Worst gadget flops of all time?
By Peter Rojas 
posted July 6th 2005 4:25PM
posted July 6th 2005 4:25PM
Alright, punks, it's time to dig deep and spit out your nominations for the worst gadget flops of all time (and we promise we're not just doing this because it's been a slow news week, either). We're defining "worst" and "gadget" and "flop" pretty broadly, so all we're asking is that if you nominate something you include a couple of sentences explaining why your choice is especially worthy of disdain. We'll take the best entries and put 'em together as a feature next week, cool?
Biggest flooppeeroo must be electronic money, e-purse, micro payments, e-coins etc. Every Tech/Bank company tried them, hyped them and failed. Hundreds of millions of dollars went into a concept that never took off.
and
C type Battery powered bike front lights.
DVD RAM Did we need a third format?
How can anyone call the iPod a flop? That and the iMac basically turned Apple from a 80's in-joke with Atari and Colecovision and made them a major player again? Frankly, I'm staggered at the opinion that anyone could call iPod a flop.
Whether you like them or not, they have joined things like Hoovers, Walkman, Playstations and such in being massive pop culture things, even though there are better products in the same class from rival companies.
Also, living in Europe, i also disagree with MiniDisc bieng nominated, I had a mini disc player in '97 and it was pretty damn good. Copying was a pain, but my friend who had an optical cable could do it pretty damn quick and keep the tags too.
My vote for the biggest gadget flop has got to be the Amstrad Emailer(iirc), the Sinclair C2, Nokia pushing the N-Gage because they didnt believe people wanted clam shell phones. (ouch)
Sega Game Gear. I had one in High School. Good idea, but 0 3rd party support. Light years ahead of the GB.
Sega Dreamcast. OK the Saturn might have been almost as bad sales-wise, but the Dreamcast suffered so many VERY public humiliations it became a running joke:
a) No games. At all. The best one was TOY COMMANDER for crying out loud
b) Repeatedly failing to sell even half as well as the 4-year old Playstation
c) The Quake 3 servers being hacked and all those gamepad-using DC owners getting mauled by mouse-wielding PC players. FUNNY AS F**K.
Laserdisc, totally craptastic, massive discs AND YOU HAD TO FLIP THE FREAKING THING OVER!
Laserdisc, totally craptastic, massive discs AND YOU HAD TO FLIP THE FREAKING THING OVER!
Mentioned before: Polavision - a very unfortunate product launch
Sony Elcaset - a larger format audio cassette (faster tape speed and wider tape). Technically a step forward but not seen since the very late 1970s - rapidly overtaken by DAT and audio CD
There was a gadget produced a few years ago - a digital back to retrofit 35mm cameras that appeared not to have had any measure of success. Leica are also trying it but not a great success either, as far as I can determine
Another even further back were some of the competing TV systems that the BBC trialled in the 1920s/30s. I believe (I hope to be confirmed corrected on this) that one system required the scene to be shot on film stock which was developed, fixed, and washed in real time through a process unit below the movie camera and then run past an early video sensor to produce the analogue video signal - apparently the only way to get enough light to the video sensor. It did not succeed.
Another couple of thoughts - disposable underwear called Chukka - made out of paper. A very 1960s notion
A Revox (I think) turntable with a self lifting stylus to protect the vinyl when the player was knocked
Quad sound definitely! I went to HI Fi exhibition in 1972 and there were at least a dozen different designs/systems
Electrostatic headphones! Where are they now?
My votes for worthy flops go to:
- Philips DCC
- Philips CD-I
- Kodak PhotoCD
- Sony eVilla (and BeOS for Internet Appliances)
- 3Com Audrey
- Cuecat
- Autowraps!
Cool but unfortunate flops:
- Sony NT (high quality audio in postage-stamp size)
- Sony MicroMV (same again, for video)
- Sony eMarker
- Modo
Colour Fax
Sega 32X... What games apart from Chaotix was on that?? O_o And IMO it didn't look that much better than SNES graphics with SuperFX (perhaps a bit smoother during 3D moments).
#324
WTF are you talking about the xbox has MADE MILLIONs Halo and Halo 2 are some of the most popular games of all time and there are still 200,000+ people playing it on live every day!
Sega Mega-CD
BETAMAX
Someone mentioned SDI as generating 'countless spinoffs that drive our economic engine'
PLEASE NAME ONE. The same bogus claims were made of the space program, which was singularly unsuccessful in turning research dollars into societal benefits or new products.
SDI, or 'star wars', was a colossal boondoggle that wasted money, and was used cynically by defense contractors to keep themselves going.
How can anyone claim the iPod as a flop!? Have you not seen the number of them sold and used? If you want to use a mp3 player that floped look no further than the Dataplay, this thing died before it left the factory. It had a good idea behind it but the players were huge when compared to the disc size.
The New Orleans flood levees.
the segway BY FAR
what a P.O.S.
"Probably the "Smartboard"
A lot of school use these but they are completely useless. They are not sensitive enough to work. My school has one in each class and they are brand new and only half of them actually work. Also, they are too delicate to be used around a large amount of people."
LOL, my school has one of these, sure its a cool idea on paper, but its a whiteboard that costs like $10,000. ours works, but i still second this!
The NGage is not pay for play, that idea was droppeed. You buy cartridges (MMC's), put them in and play -- what's wrong with the whole thing is the screen. Good 3D for a slower portable console and the games are not too shabby, but ...
... narrow screens? What game consoles have required you to turn your TV on it's side?
NEC Turbo-Grafx game....
How about the Space Shuttle? Nothing like a multi billion $ falling piece of space junk.
yea and what about "Fizzees"?
The japanese only Sony "PSX"
The only problem with the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast was timing. Both were released way too close to Sony's Playstations 1 and 2. It was a shame that a fantastic console such as the dreamcast (which was in many ways superior to the playstation, despite the fact that i owned a playstation rather than a dreamcast) had to go to waste simply because Sony announced its PS2 just months later. I was really looking forward to the dreamcast though by the time it was released here in australia rumors were already starting to surface about a new Playstation, so consumer confidence dropped and it only took a week or so for the rumors to be confirmed.
As for the biggest flop, both the segway and the sega dreamcast had to get my thumbs up on this one, because a lot of the other suggestions werent actually "big" flops, as such, because they were doomed to failiure before their release.
Both the segway and the dreamcast however (the dreamcast in particular) had the potential to acheive and recieved a lot of media hype, only to have them come crashing down. The only defense for the dreamcast, however, is that they did end up selling around 1,000,000 units so it wasnt really a big flop.. but as for what couldve been.. well lets leave that to your imagination.
I really have to disagree with LaserDisc being mentioned as a flop. In America, LD was flop only because the marketing here for LD made prices for its hardware & software expensive. But in Japan, LD was marketed at a lower price point to ensure immediate adoption by the consumer public, which it did in Japan quite sucessfully (this is why LD was way more popular in Japan than the US). LD in the USA never did really flop, it just became a sleeper/niched product popular among videophiles, home theater enthusiasts, and people with money to burn. LaserDisc provided the best video and sudio quality for any recorded video medium (up until DVD).
Plus, the random access capability of LD made the format a prime choice for some of the first multimedia applications for personal computers, using a LD player controlled by serial port by a computer to playback video clips called for by the software running on said computer (this was in the mid-to-later 80s, before Video for Windows and QuickTime were available).
I also beg to differ on Minidisc being a flop tehcnology, it's still thriving immensely in Japan and other Asian countries, and has a good following here int eh USA as well. I have 2 MD recorders myself, and it's a cheap, good quality (sound and material-wise), durable, and quite versatile format.
The floppiest:
3DO Interactive Multiplayer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DO_Interactive_Multiplayer
I don't know if this topic if still up. I just try. I totally agree the Sony minidisc was a superflop.
Let me tell you this. The most minidisc systems were horribly heavy like a stone, took me hours to record -that is, when your minidisc had the recording function-, recording went via an i/o pc line, recording also left me but no choice to NAME and cut the now become 1-file recording to songs apart, which forced me to listen to the songs recorded once more. What was even worser, was its price. The first sony MD WITH recording cost a massive 400 EUR over here, prices did drop later on but not very much.
What's more, the MD wasn't a little shockproof so it was definitly no improvement over the portable CD player :-/
Plus, the very first mp3 player was already in the shelves in Europe at that time. I had a very early Diamond Rio then.
Thank you very much for paying attention peeps.
And everything SEGA came with. It was just too expensive and nobody ever bought it.
Although they say SEGA consoles were relatively succesful in Europe.. not where I live though.
SEGA had some great arcade machines and unfortunately a very few games were similar to it's arcade counterparts. What I mean by "similar" is that you had shinobi for instance.. while I'm sure it could have been an instant succes hit they came with something called "the revenge of shinobi" which didn't had anything to do with the arcade version at all!! More of this like, cyber police E-swat, moonwalker, shadow dancer etc. It realy hurt when the super nes did have arcade perfect games like streetfighter 2 and SEGA came with horrible, easy and pathetic games made you go bored with after just a very few minutes. 32x, sega cd, saturn, dreamcast etc couldn't just make up this bad mistake.
Laserdiscs certainly weren't flops. They were very successful for a nitch market. With all the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD Hoopla and hype, they will be the same way, for a nitch market. Just talk with the common 'Wal-Mart' croud!
(((Philips DCC: A bad bad bad idea (the badness cannot be overstated). I would'nt trust the exec who OK'd this baby to even pack my groceries. You just know it'll be screwed up.
This product had the single distinction of having absolutly no redeeming features. ))))
I'm surprised that no one had mentioned (until now) that Philips' logic behind the DCC was that not only was it a compact digital tape (alternative to DAT) but it also allowed you to play all your old analog cassettes in the player. At the time I found this intriguing (Hmmm....I don't have to throw away all my old tapes!) but that intrigue was short-lived when I stopped and realized that cassette was a poor format anyway, save for its portability and convenience. With that said, I just kept my cassette deck and continued to purchase CDs used. Personally, I don't see any new format totally replacing CDs. Too much money has been invested in them. (Even people who never bought records and tapes jumped aboard.)