Tech Fail! Biggest Flops of The Last 10+ Years

[Zen]

Just as LNCPapa stated, I to own several HD-DVD players, one in my master bedroom and one in my living room. I personally love the things, I liked them back when they were first released. I also made the choice to stay loyal to the HD-DVD format, even in the face of the mighty Blu-Ray. Personally speaking, I have several friends that only use Blu-Ray, I've watched a lot of movies on that format and see very little difference, if any between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. And just like LNCPapa said, I to was buying up the heavily discounted HD-DVD movies when they were on their way out. I took my HD-DVD video library from around 50 disks at the peak of success for HD-DVD to just above 200 titles when it was on it's way out. I especially liked the $1.00 bins at Fry's, I was doing a power grab for those suckers. So for the foreseeable future, I won't be jumping on the Blu-Ray bandwagon anytime soon! For I even have have a spare HD-DVD player tucked away as a back up for if one of my primary's goes down, still in it's box, factory sealed, never been opened.

And as far as the other stuff on that "fail" list, some can be debated, but for the most part I agree with the list.

 

[Guest]

Divx was another great tech flop.

 

[Guest]

the dreamcast shouldn't be on this list, it was nowhere near as big of a flop as most everything else on here, saying it should be in a list of failures with the likes of Windows ME, Vista, Google's attempts at a social network, etc. is ridiculous

 

[Guest]

I think you forgot some Apple stuff: Mobileme, Ping. Vista wasn't so much a failure. It did pretty well in the marketplace until it was replaced with 7, which is natural. I'd also say that Android tablets are far from a failure. You can go into any store and find a decent selection of Android powered tablets. Kindle? Nook? Yea, Android. It seems like they are still in the game. It's like calling OSX Lion a failure now when it's still running strong and in production with no sign of failure (wait - Apple product, sorry they aren't allowed to fail, right?).

Tablet PC's are still widely used in the medical field. Sure, they didn't strike it big with consumers, but a lot of products don't. XBox isn't doing well in businesses, but it's far from a failure.

I do agree with a lot on the list, there are just some that are ... awkward and make the author look a bit Apple biased (Android over iOS, "Vista failure", etc.). I own an iPad and an Android and like the iPad better, but the Android is no slacker or a failure. It's a powerful machine that gives me full control. The iPad is just faster and has beefier specs so I use that mostly.

 

[Guest]

I would still be using MySpace if they didn't change it!
Likewise, Facebook is changing into a monster I don't like. I no longer visit my friends pages with the new "timeline". And once its forced onto me (sometime soon I bet) I will deactivate my account.

I miss my Dreamcast

 

[Guest]

HD-DVD was a superior format to BD, the reason it failed was cause Sony basically forced it on all the studios to be used via money and manipulation.

Dreamcast failed due to its own popularity, the copy protection got cracked, and the flux of copied games killed the game production market.

Windows Vista, I don't know what the fail is, I never had a problem running Vista, the blame should be placed on the computer manufactures like HP, Dell that sold underpowered PC's that had no business running VIsta. I never ran Windows XP, I went from Windows 2000 (which blows away XP) to Vista to Win7.

 

[Guest]

How about the Apple Newton, Lisa, Cube, Mac TV, Appleworks, Slideshow, U2 iPod...

 

[matrix86]

I'm sorry, but I have to ask...is it really fair to be putting Android tablets on this list? I think it's still too early in the game for them to be listed here. I agree with the touchpad and playbook, but Android tablets as a whole? I'm going to have to disagree with that one...for now, at least.

 

[Guest]

Wrong: Kindle Fire has been a success and has made a dent in iPad sales.

CEO Cook says differently: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/25/cook_on_tablets/
You know it is true when they say it hasn't. Why even mention the multi-million selling Fire????

 

[Guest]

I am obviously weird, because I like 3 products on this list.

Windows ME: great for consumer use on older PC's

HD-DVD: I bought this right as it was obvious it was going to be the loser in the format war, and got a whole bunch of great quality movies for under $5

PSP-Go: Just got this last Christmas and love it. I only wanted 2 games and mostly use it to watch movies which look awesome.

 

[Julio Franco]

About Android tablets being included on our fail list, first let's revisit what was said...

Even with great partners and multiple hardware iterations, somehow it feels like Android keeps lagging behind Apple's iPad. The recent delays in getting Android 4.0 ICS to all outgoing tablets makes matters even more visible. But at least they are trying to make a dent on iPad's sales. Meanwhile, HP's TouchPad and the Blackberry Playbook were a complete disaster, from lacking basic functionality, to their complete mismanagement and premature cancellation.

Although the article didn't explicitly indicate it, we went on chronological order from year 2000 to 2011. Some years didn't have a big enough fail for us to include, others had two. In some cases it would have been a mix up because certain products were released on different years depending on the continent or not even released at all (Palm Foleo).

But back to the Android tablets, the first Honeycomb tablet was the Xoom, released Feb 2011. Our list essentially exposed how non-Apple tablets have failed to make a larger dent on the iPad's dominance after 2+ years. Up until 2011, you could say Android tablets have failed on its mission to fight the iPad in the mainstream and are still offset to a distant #2.

Perhaps 2012 and 2013 will tell a different story. Maybe Windows 8 will be the OS to bring Apple down, soon enough we will find out.

 

[Julio Franco]

I should add to the above, in narrowing down the biggest fails we didn't just consider how bad a product was. Heck, the Dreamcast was great, as were some others. But it's all about the opportunities missed that make you go...

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[Guest]

Your guys forgot Real Player. Everyone was using their software, and then it all went bad...

 

[gregzeng]

>> Rofl, two out of ten fails are OS's of MS. And then you call windows a superior OS to linux!

>>ps: sorry for this out of topic comment but i couldn't resist to the recent ubuntu review's comments!

'buntu enthusiast myself, but Linux (700+ variants) is IMHO the biggest flop, excluding Android in the last 12 months.

Apple, M$ & Hitler agree with me. Not technology, not mass-market appeal - but MARKETING, both research, surveys & responding to surveys. ex-director of many companies, so I know that success depends on the stupidity of our market sector. Linux: no marketing at all. Just selfish, self-centered tech heads.

 

[Guest]

I agree on anything except the last one.
The Blackberry Playbook is exceptional, the android tablets are...decent but certainly not a tech fail and the Touchpad is very usable by some users who dual boots webos and android. get your facts straight before writing an article

 

[Guest]

It seems by your standards If an item doesn't sell as many units as an Apple product its a failure.
Take the Playbook it sold over 1 million, has a 4g version coming out soon and also a Playbook 2 in the works. Is it as big a seller as Ipad ? No of course not but if its still being sold and updates in the works then its not a failure.

 

[Guest]

not really agree with that list, as many have mentionned.
Tablet Pc are still selling, why a big flop ?

 

[Guest]

Love my TouchPad. I use it to browse the web, check my email on the road, read books and occasionally stream video from my home server. Yeah, it had a bad launch and HP certainly made some big missteps with it. But honestly, if you have half a brain and say $25 bucks you can get some great apps on WebOS to make up for what they left out and turn it into a very capable tablet. It's no iPad, but its still a nice little platform at a fraction of the cost of its pricier competitors, with plenty of functionality after a little tweaking. Despite its launch issues, I think its scale of failure is debatable. I suppose it all depends on what you had hoped to do with it. So far, its met all my needs and wants quite well.

 

[Benny26]

Dreamcast was a big, big shame. It was a good console and deserved a few more years.

 

[Arris]

Agree with Betamax being better technologically than VHS but disagree with HD-DVD being better than Bluray. I own two HD-DVD set top boxes, two bluray, and one multi capable disk drive on my PC. I have lots of media for both (I was buying it up like crazy while HD-DVD was on its way out... some titles for as little as $1. There was a max theoretical number of layers for HD-DVD of 3 - with each layer having a max capacity of 15 GB. Bluray's max theoretical number of layers is/was 8 with each layer maxing out at 25 GB. The audio and video capabilities were mostly identical and things could look just as good on one platform as the other.

Although as reported by the linked site, HD-DVDs used dual layer from the start. Blurays didn't (not sure if they are available now).
Dual layer HD-DVD has more capacity than single layer Bluray. But really, neither was particularly technically superior to the other.

 

[Guest]

Wow! I can't believe how badly, as a journalist, you missed the boat on this one. You had me up until your 10th item on the list. I can't believe your claim your of Android tables and the PlayBook being failures simply because they haven't taken enough market share from Apple. Really? 35% isn't enough? What. Would be enough for you? Because. That's pretty significant in my book and since the numbers for Android and PlayBook (now that they have a new leader) seem to be increasing rather than decreasing, I really would have chosen something else to round off the list.

 

[Guest]

HD DVD was slightly superior to Blu-ray when it first came out because they had finalized it specs before release unlike Blu-ray. Blu-ray went through 3 different profiles before it matched the abilities HD DVD had right from the start. This meant that depending on which Blu-ray player you bought, you may or may not be able to view certain content or special features. Also the initial Blu-ray discs still used MPEG2 compression which required a lot of disc space which caused some early movie releases to look like crap.

 

[Guest]

"Android Tablets, HP TouchPad, Blackberry Playbook - Until they are able to make a dent on iPad's market share"

If failure to make a dent in market share is criteria for making the list, then Apple Computers should be on the list.

 

[DAOWAce]

I use Vista and I disagree with this list.

Why? 7 removed classic features while Vista still had them. Any 'old dog' had a massive problem switching to 7, which includes practically every one of my customers that I've had a new PC bought for.

But yeah, after all the patches, there's no reason why people should still ride the 'I hate Vista' bandwagon, as it's highly ignorant.

Oh and, that classic shell program fixes a lot of the 'no classic' issues with 7, but there's still a bunch of other things that infuriate me about it.

 

[Guest]

I cannot believe these goons are still trying to paint the Dreamcast as a failure. The Jaguar was a failure. The Virtual Boy was a failure. The Dreamcast was far from being a failure. It had the largest fighting game collection, not to mention games like Shennmue, PowerStone, and lets not forget the last "Good" as in worth a damn NFL licenesed game. NFL2K series. It failed because of fanboyism. A popularity contest.

BTW your logo almost looks like the Sega Saturn Logo. =P