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?
uhh....#166 i would hardly consider the idea of guns/weapons a flop. however, remote deer hunting online with real guns, BIGTIME flop.
bleeding heart anyone?
Some of you are stretching the definition of "gadget".
Airplanes, ships, and space based lasers ARE NOT "gadgets".
The internet, because Al Gore invented it and he is a wanker.
As long as we're doing ships and planes...
THE SCHILOVSKI GYROCAR
http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/gyrocars/schilovs.htm
"The small size of the engine in the photograph (in an era when specific outputs were low) indicates that the Gyrocar was distinctly underpowered. The weight of the vehicle was 2.75 tons, concentrated on two wheels- not promising for the heavy mud of the Eastern Front. It has also been said that it suffered from a very large turning circle- again not a good thing in a proposed military vehicle."
"The car made experimental runs in London in the summer of 1914. But as the eccentricity of the gyroscope was only sufficient for a smooth curve in the direction of spin of the gyroscope, no rounding of sharp curves was possible to the left. This was the only, but very objectionable, defect, and it prevented the development of the system; no remedy was found at that time to enable the car to negotiate sharp curves, either to left or to right with equal ease."
14 yers of development, it doesn't work and then their best answer is to literally bury it. In the ground...This one gets MY vote...
Uhhh mine, last night.
PSX? Missing so many features that Sony had promised in time to get it out ready for xmas that the gadget loving Japanese wouldn't touch it.
Or maybe it was just ahead of it's time...
ERrrr... Check out the previous article "Hello Kitty Brother P-Touch".
Divx by far. It was so bad there were websites erected to usher in its (not fast enough) demise. So bad that CC had to flat out lie about its "features" and even make sure that the real DVD players were haphazardly displayed in the back of the store to make them look less desireable.
They even went so far as to announc3e that in the "unlikely event" that Divx would ever cease operations, that any gold & silver discs (discs which people have paid a full price for unlimited playability - so they'r ejust like regular DVDs) would remain playable forever. Of course, six months after they went kaput, those discs also became useless, except as coasters, or collectors items for those who collect memorabilia of very bad ideas.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I will also never buy anything from Circuit City because of this. This greed attempt at milking cunsumers out of more than their share of money was not only an insult to everyone, but it also caused a lot of confusion about what DVD was, leading many to see Divx and DVD as competing formats, and CC lies, did nothing to clarify that. One store was quoted as saying that George Lucas will only release the Star Wars trilogy on Divx. How I wish some of those anti-Divx sites were still around with their undercover reports. Those revealed some CC lies that even politicians would be envious of.
He Who Guesses Minidiscs Would Be A Distant Runner Up.
eMarker. what a disaster....
I second (or third, whatever) the CueCat.
Also, what about the oldies but goodies? Like the Newton, for example.
Xerox Star has to be on any list that includes computers. They had desktop, ethernet, laserprinters and email in an almost affordable $10,000 package in 1974 but never brought it to market. Spent millions developing the future of computing and only sold a few devices in the early 1980's. Great book called "Fumbling the future" about this if your interested.
Pipin (apples console game machine, circa 1996)
if your going to include things like titanic and such, then you gotta include the civil war submarine called the "Hunley". Killed three full crews before sinking a final time...
Charles Babbage's Difference engine, for sure!
Portable? NO (2.5 tons)
Expensive? YES (approx 398,010 british pounds, in 2005 currency)
Working parts? >4000
Clock speed? << 1HZ, depending on operator
The Nex iiE by Frontier labs is horrible. It was recommended by a friend, and looked really cool seeing as it could play from those teeny HD's and CF, but it stopped working after a day, and the only way to RMA it was send it to china. Meaning that you sent a $110 player to China, which costs $90 to Fedex over there. I was (and still am) very angry at that waste of money.
Winows XP N, wtf, how did microsoft expect to sell that shiznit.
Just to comment, the Apple Newton only flopped because it was ahead of it's time. Everyone has been led to believe that if a PDA doesn't fit in your pocket that it's too big. That since it's easier to read someone else's opinion of a device and just agree with it because it makes you seem trendy (especially the backward looking folks who can always say about flops, that "they saw it coming . . . "), when that just isn't true. The Apple Newton was ahead of it's time and it was crazy expensive (but what wasn't at that time that was deemed a computer) and that's why it was a flop. Not because of it's handwriting recognition (unlike everyone who comments about it after watching The Simpsons, or even worse; Doonesbury).
The biggest flop I can think of; the Macintosh computer. Think about it, the company makes no money until they refocus their business on Music. They had it all, and now they have about 3% of it all.
Um, hellllo, it's spelled :CueCat. Respect the colon. Wait, that came out wrong. Anyway, I second Divx (still won't go to CC) and the Apple Pippin (worse than WebTV!).
Only the 20-somethings will probably get this one, but do you remember that pen that Bill Cosby used on Picture Pages - the one that made the cool sound? Well I talked my parents into ordering it for me when I was like 6, and when it showed up in the mail, I had a pre-pubescent orgasm.
Anyways, I pull the thing out, put batteries in, and gleefully start drawing, only to realize that it sounds nothing like Cosby's pen. I was heartbroken and felt very deceived.
http://www.clinko.com/clinkodiscussion.asp?dnum=87000
My favorite albatross was the Sony MagicLink. I got one and a friend got one, and then we got tired of sending eachother drawings... and then the memory wiped out a couple of times, and then I returned that puppy. So did my friend. For a week, we felt futuristic, but that thing just blew.
Another one I forgot about, what about anything made by NeXt? spent millions developing a machine ahead of its time, sell a few 100 and end up heading back to the former employer and develop the whole thing over again and call it "Mac" :D
Microsoft/Tandy's VIS system was a multimedia system, that soon flopped after launch, unable to compete with CD-i and 3DO. CD-i lasted longer than the 3 other multimedia consoles of its time: 3DO, VIS and CDTV.
CD-i was meant to be a multimedia standard in which the CPU did not have to be upgraded (like cd audio players). However this meant obsolescence for any game console aspirations. A bit before it's time in many respects CD-i pioneered the first MPEG movies, Photo CD and a Internet web browser on a TV. Sony and Matsushita were also involved with CD-i, but the original difficulty with hardware encoding of MPEG lost the interest of Japanese/Korean manufacturers, though they did make players for the professional training CD-i market. The MPEG work on CD-i was a major stepping stone to the later DVD standard. Even the Photo CD format, helped to allow consumers to write data on CDs for the first time (when they had film developed) - content publishers were very anti any technology to write on CDs.
Microsoft/Tandy's VIS was meant to make it easier to port multimedia from a PC to a console, but all the content for it had appeared months earlier on the PC. At least it provided some lessons for Xbox and was a forerunner of Windows CE.
People need to stop mentioning star wars.
I vaguely remember something put out by sony. It was a playstation, but it was black, and you were supposed to be able to make your own games on it.
Does anyone else remember that?
So many flops. . . so little space. I'm surprised nobody's mentioned "thin clients" yet.
No, that doesn't refer to people in the "after" picture for the latest diet craze. The idea was that we didn't need actual computers. We'd all have these reduced function--hence "thin"--terminals that got everything we needed from powerful central servers (probably in Redmond). Want to send a message to mom? Log onto some supercomputer (and pay for it by the word, no doubt, although they didn't talk about that part much), and when it suits the network, it sends the result to your printer.
There was so little interest, for obvious reasons, I'm not sure any emaciated clients were ever actually sold, so maybe it doesn't count as a flop by the rigorous definitions used here.
Divx, for god's sake they named a codec for pirating movies after it (among other uses) that became infinitely more popular than it.
Also, a flop is not supposed to be something that was successful.
If it's a bad product, but it was successful, it's not a flop.
Biggest Flop:
Netpliances "i-opener" The company sold these $200 lcd screen computers at a large loss in hopes of getting you to sign a 1yr agreement for their proprietary services. It took about 1 week for the hacks to be posted all over the net. Creating huge demand for these $200 computers, but not the services plans. Eventually destroying the product and the company.
Biggest Customer Screw-Over:
How about Sharper Images' Ionic Breeze. Costs $300-400. Frontlined their catologues for nearly 6 years. Created a whole industry around them. Turns out not only do they not help they actually hurt you. No refunds later, the company still makes money selling these things.
Sony's mp3 network walkman, hd1, does play mp3's directly, ya n00bs. They upgraded it, via firmware and boy does it work better than ipod. Yes you're all ipod drones-
Also, a flop is not supposed to be something that was successful.
If it's a bad product, but it was successful, it's not a flop.
First off I think the actual prompt for this disscussion was intended to incite us to think creatively. A "broad" definition of gadget could include SDI.
And the implementation of SDI Reagan was hoping for was a complete piece of crap. There's a reason why people call it Star Wars. Regardless of what you think of his presidency (I personally think he was a piece of crap), SDI was a pretty far out (read retarded) idea (the implementation, not the concept). Today's SDI is based on better technology, but is still pretty inaccurate/expensive (read not worth it).
I think Betamax and Zip disks can't really count as flops, since they lasted for years, were widely used, and spawned third-party companies. (Mind you, someone who bought one of the *last* Beta VCRs could be pardoned for thinking it was a flop. My dad, say.)
Ricochet wasn't a flop until they overspent building out the network and upgrading the speed (to 128kbps, at a time when DSL was taking off).
SDI did not kill the USSR; the USSR was already doomed, and Gorbachev knew it when he came to power.
My vote goes for the Foonly: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/Foonly.html They should've been an ideal startup: well-defined goal (build a faster PDP-10), pre-existing market (the PDP-10 was popular), technically feasible (they did get one built). But they spent so much building that first one that they couldn't keep going, and had to pull the plug.
The Momenta pen computer.
No backlighting, tethered pen, 7 lbs, 386SX, circa 1991, $4,995.
From BusinessWeek, "The startup burned through $40 million in financing before it went out of business."
http://img.cmpnet.com/byte/art/9611/img/116bl1a1.gif
I have never seen this many responses before. Is this a record?
Thin clients weren't a flop; people competed to sell them for over a decade that I know of (e.g., NCD and Neoware). Now, the utility model (hook up your thin client to somebody else's server) never took off, and rightly so, but that's another matter. Thin clients are for enterprise use. They actually work pretty well in an environment where you have centralized IT and your users' desktops are pretty uniform. They can be great for K-12, where you (a) can't trust the users and (b) can't afford to have people fixing hard drives all the time.
Two quick choices for me:
First choice is the NEC TurboExpress (with optional TV tuner)- this gadget ate batteries like Kobayashi eats hot dogs on the 4th of July. You couldn't get through 3 levels of Bonk's Adventure without the damn thing crapping out on you. Nice marketing move by NEC in preventing the use of rechargeable batteries. I still have mine with at least a dozen games and the tv tuner.
Second choice, Atari Lynx. Nice and Portable, that is if you didn't mind carrying around a brick.
IMO all "gadget flops" considered here should be devices that, when introduced, were technologically superior to any similar devices in their respective class, however, due to marketing (or lack thereof), pricing, or simple failure of consumer acceptance, said devices failed to generate the revenue expected by their manufactures, causing them to pull any remnants of the project altogether.
::Phew::
That being said, while I love seeing the Nintendo's Virual Boy, Moto's Iridium, DivX, Apple Newton, Betamax (classic!), I still think the following takes the cake:
Mars Climate Orbiter (12-11-98 -- 09-23-99)
Granted this doesn't follow my own rules, nor would I classify a multi-million (billion?) dollar space-bound device a "gadget", but when a confusion of metric and imperial units between different collaborating NASA teams causes this behemoth to crash on Mars surface, I'd probably *would* classify it as a 'flop'.
The riding roller coasters in the old Coney Island. These were roller coasters that have, instead of cars that strapped riders tightly in, wooden riding horses like a merry-go-around. Riders would need to grab ahold of the death traps with their own force, and hope the g-forces amassed by a running roller coaster is not enough to overcome their grasp as drop from stomache-quenching heights and pass through banked curves.
A couple of things are coming to mind...
- The 'zealots' [newton|Segway|OS/2|etc] have little concept of what a flop is. Most of these products aren't so much flops as casualties in commercialism.
-The Dot Com Era [Dog food by Internet | The Dow will Never slow down | You're nothing if you don't have an Internet presence] was an aggregation of flops the likes of which three generations have ever seen. Defined the the term 'burn rate'.
-The eggstractor. Family bought two (I was dumbfounded), never successfully shelled a single egg.
-Logitech 3-d mouse, circa 1995. A platform with a hand 'puck' that could slide in a 1 inch square area, pitch, yaw, and roll. It was Carpal Tunnel in a box.
Is a PC a gadget?
Then how about the Packard Bell PC. (all of them)
Making a PC out of 'used' parts. Using 'misleading' marketing practices. R&D disasters over and over. Bad fans. Bad capaciters. Horrible customer service.
A gadget that once had an appx 30-40% share in a huge market went belly up two years later and became a poster child for what not to do in the PC industry.
It's got to be the Head Mouse. I saw it at Comdex many years ago. You strapped this plastic gyro headband around your melon and nodded up and down or left and right to move your mouse. This thing wasn't designed for the handicapped. That might have made sense. It was supposed to be a mouse replacement. I just about showered the demo girl with Coke when she straight face told me that it was more ergonomic than using a hand-held mouse. I could just picture an office full of Word and Excel jockeys bobbing left, right, up, down. What did you do when you had to page up? Throw your head back like you were having a seizure?
Worst ever.
personal computer
The Nintendo 64 "dd" I think it was. Such a shame that it never made it to Australia.
Um,
Betamax
8-Track
Minidisc
Iomega Zip Drive
Delorean (even though it kicked ass)
Windows Me
Windows NT
Windows 2000
Virtual Boy
Tablet PCs
3DO
Neo-Geo
Neo-Geo Pocket (and Pocket Color)
Atari Lynx
Atari Jaguar
Sega Saturn
Sega Dreamcast
That Super Nintendo Light-Gun
I thought maybe only I remembered DCC, but I guess not. But I still have something to add. You could also add CD-Interactive, Philips' attempt to sell movies and games on CD. It was kind of a parallel to 3D0 and equally stupid.
But you could pretty much list anything Philips did, for a long period, everything they did was a flop, except for the original CD.
I would like to list VideoGuide (later bought by goddamn Gemstar) as a flop that shouldn't have been. It was similar to TiVo, before HD recording became possible (in 1995). You bought a device, paid the fee, entered your zip code and some other info and it received TV listings from pager data. If you wanted to tape a TV show, you selected it from the listings (a week in advance) and it would send IR codes to your VCR to record it when it came on. It was dead simple and great. It didn't have season passes though.
Gemstar bought it to kill it because it competed with their burgeoning VCR+ code BS.
Eirik:
Well, Airbus is behind the curve on their answer to the 787, as they have spent so much money on developing the 380. I also found it interesting that Boeing sent some of their engineers to 'help' Airbus with the A380 project. The 787 is well under way development-wise, while the A350 program is just getting started.
For once and all, SDI was a military research/development program for a defense system ...NOT AN ACTUAL PRODUCT ...thus the name Strategic Defense Initiative ...not Strategic Defense Laser Gun. It never had a final COMMERCIAL product. Going with your insane logic, I could say aids/cancer research to find a cure is a flop because it failed to find a cure.
Yes, SDI had a lot to do with us winning the Cold War. Gorbachev even stated so in his autobiography. They were frighten to death about it. But guess what ...even without a final product, SDI achieved its intended purpose ...end the Cold War.
Windows ME ... made me switch to mac and I'm never going back
The Hydrogen Zeppelin.
The Hindenberg incident pretty much ended the promise of luxury air cruises. Also, the air dock in the Empire State Building was apparently so cripplingly scary that it was only used once, by a single person... so, the Empire State Building might qualify as well.
N-Gage, what were/are they thinking?
Haha!
Who'd a thunk it....
A topic about flops turns out to be a success.
(even if you delete the freaks!)
The list from post 224 is a good starting point, but I'm going to add a few more.
Apple Newton
Apple Quicktake (or whatever their digital cameras were called...good ol' Apple being ahead of it's time)
Mac OS 9 (so horribly buggy...)
Electric cars that had to be recharged from an outlet
WinFS
Sega Dreamcast
Motorola's satellite system which no one uses...
I'm sure I could come up with more...
Is it too early to nominate the Gizmondo?