - but it clearly didn't, because they're still selling (newer, higher-capacity) Zip drives, external CD-writers etc. So what is he suggesting? That nobody bought a Clik! drive because they didn't trust any Iomega product after hearing about the click of death? I guess it's possible, but since the Clik! drive was clearly unable to compete with CD-R on price, convenience or market penetration, it doesn't seem very Occam-friendly to blame the click of death.

Just musing.

Honorable mention

[Knights who say 'INT]

... to the whole concept of push content.

Re:FAA Traffic control system

[squarooticus]

$1.5 billion to potentially benefit the entire country is better than $16 billion wasted on one city [bigdig.com]. It's too bad it didn't work out (pre-set flight lanes essentially required by the fuzziness of VOR make the whole system less efficient than it could be), but at least it was federal money wasted on a national system, not federal money wasted on a local system.

Re:The biggest flop ever..

[Tony Hoyle]

The Sinclair ZX80/81 were the things that created home computing (at least in the UK).

Amigas sold like hot cakes, and still have a large (overly nostalgic IMO) following.

Neither of them exactly failed...

The IOmega Clik

[perfessor multigeek]

Personally, even if I hadn't already loathed IOmega (even though, as it happens, most of my Zip drives have worked just fine, thank you very much), the millions of little metal clickers that they gave out at computer shows to promote the Clik drive would have prevented any purchases by me.
Anybody else remember what it was like walking around industry trade shows that year with a constant backdrop of "clik" "clik" everywhere? Trying to carry on a productive conversation at PC Expo that year was about as viable as sleeping in a field of katydids at the height of their season.

Doggone Utah nutjobs with their clueless, murble, gurble, frazzin' . . .

Rustin

When did this author climb out of diapers?

[Anonymous Coward]

8 biggest flops of all time? More like the 7 biggest flops published in issues of BYTE found when he finally cleaned out his closet at his Mom's house, plus the PC Jr.

I knew the average age of /. skewed low, but come on!

How about the Space Shuttle? Or the Mars Observer? How about the billions in miltary flops, like the Cheyenne helicopter or the A-12 attack jet?

Re:bigger flops still...

[binaryDigit]

"Multimedia"

Egads man, the entire web is all about multimedia. How on earth can you claim that it's a flop?

8" floppies

A flop? It was a earlier technology and part of a natural progression. This is like saying that horses were a flop because everyone uses cars now.

RS-232 serial port (25 pins, of which 4 are used)

Are you saying the port is a flop? Which would be wrong because it's the one legacy port that has/will outlive most others. The fact that it doesn't utilize all 25pins. Well the rs232 spec doesn't mention anything about using 25 pins. 9 pin connectors are also very common as well as using POTS telephone cabling (very popular back in the day to wire terminals).

Audio Cassettes for data storage

Hardly, most of the popular home based computers depended on this cheap technology for there "mass" storage needs. It simply became obsolete.

Tuner cards?!?

[AsmordeanX]

>Graphics cards that allow you to watch television on your monitor, by plugging a coax cable into the card.
Um sure. That is why you can walk into any store today and still see four different tuners on the shelf. The market for tuner / capture cards is small but exists and thrives. HTPCs are taking off now with people building TIVOlike devices. A tuner card is required.

PS -
>Audio Cassettes for data storage
You have strange definitions of a flop. The cassette tape was THE means of data storage in the early days of home computing. PET had one, the VIC20, ADAM, TRS80, hell even the IBM XT first came with one.

>Windows 1.0
Strange definition indeed.

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

[mangastudent]

I wouldn't categorize most of your examples as tech flops at all, and certainly they wouldn't be among anyone's list of the Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever, IMNSHO.

For most of the items, I agree; many are qualified successes (very qualified in some cases), or hype more than product flops, which would include the .COM bubble; I think there are too many successful .COMs to call that a flop.

But binaryDigit is spot on with his last three:

Windows version Lotus 1-2-3, it's failure helped to change the landscape of application isv's and helped to firmly root Office as defacto.

I would go further and say the failure of all the competitors of Office to deliver timely or sufficiently bug free Windows versions of their products. One of Microsoft's "secrets of success" is that they consistently write software that basicly works (stop laughing, now! :-).

(By that I mean it didn't GP fault so quickly you couldn't even run a demo. Or in the case of Word Perfect, which had an amazing lock on the market, delivering a version that was totally obnoxious to use (e.g. the pictures dropping to the bottom of the document). I had a loyal WP friend at the time who gave up in disgust.)

Apple Lisa/III. Nuff said.

Not the Lisa, if for no other reason than it translated into lessons learned the hard way for the Mac. The Apple III, on the other hand, was critical . Thanks to VisiCalc, Apple had gained a degree of respectability with businesses, which they could have in theory build upon with a credible serious business machine.

Thank goodness we were spared the horrors of memory bank switching (something that crippled the Xerox Alto), but Apple's abject failure to execute (right down to sockets that were so cheap chips were frequently rattling loose in the case upon arrival at the dealer) gave IBM a free shot at capturing the next generation PC market ... and the rest is history. (The critical historical strategic failure for Apple has always been to target profit margin before quantity in an area where network effects are overwhelming.)

PCJr, NOTHING compared to PS/2, the system that helped IBM lose the PC market.

The PCJr. was a credibility flop, although there's a strong argument that using off the shelf components was the fatal flaw for IBM, since it removed the IBM mystique. However, I don't single out the PCjr since except for the AT all of IBM's follow ons to the original PC were flops (as I remember, none of them were even "PC compatible"!).

I'm not sure I'd count the PS/2; it was a flop as an attempt to recapture control of the PC market, but I'd argue that the failure to counter or preempt the Compaq 386 cemented IBM's loss of control. (It was said that IBM had promised its customers that the AT was the last PC they'd have to buy for a long time ... that was a/the critical mistake in what turned out to be their end game.)

Re:The Pen Computer

[Troed]

My Sony Ericsson P800 cellphone is also a handheld computer, and is in one way controlled with a pen that reads my handwriting.

Sure, not exactly the same thing - but the tech is.

Re:MMmmmmm

[Cat_Byte]

Have you bought any of this new "free trade" Chinese stuff? I've blown fuses in my truck from cigarette-lighter adapters proudly wearing the "Made in China" stickers when they fell apart & shorted it out. Take it back & exchange/repeat. It's hard to get those things out when they're glowing red hot. They even had some special on the news a few weeks ago showing the extension cords bearing the stickers saying they were approved by American safety organizations were forged and they were nowhere near the correct gauge to handle the load.

flop vs. crap?

[Xtifr]

Shit, OS/2 ain't even on the list.

OS/2 may have been a failure in the home/desktop market, but it was a pretty big success in the business/embedded market. It's use in bank ATMs alone may well qualify it as the 2nd most successful OS to date.

How about Taligent?

Better, although it might be disqualified on a technicality: does something have to exist before you can really call it a flop? :)

What about the Disney Sound Doohicky

I dunno, never heard of it. Are you sure it isn't just ordinary crap? To be a flop, there has to be an expectation of success, and to be a huge flop, there has to be an expectation of huge success. So things can be amazingly crappy without ever being a flop. In fact, when it comes to high-tech, crap is almost the rule, rather than the exception. And everyone knows this, which is why expectations are usually low, which in turn is why huge flops are kinda rare, despite all the utter crap that's out there. :)

Re:Mistake on Clik! Drive

[Nogami_Saeko]

You don't work in a school :P

After years of ZIP-drive angst (disks failing, becoming corrupted, loosing student work), we're finally getting rid of the damn things and migrating everyone to solid-state USB keychain drives. Far faster and reliable. Long past-due.

So far, the USB drives have worked flawlessly. No moving parts, magnets and dust don't harm them, etc.

N.

Tech Flops or Pioneers?

[bpiltz]

Perhaps this article is looking at the wrong side of the coin and taking a pestimistic view of innovation and discovery. How many "idiots" failed at flight before the Wright brothers finally did it? Was their forerunners' effort for naught? Even today we might consider the Wright Flyer a flop - good pilots can barely get the thing to fly and nobody rushed to purchase and deploy their model. They didn't serve a meal and a movie onboard, and failed to fly to the next airport! That's primitive and useless by our modern standards. Judging old technology through our modern lens is a folly that fails to recognize the significance of the technology for its day.

I could go on with early attempts to cirumnavigate the globe, invent the lightbulb, etc. Many failures and cosmic wastes of money prevailed before a breakthrough occured. The buckets of gold handed to you by the Queen to go try something aren't as forthcoming. You have to support yourself with a capitalistic business model. The marketing of the tech product that isn't quite there is an effort (sometimes shady)to recoup R&D money. If you're lucky you get a few spin-offs along the way to pay your bills. If your're not, your business dies and leaves behind a product that "failed". Inevitably another business scoops up the pieces and finishes the job when there is enough money or advancement has solved the technical hurdles.

What matters, is the idea and the useful knowledge that comes from failing. Today's failure might just be the one useful piece of knowledge that makes tomorrow's success fall into place. In his list I see the forerunners and failures that have made Tablet PC, PDA, current GUI interfaces, DVD, etc. possible. So what if the previous business model and marketing attempts sucked. I am glad for my technophile little self that someone tried to make it happen, so I could enjoy their eventual fruits. Innovation is rarely a function of market penetration and stock price. This guy's column is suitable for the MBA crowd, not the tech crowd.

Re:Lame

[east coast]

"And some stuff which seems/should be doomed:

Tablet PCs"

Not to belittle you but you must be crazy. Tablet PCs are going to become a sweet market in time. Let's face facts, a "good" PDA costs nearly half the price of a table PC. Now ask yourself; For what? 128megs and adobe reader? No thanks. I'll pay out my dollars and get something that has a reasonable processor, a hard drive and is fully windows compatable.

I know the idea that cell phones replacing PDAs has got some coverage but I just don't see this happening. It's less than a PDA in every aspect. With future technology? Perhaps cell phones will take a good share of the portable market but tablet PCs can do it today.

The difference between a flop and a success

[salesgeek]

Most of the flops being discussed were not flops in the sense of being a bad idea that died a bad death.

Here's my top 5 list:

* Attempts at making the IBM compatible PC proprietary. Everyone who has tried has failed, including IBM!

* Copy Protection. From the damaged sector floppies of the 80s to dongles, to encryption schemes to future DRM. All of it has been an abject failure. Anyone remember Copy IIpc?

* Proprietary removable media formats with the exception of iomega.

* Razor blade business model for technology with less than a two year lifespan.

* Proprietary networking technologies. They work for a year then die. Proprietary means only one company makes it. Thomas-Conrad comes to mind.

Re:bigger flops still...

[owlstead]

Parent should be marked as troll.

I wanted to make a statement about MSX, which you could hardly call a flop, but then I took a better look at the rest of the list.

It seems a more or less random list without any real argumentation about why the product was such a flop. If you count CD-R as a WORM drive by the way, then this might be the most popular technology so far.

This is more like a list of products that the author dislikes than anything else.

PC Jr.

[Type-R]

IBM never recovered from the Junior.

Wow... I wish I could NOT recover like IBM has! :)

Re:Mistake on Clik! Drive

[willtsmith]

I think that Iomega in general was a curse to the computer industry. They single handedly DESTROYED removable platter storage by preventing the logical upgrade of floppies into higher capacities.

It's still a huge shame that the Imation Super-Floppy didn't catch on.

Lisa was a huge flop?

[porkchop_d_clown]

Yeah, Lisa was a flop - but Lisa built the foundation for the Mac.

As for Newton - how was that a flop? It still has fanatical fans.

IBM PCjr

[yeremein]

The Junior was my first experience with IBM-compatible computing. I had the Extended BASIC cartridge and had a lot of fun programming the Junior's 16-color graphics (vs. the PC's 4-color CGA) and four-note polyphonic sound (vs. the PC's beeper). I was just ten years old at the time and couldn't care less that they were a dismal flop financially--it was a neat little computer in its day.

The chiclet keyboard was a bad idea, but it had a purpose: You could insert overlays showing which key does what for a particular application. Even in its day, though, IBM got enough flak about the chiclet board that they sent all PCjr owners a more normal keyboard free of charge.

I don't think the sidecar alone was the reason for its demise (although not being able to use standard ISA cards certainly contributed to it). The main problem was that it just wasn't compatible enough with the PC, lacking "business" features such as DMA and hard-disk support. And it had a name that was hard to take seriously.

Segway recall

[JustMichael007]

I thought it was so funny when they finally figured out that Segways would flop over when they had little or no power. Anybody with half a brain would have realized that power to the electronics and motors keeps it upright and without power it would fall over. In my opinion, the single speed Segway is not a good idea. Now if it had variable speed you could go with the crowd without mowing everyone over. The price would also have to come down drastically for it to really be a "big hit".

Re:Mistake on Clik! Drive

[damiam]

2500GB is 187 hours at full DV-quality, or 711 hours at DVD-quality 8Mbps MPEG-2. 4 straight weeks of high-quality video is quite a bit more than a "good start".