Fail articles

Finding the good in a failed product can be difficult at the time but in hindsight, it's those same products that often serve as precursors to existing technology. In this article, we will be profiling nine such ideas that were conceived and brought to market well before their time.

While some weren't exactly failures, most were - and all are responsible for playing a role in current devices or services that make our lives more comfortable and enjoyable.

Being one of the most prolific sources of security vulnerabilities in Windows and other platforms, Adobe Flash Player needs no introduction. In spite of that reputation, and the fact that the rest of the industry is moving away from Flash, Microsoft surprised many of us by bundling the software with its operating system for the first time with Windows 8. This is after previously announcing that they wouldn't allow Flash in the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 – a decision the company later reversed.

I was glad when the Adobe Flash Player Updater was released in March. Finally the day had come when our machines would be silently updated with the latest Flash version... or so I thought. It'd just seem Adobe is making all possible efforts to make its software more bloated and less attractive to all consumers, here's why.

There are two surefire ways to have your name immortalized in history: succeed in your stride toward greatness or, as so many tech firms did in 2011, faceplant trying.

Fresh in our memory are failed products like the Blackberry Playbook, the PlayStation Network getting hacked, Microsoft's Kin smartphones, AMD's FX relaunch and Duke Nukem Forever. Those and a few others have served as inspiration for us to look further back and revisit some of the biggest flops of the new millennia, starting with what many consider Microsoft's worst OS ever.