The Top 21 Tech Flops 432
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
If were going to pick on Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Bob really sucked (Score:5, Funny)
Bob was, however by far the most innovative UI MS ever produced. It just innovated in a direction that nobody wanted to go!
Re:Bob really sucked (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, Packard Bell [wikipedia.org] wanted to go there.
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What happened to DAT? (Score:5, Informative)
DRM Killed DAT (Score:4, Interesting)
DAT is dead... good.
Re:DRM Killed DAT (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:DRM Killed DAT (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I have some DAT tapes here that I'm anxious about, as I haven't converted them and me and my pals have all moved on to other tech.
One of DAT's more notorious flaws was its sensitivity to head alignment, so that a tape recorded on one deck wouldn't play on another, sometimes it was sheer voodoo: blood, feathers, dancing cables and hauling decks around.
While the portable Tascams were sweet machines for field recording, they were bulky and $2800 CDN. The next step down in price was $1000 and had no XLR inputs. As far as I'm concerned, we're in an in-between phase: the right replacement for DAT hasn't come along yet, and I just use MiniDV cameras when I need to record in the field. It's a drag, audio should be so much easier than video.
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44.1 16bit PCM->.172MB/s
The problem with USB is jitter, but that's not so much a problem for recording as it is for playback because jitter on the digital signal on its way to the HDD for storage doesn't matter, it's going from storage to DAC's where it's an issue. The solution is to get a firewire [platinum-records.com] or cardbus [platinum-records.com] based solution, they just cost about twice as much, but still way less than a Pro DAT recorder =)
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Digital jitter only happens when your signal is traveling over a embedded clock signal like S/PDIF.
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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.
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The k
Re:DRM Killed DAT (Score:4, Informative)
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I was a bit suprised that DAT made it to the list, as it got quite a lot of use in the pro audio industry.
I thought maybe they were thinking of the Philips Digital Compact Cassette - DCC.
Anyone remember those??
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DAT was a flop? (Score:2, Interesting)
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The article is dead wrong about Philips' involvement. Philips and Matsushita developed the competing DCC [wikipedia.org], which actually played analog cassettes. DAT has based on videotapes.
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Sucky article, and even suckier and badly informed author.
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The ADAT protocol that was introduced on the hardware is still the most convenient (and cost-effective) way to pipe multichannel audio around, and will (has already?) outlast the ADAT recording medium.
DCC has nothing to do with DAT, it was positioned as a competitor for MiniDisc, and lost out basically because you didn't have to rewind MiniDiscs. Fuck all commercial albums were released in either format.
And while I'm at it, SCMS was basically the precursor of HDCP
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But as for being dead - you should drop by a radio station recently - it has become the de facto standard for jingles:
Fast random access, rewritable and replayable without sonic degradation. Fits the bill very neatly.
Re:DAT was a flop? (Score:5, Informative)
It's still the standard way to take music to a mastering house for cutting, and even in the digital domain when people aren't burning data such as
Consider mastering DVD audio with a 48kHz audio sample rate - you can't burn an audio CD at anything except 44.1. And the StellaDAT and some Pioneer decks support 88.2/96k on conventional tapes (use DDS to be sure).
I haven't even started on DDS drives for archival. DATs aren't going away.
P.S. The audio world is waiting for the "killer app" that allows you to stream in an audio DAT faster than real-time. DDS drives read up to 8x, and quite a few drives have audio-capable firmware. Remember when you could first rip a CD faster than it took to play? It seems archaic to pay hundreds an hour for mastering and waste the first hour striping in the album in real time. Perhaps the fact that this hasn't been addressed for a niche market with money to burn indicates that DAT is effectively "unsupported" nowadays..
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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
Re:DAT was a flop? (Score:4, Informative)
Sure is! [vestax.com]. However, I wouldn't bank on a long lifespan from vinyl you cut yourself. There is a lot more to producing quality vinyl than meets the eye. I looked into doing my own 12" releases in the early 90s when I was big on live remixing (I used to fancy myself a dj at one point). The quality is extremely difficult to maintain without extremely expensive equipment (and proper masters). Still, cutting your own records from something that'll fit on your desk is pretty nice, and you can't beat the sound of fresh vinyl through a good stylus!
Re:DAT was a flop? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Newton wasn't ahead of its time (Score:4, Interesting)
What killed the Newton is that Apple misjudged the market: people didn't want a $800 sophisticated PDA. They wanted a $300 crappy PDA. That's what Palm figured out. Apple was moving there too, about to release a small PDA, before it got Steved.
Why would Y2K make the list? (Score:5, Insightful)
What next? The polio vaccine was a flop, too?
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Re:Why would Y2K make the list? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why would Y2K make the list? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why would Y2K make the list? (Score:4, Interesting)
Although we'd updated all the computers to a Y2K-compliant version of the OS (IRIX), on one of the machines the (non-Y2K) SCCS binaries had got there by copying rather than a proper install - so the OS upgrade didn't know they were there, and didn't upgrade them to the Y2K fixed versions.
End result: I edited the corrupted SCCS files to fix them, and called a sysadmin to fix the binaries. Two people called in, some developer time lost - it probably cost about 10 geek-hours in total. I think I might have got a few hundred dollars extra pay as well - I can't remember now.
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For my shame, I worked for such a consultancy (Score:3, Interesting)
Understand that at the time I wasn't long out of school and had zero real-world IT experience.
This consultancy had bought a proprietary software package which went on a floppy and could be operated by a monkey. The idea was you booted the PC from the floppy, the software ch
Y2K?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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year mod 400 == 0 OR (year mod 4 == 0 AND year mod 100 != 0)
Secondly, the first post you replied to mentioned that his code would definitely NOT be in use by 2100, in which case year mod 4 == 0 works just fine.
Y2K (Score:2)
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Re:Not a bug. (Score:5, Interesting)
As it is I'm not aware of any systems that did this.
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Mike: Maybe you shouldn't have poured that washing up liquid into it.
Vyv: But the manual said: "Ensure machine is clean and free of dust before use."
Mike: Yeah, but it didn't say: "Ensure machine is full of washing up liquid."
Vyv: Ah, but it didn't say: "Ensure machine isn't full of washing up liquid."
Dreamcast was not a flop (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Dreamcast was not a flop (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, but that was mainly because they were marked down to nearly free for the last 6 months of its life...
When the PS2 hype was sucking the marrow from Dreamcast, and widespread piracy methods were worked out, they decided to give them away, since they knew no new games were possibly going to appear.
I'm sure that will make Sega's stock holders feel much better about the ridiculous amounts of mon
Lisa was a step, not a bomb (Score:3, Interesting)
The other things on the list are dead-ends. Lisa wasn't profitable, but it also wasn't a dead-end.
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Re:Lisa was a step, not a bomb (Score:5, Informative)
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The mac itself would have died an early death an
Re:Lisa was a step, not a bomb (Score:5, Funny)
Y2k isn't on the list because it was a success! (Score:3, Funny)
Y2k isn't on the list because it was a HUGE success for the consulting firms that flogged it. (That, and it was the COBOL programmer full employment act for a few years.)
COBOL programmer full employment act (Score:3, Interesting)
Y2K? (Score:2)
To clarify (Score:3, Informative)
They're mostly marketing flops, not technical ones (Score:2)
I disagree with Smart Appliances being listed (Score:4, Interesting)
Still the article was a fun read.
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I'd like to think that slowly, companies will be more interested in data
No TI-99/4A? (Score:2)
DAT, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
DAT Tapes in a music store... (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe DAT wasn't a huge worldwide phenomenon, but they certainly aren't a "flop"!
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Also, don't forget backups. Instead of large expensive proprietary tape solutions, a dat drive could fit in a 3.5" drive ba
Want a flop: the DBX 700. (Score:3, Informative)
It was similar to the Sony PCM F1 in function -- basically a box without any moving parts, that took an audio signal at one end, and put out a composite video signal at the other that you recorded using a VCR. But rather than using PCM recording, it used a system that's a lot more like S
I had a PCjr (Score:3, Interesting)
DIVX Players (Score:2)
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bah (Score:2)
Or is the argument that the PC is a technical flop in general?
I love you, PCjr (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone Remembers Qube (Score:2)
I Remember Qube (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a separate Eclipse, the "Studio System", which used a high speed interprocessor bus to move polling data to and from the polling system.
I wrote several of the studio system's technical scripts, which needed to be synchronized with the TV shows.
QUBE flopped as a technology due mostly to the fact that people are (and were in the late 70's) in the habit of being couch potatoes, rather than interacting through a rather stilted 2-way system.
QUBE gave two-way cable communications hardware people some pretty good practice in how to run signals both ways through a hierarchical network. Eventually, (with huge improvements, etc.) it led to today's cable modems.
A cute cultural story: The two-way boxes were designed by Pioneer Electronics (the stereo folks) in Japan. The Japanese engineers had absolutely no idea how quickly Americans would learn to hack the boxes to watch pay-per-view premium content without the box reporting that they had selected premium channels. It turns out that the box was designed to detect channel change events and track the changes, rather than reporting the channel that was currently selected for viewing. The result was that as soon as someone discovered how to disable the change detection logic (with a paper clip), they started watching premium content for free.
The business management folks had me write a program that statistically analyzed premium purchasing habits, noting (for example) when a given customer transitioned from several months of reasonable amount of premium content, to absolutely zero premium viewing. The program was called "zerobill". Naturally, its capabilities grew in various ways to track a whole range of statistics about viewing habits during the next few years. Eventually, zerobill became *the report* that every manager wanted to see, every morning without fail. I had some *exceptionally early* mornings caused by various bugs and vicissitudes in the database.
Phone rings...
Me: (knowing damn well what was coming next) Hello?
Night operator: "Daily batch died."
Me: "and..."
Night operator: "Not sure, it looks like an error."
Me: "Did it leave a suicide note, or was it just shot in the head?"
et cetera...
My best friend and I were not scheduled the evening of the Rundgren concert, and we had a *kickass* time at the concert, including a little while backstage. It was a great time and place to be a young software geek, mixing television and technology.
QueCat (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahead of Time Flop (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Virtual Reality. This hasn't happened
Qube (Score:2)
Why should Y2K make the list? (Score:2)
Also lack of problems doesn't mean it was all hype. (I like to think that the raised alarm saved problems later on, but I have severe doubts about whether it was worth the worry or hype it garnered.)
DAT (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the Apple Pippin and AMD PIC? (Score:2)
Also, although technically under the category net PC's, what about the AMD PIC (see here [wikipedia.org] or here [amdboard.com])? I briefly was involved in a project to develop media for the PIC. Remarkably, this low cost computer made its debut two years after the i-Opener failed. You would think they would learn.
Absolute Rubbish (Score:5, Informative)
DAT has been a staple of industry professionals for ages. As an indie filmmaker, I've found cheap digital audio equipment which is supposed to be superior to be rather poor in comparison. I'd kill to have good DAT equipment.
eBook readers are perhaps a flop in that few will invest a device that does solely that, but eBooks as a whole gain in popularity every year.
The PCjr entered an area when IBM-based PCs had hardly become the norm, and many critics believed a personal computer in the home would never become a reality. It was a step in the right direction, and people forget that there were MANY alternatives back then. The fact that 99% of home computers are based on IBM standards today is not a flop.
Internet Currency? Last time I checked there are several "points" programs on the web where you can earn and use points that aren't currency themselves. This business model still operates today. Furthermore, the concept of a firm handling transactions across multiple borders for online currency paved the way for one of the most successful websites ever, Ebay/Paypal.
Just as the article states, Iridium is still in business.
Bob was a flop, and one I commonly mock. However I promise you, that the concept will be revisited and better marketed the second time around. Honestly, I imagine that Second Life will become, or inspire the next generation of Bob, allowing us all to make virtual spaces, which in turn will link to applications and activities within this virtual world.
The NetPC? I still know people who own Web TV, and the market might have continued if Microsoft hadn't bought them out. People forget that Net PC devices were a threat to people whose business depended on the PC model. People also still make homemade Net PCs out of things like XBoxes and such.
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. The article also fails to mention that Push technology preceeded and eventually became streaming media as well, and was largely developed for and by the porn industry. You'd be surprised how much technology comes from the porn industry.
I could go on and on and on, but I have to head out the door.
Re:Absolute Rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
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:
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
This article is a flop.
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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.
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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
Segway (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd also like to nominate Windows Vista for the list, but even that might be a little premature.
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Please, try not to be so rude.
Print Version (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
AC to avoid the whoring of karma.
Re:Print Version (Score:5, Funny)
Speech recognition (Score:5, Funny)
Over the years, Bill Gates (among others) has repeatedly predicted that speech recognition will be a major form of input, but it hasn't happened yet.
That's not true. I'm posting this comment using a Windows Vista speech recognition software and Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
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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 o
Newton != Flop (Score:3, Interesting)
FTFA - learn binary please (Score:5, Funny)
In the techno universe, we do binary, and 1 plus 1 will always yield 0 with a 1 in the overflow bin.
SelectaVision anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
But Microsoft Bob had an amazing effect (Score:5, Funny)
An oldie but a goodie: THOR-CD (Score:3, Informative)
Read more here: http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/thorcd88.ht
Tablet PCs (Score:4, Insightful)
Y2K was not a FLOP!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
How about the original MSN (Score:4, Informative)
CircuitCity's DIVX was GREAT! (Score:3, Funny)
Iridium not dead and won't be (Score:3, Insightful)
Also the external Iridium antennas look like dildos.
DAT Wasn't a flop (Score:3, Informative)
Today ofcourse everything is moved around on DVD's, through FTP or other "consumer grade" medias, because they are as bit-perfect-copies as anything. Back in the 90's it was the standard to move the tracks from reels to DAT's for transportation from recording studio to the mixing/mastering studio. And then from there to CD plant for press mastering.
DAT's also have the advantage of magnetic media. It doesn't deteriorate as fast as optical media. (I'm going off topic here but give me some slack.) For example, I never reuse my MiniDV video tapes. I just rip to harddrive what I expect to use in near future and stash the original to my safe box in a bank vault -- A humidity controlled, cool, dark place. This way, I expect to be able to access the originals for decades to come.
Re:DAT Wasn't a flop - DCC was! (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't all bad news though - the technology used to make the read/write heads found its way into beer making:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6121 [newscientist.com]
mmmm beeeeeer.
Virtual Reality... (Score:3, Insightful)
...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.
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And I think Linux has support for certain MCA adapters nowadays...