5 of the Biggest Tech Failures
5 of the Biggest Tech Failures
How many of these are collecting dust in your attic?
How many of these are collecting dust in your attic?
Let's kick things off with a piece of tech that isn't even that old, yet nobody remembers. In the early 2000s, Toshiba and NEC got together to create a new HD DVD format that would let the world move on from that crappy DVD format.
Things were actually looking really well, but Sony got into the mix with their own format and obliterated the HD DVD format with the introduction of Blu-ray. It wan't all that much better, but Sony played it smart and stuck a Blu-ray player into the new PS3 game console.
Sony did this with DVD back on the PS2 to help that format explode, and with the added fact that Sony owned a tons of movie studios the war was won pretty early on. HD DVD may have stood a chance if it was incorporated into the Xbox 360 like intended as the console launched before the PS3, but someone got scared and left it as an add on drive months later being to little to late.
The Zune was a really neat piece of kit that, like so many Microsoft products, was killed because they had no idea what to do with it. After the amazing success of the Apple iPod, Microsoft wanted in and produced the Zune.
The problem was that the device was plagued with delays that saw it hit the market five years after the launch of the iPod. By that time other devices had come and gone and Apple was simply too entrenched to break its hold on the market. Microsoft also had no idea how to market the device.
The Zune lasted all the way into 2012, but can you recall a single Zune advertisement or marketing tag-line? Hell, the best marketing the Zune ever got was in Guardians of the Galaxy volume 2 as a joke scene. That was five years after it was dead and the world already saw it as ancient.
How many of you remember the Twitter Peek device? Hitting the market in 2009, the Twitter Peek was designed to let Twitter users check and post to their feeds from a dedicated device. It seemed like a decent idea, but you have to remember that it came out in 2009.
The Twitter Peek also had some limitation in that it could only show a 20-character preview of whatever you were writing without clicking to see more. You also mad to pay $7.99 a month if you bought the $99 edition of the Peek. It's like paying for a terrible Twitter experience.
And again, this was 2009 and the world of the smartphone was already here. By the time the Twitter Peek hit the market there were already several free apps on smartphones that could handle this, or, you know, via their browsers. The Twitter Peek is probably one of the most worthless devices ever released.
The Nintendo DS hit the market in 2004 and has been going strong since. Sony attempted their own portable, but failed to match the success of the DS. Sony then tried to do their own DS-like device with the Sony Tablet P, a portable dual screen device that was too big to fit in your pocket.
The device was actually trying to capitalize on large tablets, but Sony figured that they were portable enough to really take on the go. Unfortunately they misjudged the market and also priced the thing well out of the range of most consumers at $549.
The Sony Tablet P also couldn't run two apps at the same time, but the biggest problem was that the device was dated by the time it hit the market. The Sony Tablet P could only run on the HSPA network and had no support for the newer LTE network.
The Juicero was a disaster of epic proportions. This $700 juicer was horribly overpriced, over-hyped, and worked less well than using your own hands. How they managed to raise over $100 million is beyond us for something that works less well then the hand juicer I have from the 1970s.
The idea itself wasn't all that terrible. They wanted to address the lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables, which is a real thing, especially in places considered food deserts. The problem is that people living in such areas don't have $700 to throw around on top of a subscription for juice packs. But even if you could, people quickly figured out that the machine itself was terrible.
You couldn't use any other juice packs thanks to the proprietary technology, but even worse was that you could simply squeeze the packs with your bare hands and get more juice than the machine could. It's a case of technology taking something very simple and making it more difficult and expensive.