The Top 21 Tech Flops

PetManimal writes "Whatever happened to Digital Audio Tape? Or Circuit City's DIVX program? Or IBM's PCjr. and the PS/1? Computerworld's list of 21 biggest tech flops is an amusing trip down the memory lane of tech failures. Some are obvious (Apple Newton), while others are obscure (Warner Communications' QUBE). Strangely, Y2K didn't make the list."

Zune

[Toe, The]

Next on the list... Zune.

Why would Y2K make the list?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a REAL problem despite this revisionist attitude that some now have that it was nothing at all. You know why you get to think that? Because a lot of people spent a LOT of time fixing the problem so it wouldn't be a problem. What you see is a sign of success. Sheesh.

What next? The polio vaccine was a flop, too?

Y2K??

[Yakman]

What's Y2K got to do with tech flops? While there's no way to know one way or another, it could well be that nothing major happened precisely because people made effort to remediate and test any issues prior to 1/1/2000.

Re:DAT was a flop?

[Anonymous Coward]

As you mention, it failed in the CONSUMER REALM, but not in the professional realm, where it was, and still is, widely used; it's still the de facto standard recording medium alongside the newer A-DAT.

Sucky article, and even suckier and badly informed author.

Re:DAT was a flop?

[fyoder]

I just bought a DAT deck on ebay. But I probably would not have were it not for the fact that my old DAT deck died and I have material on DAT. I suppose I should have saved it on CD or DVD, but I'm not that confident about the longevity of these mediums. Of course, tape will deteriorate as well. I suppose I should just resign myself to eventual non-existence, both of myself and of the artifacts that mark my being here. Bummer.

What are you archiving to? Is there a system for transfering digital data to vinyl? Short of carving ones and zeroes into stone, that might be the way to go, provided it were cared for properly. But until such time as I have my digital to vinyl transcriber, I think I'll keep my DAT tapes and try to keep a working deck on hand.

DAT, etc.

[ktakki]

DAT might have flopped in the consumer sector (I blame CD for that), but it was the bee's knees for audio professionals, considering that it was the lowest cost and most convenient PCM format at the time. Prior to DAT, digital masters meant using a Sony 1630, PCM audio on a large videocassette. There were digital open-reel solutions, but these never caught on for mixdown and mastering.

As for the rest of this list, it seems to me that a lot of these entries (Newton, PC jr, VR, Qube) were just inadequate hardware/software implementations of valid concepts. Consider the Newton: ahead of its time, it just needed sufficient CPU/RAM/display tech to become the Palm/Blackberry/smartphone that it should have been. The IBM PC jr was unarguably a flop, but the concept of an affordable home PC lives on in the $299 Dell or $399 Mac Mini. VR was a whole lot of hype (and yes, I bought into it, seeing as I was a 3D animator back in the mid-'90s), but now look at WoW or Second Life. And Qube? One word: TiVo. I realize that Qube was meant to be a more interactive product/service, but the web co-opted the e-commerce aspect of the Qube. I think the only interactivity people want from their TV is to watch what they want when they want.

Finally, the paperless office is not dead. It just smells funny. I worked with a number of law firms and mortgage companies who are carrying decades of paperwork around, and are either using solutions that allow them to scan/index/search/retrieve these documents or are looking for one. It's a really big deal in the real estate industry considering that each mortgage closing generates a package that can be a couple of hundred pages. Multiply that by a typical mortgage company's 2,000 to 10,000 closings a year and consider that these documents need to be retained for as long as thirty years.

k.

Re:DAT was a flop?

[emjoi_gently]

All over the world, DAT tapes are being inserted into servers for the nightly backup....
Yeah, but it didn't succeed as a consumer audio product. Good idea, but never caught on.

Newtons... great devices, a bit ahead of their time. But towards the end of their life, they were starting to get the needed power to be useful. Another generation, and Apple would have gotten there.

Lisa? Great concept machine. Totally amazed me when I first saw one. But cost too much to sell many. Evolved into a Macintosh.

OS/2 2.0? A brilliant OS for it's time. It gained a good deal of support. Just not quite enough to survive against the MS beast.

Dreamcast?

None of these products were "bad". They were all quite innovative and gained fans, but they just didn't quite crack the economic threshold.

QueCat

[zoomshorts]

Quecat - major bomb. Shitty scanner too.

Re:Why would Y2K make the list?

[Typoboy]

How much was spent? US$8.6 billion by the US Federal Gov't [gcn.com] and a lot more elsewhere. An 'industry' that big is hardly a flop. I think the problem is that people want drama, they want something sensational. Potentially Bad Problem Gets Fixed gets old quickly.

DAT

[HairyCanary]

They give a few reasons why they think DAT failed, but it seems to me that there is a big obvious one right in front that was overlooked -- sequential access. I think CD's were immediately attractive only partly because they were digital. The killer feature was random access.

Print Version

[BlueCollarCamel]

How hard is it to link the the single page print version...
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9012345 [computerworld.com]
AC to avoid the whoring of karma.

Re:Speech recognition

[GaryPatterson]

I always like the way some people think of speech recognition as a Good Thing(tm).

Imagine using a computer in a quiet office with a speech recognition. Sounds good, doesn't it? That's the environment of the executive, where it might make sense.

Now imagine your work environment. I'm in an open-plan office here, and I can clearly hear the many people around me, even quite far away. Imagine if they were all talking to their computers!

Yup. Bedlam. Shouting. Not the office of the future, but like a stockmarket of the past.

Bill Gates has no vision. He's never had vision. He has business acumen, but never any vision.

Re:Dreamcast was not a flop

[Simon Garlick]

In terms of "hours played", my Dreamcast is the clear winner in my household console collection. Even today, Soul Calibur is the pinnacle of the 3d fighting-game genre.

Re:Why would Y2K make the list?

[ari_j]

That's not why I complained about the idiotic Y2K bit in the blurb. A flop is a product that is so badly timed, badly designed, badly received, or badly something else that it fails. Y2K isn't a product. It's that simple. The polio vaccine could be a flop (such as if the polio virus were already extinct by the time it was marketed). But y2k can't be a flop any more than "off by one errors" can be. Or maybe I'm wrong. How much did you guys pay to buy your y2ks?

Re:Absolute Rubbish

[bill_mcgonigle]

I could go on and on and on, but I have to head out the door.

They just want to make fun of some things they didn't have a use for. They even do a really bad job at it:

NeXT: If it's possible for a failure to be a huge success, this is it.

So, NeXT was so good it took over Apple and now has the second most popular desktop OS on the planet. And it's a huge success. No, wait it's a failure. No .. a flop. But it's not, it's a success.

This article is a flop.

Tablet PCs

[Timbotronic]

"within five years it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America" - Bill Gates 2001

Re:Segway

[QuantumG]

Segways launched at $10,000 a pop. $1,000 would have made them affordable.

Please, try not to be so rude.

Y2K was not a FLOP!!!

[nuckfuts]

I am soooooo fucking tired of hearing people say that Y2K was a "flop" of some kind. Ya, the world didn't grind to a halt, but that's NOT because there wasn't a HUGE NUMBER of VERY SERIOUS PROBLEMS. It's because a HUGE NUMBER OF MAN-HOURS WERE SPENT making sure the problems were fixed on time.

I personally tested systems that simply FUCKING BARFED when the date rolled over. Entire systems. Important systems. In some cases they actually had to be REPLACED because it wasn't possible to fix the problems.

So don't ridicule the hype that preceeded Y2K. Without the hype many PHB's would not have approved funding for the testing, fixing and replacements that ensured your sorry ass didn't get stuck in an elevator or a traffic jam or whatever.

Re:Why would Y2K make the list?

[FrenchSilk]

A lot more than $8B was spent fixing the Y2K mess. Estimates run as high as $1.5 trillion worldwide. It was an enormous problem and the fact that the dire predictions never materialized is a testament to the people who alerted the world to the seriousness of the problem and to the thousands of IT personnel who labored for years to fix the bug and to prevent the worst from becoming reality. Y2K was not a flop by any stretch of the imagination. It was an overwhelming success story.

Re:Absolute Rubbish

[N7DR]

Push technology? The article fails to mention that while Desktop channels were obtrusive and filled with advertiser content, this concept is very successful today. RSS feeds, AJAX technology and the like are very much staples of today's web

Just a correction to one of your points: RSS is not push; it's pull. I'm not certain about AJAX, either, but I am sure about RSS.

Iridium not dead and won't be

[Eil]

Although Iridium failed commercially, it's not quite fair to call it a flop. The military makes extensive use of Iridium phones. Sea-faring vessels, aircrew, ground forces, you name it. In many cases, Iridium phones are replacing medium- and long-range radio communications altogether. I've no idea what the phones or service cost. But for what civilian companies usually charge the government for well, anything, I'm sure it's more than enough to keep Iridium afloat for a good long time.

Also the external Iridium antennas look like dildos.

What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

This has to be one of the most poorly concieved lists I've ever seen. Most of the tech listed actually /revolutionised/ the PC world as we know it! OS/2 was HUGE in it's day! Hardly a flop! And alot of major financial institutions still rely on it. Hell, your nearest ATM probably still uses it! And I have plenty of customers using windows mobile who keep saying 'Boy I wish this was a Newton, those things just worked! This windows mobile is CRAP!'. And the dreamcast? How was it a flop? Because it didn't sell quite as many units as the psx did? I know heaps of people with dreamcasts and they're still using them. This list should be renamed 'The Top 21 Techs that revolutionised your world but your mum and dad don't talk about at the dinner table' because thats the general feeling I'm getting from reading this list. Clearly written by someone who either was not present for the tech's hayday (os/2, newton) or is simply discounting the tech because it's not visible in mainstream media. Tell paypal that internet currency is a flop. Tell your bank that OS/2 never took off. Tell your counterstrike and WoW addicted children that virtual reality fizzled out and died. Tell all your pissed off blackberry and windows mobile clients that the newton is how a pda should /not/ be done. This list is entirely baseless and inaccurate.

Re:Absolute Rubbish

[Niten]

Just a correction to one of your points: RSS is not push; it's pull.

I just stopped in here to make that point (RSS was branded as "push" in TFA as well), but it's good to see that somebody beat me to it. Anybody who has to pay the bandwidth for a popular Atom or RSS feed can tell you that RSS is most definitely a "pull" protocol.

Like RSS, AJAX is really just another application of Good Old HTTP. AJAXish web sites can indeed yield more efficient bandwidth utilization than traditional designs, but from the network's perspective, AJAX is a "pull" protocol as well. (*Not that I am implying AJAX to actually be a protocol, or anything at all more than an overly-hyped term referring to an amorphous set of web design techniques, but I digress...)

Re:DRM Killed DAT

[Short Circuit]

I think he's referring to latency in the USB transmission medium, especially if one uses a hub.

Virtual Reality...

[zentinal]

...didn't flop. It was repurposed and renamed MMORPG. The huge revelation was that people (today, at least) don't want to work in virtual spaces, they want to play in them. As far as tomorrow goes, who knows?

So, instead of Gibson's cyberspace, we have WoW, Second Life, Lord of the Rings Online, etc, etc, etc.

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

My memory must be faulty.

DAT
I distinctly remember that the problem with home DAT was that the music industry dictated a rediculously low sampling rate (22khz, 1/2 CD IIRC) that made digital tape sound worse than cassette. And cassette's problem wasn't that it sounded bad, but that it needed rediculously expensive equipment to sound good.

DIVX
IIRC (and I must not as my memory doesn't match the writer's memory) the DIVX DVDs cost seven to ten bucks, while a DVD rental was/is two or three. Plus they sold them as your buying something, and it seemed stupid to "buy" a movie that you could only watch for 2 days that cost three times what a rental was.

Dot bombs
No, it is NOT hard not to "not see them as one entity". That's just stupid. "Dot bombs" aren't "a" tech failure, they were multiple BUSINESS failures.

E Books
"...are still being developed." Perhaps reports of their death are, to misquote Clemons, "greatly exagerated?" It's a little early to judge these dead; if someone does them right they could work. DRM isn't the way, though.

Microsoft Bob ...and Clippy, and the stupid search dog... will Microsoft fucking GROW UP already?

The paperless office
The Christian Science Monitor is wrong. They were talking about it in the middle 1980s, it was coming "any day now", much like pot legalization a decade earlier.

Smart appliances
The article and the press at the time always gave the internet fridge (which was a tech failure) as THE example, but I have plenty of "smart" gadgets. My TV shuts itself off after a preset time I tell it; my thermostat warms the house before I get up; my car "knows" when to turn on the headlights and locks the doors when you go faster than 15mph; there are vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers that run themselves! The list of "smart" gadgets that AREN'T flops is endless and getting longer. But the "smart refrigerator" is and was a stupid idea.

Virtual reality
"Or maybe virtual reality worlds were less real and compelling than our own imaginations" Two words: second life. Two more: Sim City. Need a few more pairs?

Speech recognition
I can dial my daughter on my Razr by saying her name, and there are voicemail syetems that use it. Speech recognition didn't flop, electronic dictation did.

TFA's author seems to be a big tech failure IYAM. And the biggest tech failure of all? The "Star Wars" missle defense system, billion$ poured down a rat hole.

-mcgrew

Re:DRM Killed DAT

[Gr8Apes]

You obviously haven't used Firewire. I have both USB2.0 and Firewire 400/800 drives. Firewire is now my preferred connection format, at least until eSata becomes ubiquitous, although even in that case FW may have its advantages.

USB is another dead-end connection specification that doesn't even work reliably. They really should just go with ethernet connected devices. Easy and simplifies your entire cabling structure to a single cable type plus it allows for wireless connectivity.