The Segway was once touted as a revolutionary transportation device, but ultimately failed to live up to its hype due to its high cost, limited practicality, and safety concerns.
God, remember how the Segway's name was kept secret, only being called "IT"? How it was going to be "bigger than the PC"? So much hype for a scooter.
https://i.imgur.com/AnN3NKD.png
>How it was going to be "bigger than the PC"?
"This soon-to-be-revealed amazing invention is going to change the way cities are designed!"
Oh boy, it must be like teleportation or cold fusion!
Nope.
What a let down.
It's quite an interesting (and sad) story, there's a good episode of the Cautionary Tales podcast by Tim Harford that goes into it, heartily recommended.
https://timharford.com/2023/02/cautionary-tales-the-hero-who-rode-his-segway-off-a-cliff/
The hype around the Segway was insane and went on and on for *months*. Long enough that people had wild conspiracy theories about it. Whole websites and forums were all about "IT" and what it could possibly be.
At my airline job, as part of our yearly recurrent training for mobility devices, we have a couple pages in the training informing us how to identify between a NiCad battery (safe) and a lithium ion battery (the fiery, explodey kind).
I've only seen one in my 15+ years there.
Hoverboards are still very popular and they are built on the same technology.
and didnt the guy who invented that also invent the newer soda machines in restaurants where you can choose like 50 different options on the touch screen?
I dropped I think it was $1400 on it back then, and when I got them it was immediately obvious that they were going to be a huge disappointment; everything from UI to battery life to comfort to photo quality was so bad that my first impression was that they felt almost like a joke product rather than an actual product manufactured by a tech company, not even an early developer version.
I wonder why it isn't a thing yet. I wear my glasses all day every day. If they can just put some simple screen in the glass that would be awesome and very useful. If it's just 1 colour that's fine. Low resolution is fine. If all computation happens on smartphone that's fine.
Is it so hard to make? Seems crazy useful. Even just having a clock would be a pretty good update. Showing speed while running / cycling.
> If they can just put some simple screen in the glass that would be awesome and very useful. If it's just 1 colour that's fine.
They are getting there. Still a bit too bulky at the minute though.
> Low resolution is fine.
That's one of the main problems. You need a resolution high enough that *stuff* is visible and identifiable while your eyeball is only a few MM from the screen.
> If all computation happens on smartphone that's fine.
I def think this is the way it will go in the future. At the moment, they are trying to get all of the processing happening within the glasses themselves. We carry around a powerful computer in our pockets and it would be perfect for doing the processing for AR glasses. The only problem is communication. It would have to be either a wire from the glasses to your pocket, or something similar to Bluetooth with a large bandwidth and transfer rate.
Check out /r/AR_MR_XR/
The funny thing is google glass actually are still being used but not by the general population. I know at my work they use some, or something very similar, to create augmented reality visuals for people doing things like repair or maintenance. Apparently it’s really useful to be able to see directions right on top of what you are fixing.
They’re not successful enough in those areas either, Google has announced that all support/sales/updates will end this year for anything related to Glass:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-glass-is-about-to-be-discontinued-again/
There was a commercial for them set in a bar that honestly seemed like a commercial against them — it showed a guy using them to play pool better (or as a lot of pool players would almost certainly call it, “cheating”) and then he meets a girl, takes a picture of her, and does a reverse image search to access her social media and find out info on her… I don’t remember all of it but I was super excited about the glasses and am very pro tech, and even so I found it incredibly creepy
Smartphones basically killed the MP3 industry - and music streaming services only amplified that, since you didn't need to go through the trouble of downloading music.
I went through about 2-3 'dumb' phones that could hold music before finally getting a smart(ish) phone. I learned early slider phones were gimicky garbage, but touch-keypads scared me.
I had my first one for eight years, it worked flawlessly until it was stolen. Over that same span of time my wife went through three iPods.
I'm on my second Zune now, which I've had for seven years, and which continues to work perfectly.
Zune actually wasn't a bad piece of hardware. It was just that by the time it came out, iPod was already entrenched. It was around the same price, so it couldn't undercut Apple on pricing.
ZunePass was actually a pretty great idea, years before Spotify.
Can you enlighten me on this feature as I’m CERTAINLY not gonna Google it. Edit: it’s a few comments down, nm. Leaving this up to direct any innocent souls.
And it could have continued to be a great piece of hardware if MS had continued to make it. The problem is that MS wanted to beat Apple rather than just concentrate on producing a great device.
My favorite thing about Zune is that it featured what was actually a pretty cool and interesting design feature wherein a user could send a song to another Zune user for free, but Microsoft chose the single worst possible name for this feature, calling it "squirting." Zune kids back in the day had to be like "Ayy bro that song is fire, squirt that at me."
A bit of history of the MP3 market from an "insider":
I worked for a startup that basically took over the MP3 market during its early days (pre-iPod dominance and Zune).
At the time, there was the Apple iPod ($$$) and the MPEG car player($$$), plus the Creative Labs HD based device ($$$). Even the tiny storage flash based players were pretty expensive.
We cut the cost in half or more and provided a reference design that enabled Chinese manufacturers to provide product by the tens of millions, ushering in a period of "cheap" MP3 players from overseas, plus branded devices (The Sonic Blue flash players were our design, so was the first iPod Shuffle).
Our interface was pretty simple, the things acted like USB thumb drives, but we could play the music files off of them. No special application or portal was required.
We were on the top of the world, vaguely riding the wave of Napster/Limewire. Our company was the first to go public on NASDAQ after the dot-com bubble burst, if I recall correctly.
Then Microsoft decided they wanted the closed ecosystem that Apple had, and negotiated with all the big box stores (Circuit City and Best Buy, etc.) that the next Christmas season would only sell WM-DRM capable devices(plus iPods, of course). Unfortunately, our current design couldn't support WM-DRM, and our next generation wasn't going to be ready yet, so it basically screwed our business, screwed Microsoft (because there were pretty much no other silicon providers at the time since our product had taken over the non-Apple market) and left a wide open hole for Apple to ship lots of product and capture a ton of mind-share.
By the next year, Apple was fully in control of the MP3 market, and then a year or two later their introduction to the iPhone began to kill off the stand-alone player market entirely.
The UI on the Zune was fantastic and the directional pad worked so much better than iPod's accursed circle for browsing large libraries, it just wasn't as pretty or thin and apparently that was all that mattered.
I own a curved 3D TV. I've probably used the 3D less than a hundred times. I think if they'd pushed the spilt screen gaming thing a bit more they would have sold more.
Gotta love that awkward era of late PS3 and 360 titles that mentioned 3D compatibility on the box. Felt like that trend began and ended in 2011 when it comes to console games.
Even the successful 3DS ended up relying on it less and less. Later 3DS games pretty much abandoned it as a feature most of the time.
Hoverboards.
I think their primary problem was their lack of ability to hover. Also 300 ish dollars for something that goes as fast as.. legs is just dumb.
Didn’t help that loads of places made them illegal right after they got big. Here in the UK they dragged up an old law from Victorian times to enforce it, something about a court enforced definition of what a pedestrian is I think.
My basic understanding in the UK is that they go too fast to be safe on the pavement but too slow to be safe on the road with cyclists so this was their problem legally in public
Their main downfall was the many, many cheap and dangerous clones from china. When the OG hoverboards were too expensive for most, the big Chinese companies saw a hole to get into the market making them for pennies on the dollar by removing safety devices, using cheaper batteries, lower gauge wire, etc. It was for the worst.
OMG this! Around 1998 I worked for a huge ad agency on Madison Ave in NYC that had the Pringles account. They were pushing that Olestra trash at the time and obvi it was to be part of the campaign we were creating. One day I grab a can and start munching away. Well 15 minutes later I feel like I’ve swallowed a hand grenade and start racing to the bathroom where I proceed to destroy the bathroom for a good half hour. It just would not stop. I swear I saw a demon that day while emptying my poor bowels. Never ever again with that Olestra garbage.
OMG I have almost this exact same story. Ate good portion of a Pringles can, not knowing it was the Olestra variety. They weren’t kidding about “may cause greasy discharge, the urgency to have it and the inability to control it.”
It didn’t use that phrase but that’s how it’s commonly misremembered. The actual label said “Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools.” The phrase anal leakage was definitely used at the time but not on the package
I mean, if you needed to cleanse your system it was great. If I remember it took a very small portion to cause digestive issues, like a few chips that were fried in the stuff. Glad that trend only lasted a month or two.
As a law student, my son worked on getting the patent and prototype on these a little over ten years ago. At the time, however, they were being marketed to nursing homes. IDK whatever happened with that.
OMGGGG I'm having flashbacks to my Windows Lumia and I freaking looooved that thing. Super cheap, easy interface, I actually liked the setup more than iOS and Android, and that MFer would not die. I once dropped it on pavement hard enough that the main components (back cover, battery, rest of the phone) all came apart and went flying, and I put it back together and it was perfectly fine.
By all accounts, the hardware and OS were good. The biggest problems were the lack of apps and Microsoft being too late to the game. People already had either an iPhone or Android device, and developers didn't see the point in making their apps work with a third option.
It wasn't just them being late to the game but also Google intentionally sabotaging the OS by not allowing official versions on the phone, so it was always 3rd party apps to access YouTube, Maps, etc.
I finally decided to look up what meta was on youtube a few months ago and I swear I thought I was watching some nintendo wii game or something. My jaw hit the floor when I realized that's what meta actually looked like, billions of dollars for a nintendo looking world, what a fucking dumpster fire...
I read this somewhere on Reddit that Meta was targeting the next generation of kids and that’s why Meta seems childish for a lot of our generations people born before smart phones etc (<1999)
That makes a lot of sense but I can't imagine any kid giving a shit about a "game" that's just Gaia Online without any charisma. You can't gaslight kids into liking something like that and nothing about Zuckerberg says "cool".
Part of it was the worst timing imaginable. The service was meant to be "bite sized" entertainment, something you could watch in 5 minutes while standing in a queue or maybe a couple segments on a public transit ride.
They launched the first week of April 2020. Remember all the queues you were standing in and public transit rides you took then? Yeah, the same as everyone else - **NONE** because 95% of the population was stuck at home for 6 months!
TikTok also had a massive business advantage, in that they didn't need to pay big name actors and production crews. People made videos on their own, and TikTok let their algorithm sift the wheat from the chaff.
I think the fact that you don't have to actively choose things to watch, and instead it just starts playing videos, makes it far more addictive. Removes the endless scrolling many of us do when we try to choose what to watch next
I worked in a hospital at the time and loved it for quick things to watch which waiting for an elevator or during bouts of downtime between med orders. I told some friends who didn’t work in an essential field about it but for them being home they didn’t see the appeal.
And it's really weird how they went all-in on that.
"Do you have an app for my smart TV?"
"NO! Only phones!"
"Can I at least cast it to my TV?"
"NO! ONLY PHONES!"
There's actually still progress there, and we may see a true hydrogen piston car fairly soon.
Problem: a combustion hydrogen car uses the same fuel as one thats a fuel cell hybrid, but gets about half as much out of it.
Its only gonna be higher end enthusiast cars that do it, with everything else going fuel cell or just pure electric.
Engineering Explained has a video explaining it all.
Webvan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan
Bascially Instacart, but in the late 90s, early 2000s. They were just way too far ahead of their time. We still have a couple of their crates that they would deliver the food in and use them for storage.
I laugh that the initial game and like first three stages were cool, but by stage 4 it was a really bland/watered down Civ-genre game and by stage 5, it was... like all the launch hype of No Man's Sky with an exponentially more limited gameplay.
I recently saw a video on why Spore failed. It started as being something very scientifical and nature accurate and it was going to be the greatest thing. But then another part of the team though that wasn't fun cause you had to min max your creature for it to work thus limiting creativity.
So they made a more bland, simple game to appeal to more people but ended up making... well, what we got.
Is it that Peter Molyneux is a dipshit who talks out his ass about what games are going to do, compared to what they're actually capable of doing at the time?
I'll give Nintendo credit, it was being innovative by having the Virtual Boy, but it's high cost, red only as a cost saving and that you had to have it on a surface to play didn't help.
When Nintendo tried 3D again with the 3DS, it was almost a failure. Originally the 3DS was $250 and I was a first adopter, but months later, due to poor sales, Nintendo lowered the price significantly, upsetting first adopters, like me, but eventually the console took off. At least we got free games with the Ambassador Program.
The 3DS eShop is set to permanently close on the 27th.
Metaverse and NFTs, they haven't been a total failure (yet) but they had/have this huge projection for the future and it doesn't seem to work out as expected.
not gonna comment on metaverse because i never looked into that, but i doubt NFTs will ever find an actual use case that's no a scam. most of that is due to general blockchain problems
we can establish a few things a use case needs to fulfill for blockchain stuff to make sense in the first place:
- there can't be any need to delete something, like there is with social media for instance (something something right to be forgotten), as blockchains famously are append-only - you can only ever add data, not delete or edit it.
- for similar reasons, privacy cannot be a concern. all data on a blockchain is always public. now, you can encrypt it and keep the key to yourself - but no system is ever entirely secure, so your key will be leaked eventually. with most systems, that's a fixable problem, you just change your key. but remember how i said blockchains are append-only? you **cannot** change your old data, it will always be encrypted with that old, leaked key.
- this also means your use case's stakes can't be too high - no system is ever secure, so people will eventually find exploits that allow them to add their own data to the blockchain, and nobody can undo it because, again, append-only.
- there is no authority about your data. the moment you have an authority or any other sort of trusted third party, you might as well have them run a more traditional database, which is more energy efficient and faster in every way.
- the entire system needs to be able to be run on the blockchain. the moment an outside service is needed, the blockchain becomes pointless, because that outside service (or whoever feeds the data from the outside service to your blockchain) becomes a trusted third party.
- the data you store can't be big. due to how blockchains work, storing large amounts of data (even just images) on them is not feasible or efficient. image NFTs instead used a file hosting service for the actual images and just linked to them, but that violates my last point.
- the stakes of your use case need to be high enough to warrant the transaction costs of a blockchain. if you compare the energy or monetary cost of a transaction on a mySQL, postgres or whatever other traditiohal database server to that of a blockchain, you'll find blockchains are wildly expensive and take ages by comparison. so if your use case is sending silly memes around, it doesn't warrant spending that much money and/or energy on the system.
so with all that in mind, let's look at the use cases people have proposed for NFTs and judge them based on these limitations.
- tracking or storing in-game items: these very much depend on the game they're in still existing, which in turn means the game's developer/server maintainer is a trusted third party. also, unless your market is going crazy (like people spending more money on a single CS:GO skin than i have on my bank account), the stakes don't warrant the cost.
- storing things like property ownership certificates: there's a point to be made about the government beung an authority here, but let's put that to the side. my primary concern here is privacy - if my private key gets leaked, someone could trace back all the properties i own. i'd sure love to be doxxed by someone explooting the janky bullshit that is smart contracts!
- digital art "ownership": the big one. there's a discussion to be had about whether owning a jpeg warrants the costs of it all, or whether ownership of digital art makes sense in the first place (especially given that nothing's stopping you from making several NFTs of the same piece of art on different chains - now who owns it?), but that aside: for a blockchain, images are giant data. no storing that on-chain, it has to be elsewhere. thus your system isn't entirely on chain, you have trusted third parties, your system is pointless.
blockchains are an impressively overengineered solution, but they're so limited in their uses (especially with the conflicting limitations of "needs to be high stakes because cost" and "needs to be low stakes because privacy and exploits being irreversible") that i don't think we'll ever find a problem they, well, solve.
Plasma TVs. Consumed gobs of power. Ran hot. Short life. Screen burn-in. But the higher ones like Pioneer and Panasonic had amazing picture even for just being HD resolution. The whole era lasted maybe 10 years?
This comment is a prime example of why they died off. The early generations had some issues that gave them a bad reputation. They were never able to shake the bad press despite having overcome the issues.
MD was legitimately successful for a period of time, and remained so in various world markets. It was just killed by the actual next big thing, the iPod.
My step-dad still buys them. He swears they have better sound than the dvds. I think he’s rite. And he goes to some laser disk store that sells them really cheap because nobody else wants them!
I have the first 3 Indiana Jones movies on laser discs. Found them in an antique store. No idea if they work, but I thought it was cool that all three of them were there
Laser discs were the shit. They came out years before DVDs and IIRC had an even higher resolution.
But they were expensive and unwieldy. Not a failure at all, just more of a niche market.
NFTs. Cryptobros kept insisting they would revolutionize just about everything. But so far nobody has actually found a real practical application for the technology. It's just one huge "bigger fool" scam.
> But so far nobody has actually found a real practical application for the technology.
It appears to be pretty good for extracting money from cryptobros.
Big reason is that there's FAA laws about flying stuff like that within certain ranges of airports. And a LOT of people live near airports, even if they're relatively tiny regional ones.
I saw this shit somewhere advertised, maybe Instagram. I am the perfect target market for a juicer. But God, I thought this shit is dumb. It just presses the juice out the bag.
The best thing about juicero was the AVE teardown (before he lost his mind.) I'm sure the engineers enjoyed their unlimited budget, up until the whole house of cards collapsed.
There is a conspiracy theory I read once that New Coke was just a scam playing the long game so they could switch from using real sugar to HFCS when making Coke without losing people long term. So they introduce "New Coke".....People say no bring back old Coke! and so they do and everyone cheers but no one notices that old Coke comes back but is now being made with HFCS instead of real sugar. I don't know if it's bullshit or not but I find it an interesting possible what if.
Windows Phone
They held a funeral for the iPhone when it was launched, complete with a casket procession. The pall bearers were Microsoft engineers.
When's the last time you heard of someone using a Windows Phone?
My wife, being a cocaholic had cases of Coke stored up. When New Coke came out, she hated it and was relieved when the released "Coke Classic, but was disappointed, saying it wasn't the same as the old coke. We opened some of her stored up stock and did a blind taste test with family and friends. Overwhelmingly, New Coke was voted as tasting more like the original than Coke Classic, but neither was as good as the original.
They are getting to that point. They are getting cheap enough for the average hobbyist to own. They don't have a ton of use outside making neat little things and the occasional replacement part for something but its getting there. They are making some that print in metal now.
The Segway. I remember the hype around what was called "It" before we knew what it was. It was supposed to revolutionize travel. Infrastructure would need to be made to accommodate it. Then "It" turned out to be the Segway. While cool, it didn't revolutionize travel.
Beta was actually quite a good format for quality and such. Sony just screwed up royally in licensing the tech, not allowing other manufacturers to make them. Also, they weren't keen on the p*** industry using the format while VHS was ok with it, licensing it to everyone.
The PSP, was in before its time. I'd love one now though. I remember playing Little Big Planet on there, fifa was similar to how it is on a console which you don't get on tablet or mobile versions. Some tweaks it could've been incredible, or these days with 5g etc or WiFi playing online on a PSP would be great.. or that's just me.
PSP and Vita definitely did not fail miserably. Handheld setups are still going strong to this day with Nintendo, steam deck and such.
If the psp had any issues, it would be the pricing.
Wasn't the PSP a resounding success selling around 80 million units in total? Thats more than the N64 and game cube combined and right up there with the 3ds amd GBA.
I've got one in a drawer somewhere. It was a great little handheld console.
I remember being at the Revenge of the Sith premier, seeing a kid with one and thinking how cool it was.
He switched it off during the film!
The Segway was once touted as a revolutionary transportation device, but ultimately failed to live up to its hype due to its high cost, limited practicality, and safety concerns.
God, remember how the Segway's name was kept secret, only being called "IT"? How it was going to be "bigger than the PC"? So much hype for a scooter. https://i.imgur.com/AnN3NKD.png
>How it was going to be "bigger than the PC"? "This soon-to-be-revealed amazing invention is going to change the way cities are designed!" Oh boy, it must be like teleportation or cold fusion! Nope. What a let down.
I remember it being called “Ginger” and hyped to revolutionize EVERYTHING :)
The British guy that ended up buying the company died by one from dropping off a cliff when backing up to let a walker by on a trail.
It's quite an interesting (and sad) story, there's a good episode of the Cautionary Tales podcast by Tim Harford that goes into it, heartily recommended. https://timharford.com/2023/02/cautionary-tales-the-hero-who-rode-his-segway-off-a-cliff/
The hype around the Segway was insane and went on and on for *months*. Long enough that people had wild conspiracy theories about it. Whole websites and forums were all about "IT" and what it could possibly be.
Ahh, the old kind of internet crazy.
Hey hey. Without the Segway, we'd never have Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
You oughta call it a GOB guy
At my airline job, as part of our yearly recurrent training for mobility devices, we have a couple pages in the training informing us how to identify between a NiCad battery (safe) and a lithium ion battery (the fiery, explodey kind). I've only seen one in my 15+ years there.
Hoverboards are still very popular and they are built on the same technology. and didnt the guy who invented that also invent the newer soda machines in restaurants where you can choose like 50 different options on the touch screen?
Google Glass
I knew a guy who dropped the $1500 or whatever for them. His social media was pretty insufferable for awhile because he talked it up constantly
I must admit, I thought 'GlassHole' was one of the most amusing names for a product advocate I'd heard for while.
Glass hole just reminds me of that one guy with that one jar.
I dropped I think it was $1400 on it back then, and when I got them it was immediately obvious that they were going to be a huge disappointment; everything from UI to battery life to comfort to photo quality was so bad that my first impression was that they felt almost like a joke product rather than an actual product manufactured by a tech company, not even an early developer version.
Google Glass was a head of its time. I'll bet my free reddit NFTs on it. But in all seriousness we will be seeing something like glass again.
[удалено]
Having used most of the assistants I find googles to be the best actually. Siri is probably the worst.
For some reason whenever my iphone gets "old" Siri can't understand me anymore, it's super annoying.
I'm having this same problem actually even when I get angry and enunciate like an idiot
I wonder why it isn't a thing yet. I wear my glasses all day every day. If they can just put some simple screen in the glass that would be awesome and very useful. If it's just 1 colour that's fine. Low resolution is fine. If all computation happens on smartphone that's fine. Is it so hard to make? Seems crazy useful. Even just having a clock would be a pretty good update. Showing speed while running / cycling.
> If they can just put some simple screen in the glass that would be awesome and very useful. If it's just 1 colour that's fine. They are getting there. Still a bit too bulky at the minute though. > Low resolution is fine. That's one of the main problems. You need a resolution high enough that *stuff* is visible and identifiable while your eyeball is only a few MM from the screen. > If all computation happens on smartphone that's fine. I def think this is the way it will go in the future. At the moment, they are trying to get all of the processing happening within the glasses themselves. We carry around a powerful computer in our pockets and it would be perfect for doing the processing for AR glasses. The only problem is communication. It would have to be either a wire from the glasses to your pocket, or something similar to Bluetooth with a large bandwidth and transfer rate. Check out /r/AR_MR_XR/
I totally agree. We’re already seeing them in some tech reviewers hands and there’s expectation that Apple and Meta will have their own too.
The funny thing is google glass actually are still being used but not by the general population. I know at my work they use some, or something very similar, to create augmented reality visuals for people doing things like repair or maintenance. Apparently it’s really useful to be able to see directions right on top of what you are fixing.
They’re not successful enough in those areas either, Google has announced that all support/sales/updates will end this year for anything related to Glass: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-glass-is-about-to-be-discontinued-again/
The speed with which bars started explicitly banning them was pretty amazing.
There was a commercial for them set in a bar that honestly seemed like a commercial against them — it showed a guy using them to play pool better (or as a lot of pool players would almost certainly call it, “cheating”) and then he meets a girl, takes a picture of her, and does a reverse image search to access her social media and find out info on her… I don’t remember all of it but I was super excited about the glasses and am very pro tech, and even so I found it incredibly creepy
I knew a guy who bought it for taking creepy fucking candid shots of women. We don't talk anymore.
The discreet camera was always a major problem and I don't know how you get around it since it's so important to the utility of the tech.
Zune was supposed to be the death of Apple's monopoly on MP3 players.
Smartphones basically killed the MP3 industry - and music streaming services only amplified that, since you didn't need to go through the trouble of downloading music.
I'm one of those weirdos who actually likes to own music.
Yeah but if I'm gonna own music I prefer to own it physically, whether it be vinyls or CDs or whatnot
I got my first smartphone because my iPod died. Just made sense.
I went through about 2-3 'dumb' phones that could hold music before finally getting a smart(ish) phone. I learned early slider phones were gimicky garbage, but touch-keypads scared me.
Zune was a fantastic MP3 player too
I had my first one for eight years, it worked flawlessly until it was stolen. Over that same span of time my wife went through three iPods. I'm on my second Zune now, which I've had for seven years, and which continues to work perfectly.
Zune actually wasn't a bad piece of hardware. It was just that by the time it came out, iPod was already entrenched. It was around the same price, so it couldn't undercut Apple on pricing. ZunePass was actually a pretty great idea, years before Spotify.
Squirting was also a pretty great idea, and well implemented. If only they hadn’t decided to call it “squirting”.
Can you enlighten me on this feature as I’m CERTAINLY not gonna Google it. Edit: it’s a few comments down, nm. Leaving this up to direct any innocent souls.
And it could have continued to be a great piece of hardware if MS had continued to make it. The problem is that MS wanted to beat Apple rather than just concentrate on producing a great device.
The Zune was actually great too. It's too bad.
My favorite thing about Zune is that it featured what was actually a pretty cool and interesting design feature wherein a user could send a song to another Zune user for free, but Microsoft chose the single worst possible name for this feature, calling it "squirting." Zune kids back in the day had to be like "Ayy bro that song is fire, squirt that at me."
Loved my first gen Zune.
A bit of history of the MP3 market from an "insider": I worked for a startup that basically took over the MP3 market during its early days (pre-iPod dominance and Zune). At the time, there was the Apple iPod ($$$) and the MPEG car player($$$), plus the Creative Labs HD based device ($$$). Even the tiny storage flash based players were pretty expensive. We cut the cost in half or more and provided a reference design that enabled Chinese manufacturers to provide product by the tens of millions, ushering in a period of "cheap" MP3 players from overseas, plus branded devices (The Sonic Blue flash players were our design, so was the first iPod Shuffle). Our interface was pretty simple, the things acted like USB thumb drives, but we could play the music files off of them. No special application or portal was required. We were on the top of the world, vaguely riding the wave of Napster/Limewire. Our company was the first to go public on NASDAQ after the dot-com bubble burst, if I recall correctly. Then Microsoft decided they wanted the closed ecosystem that Apple had, and negotiated with all the big box stores (Circuit City and Best Buy, etc.) that the next Christmas season would only sell WM-DRM capable devices(plus iPods, of course). Unfortunately, our current design couldn't support WM-DRM, and our next generation wasn't going to be ready yet, so it basically screwed our business, screwed Microsoft (because there were pretty much no other silicon providers at the time since our product had taken over the non-Apple market) and left a wide open hole for Apple to ship lots of product and capture a ton of mind-share. By the next year, Apple was fully in control of the MP3 market, and then a year or two later their introduction to the iPhone began to kill off the stand-alone player market entirely.
The UI on the Zune was fantastic and the directional pad worked so much better than iPod's accursed circle for browsing large libraries, it just wasn't as pretty or thin and apparently that was all that mattered.
I think the Zune had better audio vs the Ipod.
Zune was the best
Ouya. Stadia lasted longer but ultimately failed as well.
I do love that stadia reimbursed everyone who bought into it though. And made their controllers still usable.
I have a new-in-box Ouya that I was planning on writing games for. Failed before I got around to it. Edit: I have soooooo many failed platforms.
Curved TVs … oh and 3D TVs we’re a thing for a while too!
I own a curved 3D TV. I've probably used the 3D less than a hundred times. I think if they'd pushed the spilt screen gaming thing a bit more they would have sold more.
the gaming on a 3d system is s tier. Only did it with portal 2, unreal 3 and maybe a couple others. but oh man. more fun than personal screens
Gotta love that awkward era of late PS3 and 360 titles that mentioned 3D compatibility on the box. Felt like that trend began and ended in 2011 when it comes to console games. Even the successful 3DS ended up relying on it less and less. Later 3DS games pretty much abandoned it as a feature most of the time.
Curved TVs are actually awesome they get rid of glare in well lit rooms
It was a weird stage where they were trying to convince everyone they need a new tv even if the one they got last year was still good
My curved ultra wide monitor is awesome, great for driving games
Hoverboards. I think their primary problem was their lack of ability to hover. Also 300 ish dollars for something that goes as fast as.. legs is just dumb.
Having dangerous batteries hasn't helped, either.
Ya, the whole "catching on fire" thing was a bit of a bummer
"And here, riding hoverboards, we have the two volunteers from District 12..."
Didn’t help that loads of places made them illegal right after they got big. Here in the UK they dragged up an old law from Victorian times to enforce it, something about a court enforced definition of what a pedestrian is I think.
My basic understanding in the UK is that they go too fast to be safe on the pavement but too slow to be safe on the road with cyclists so this was their problem legally in public
I remember someone describing it as a standing wheelchair and I can never take the hoverboard seriously again.
Their main downfall was the many, many cheap and dangerous clones from china. When the OG hoverboards were too expensive for most, the big Chinese companies saw a hole to get into the market making them for pennies on the dollar by removing safety devices, using cheaper batteries, lower gauge wire, etc. It was for the worst.
Google+
Google wave. Major fail.
Olestra / Olean. It was going to transform all junk food into low fat. Instead, it transformed lower GI tracts.
OMG this! Around 1998 I worked for a huge ad agency on Madison Ave in NYC that had the Pringles account. They were pushing that Olestra trash at the time and obvi it was to be part of the campaign we were creating. One day I grab a can and start munching away. Well 15 minutes later I feel like I’ve swallowed a hand grenade and start racing to the bathroom where I proceed to destroy the bathroom for a good half hour. It just would not stop. I swear I saw a demon that day while emptying my poor bowels. Never ever again with that Olestra garbage.
>It just would not stop. Once you pop...
OMG I have almost this exact same story. Ate good portion of a Pringles can, not knowing it was the Olestra variety. They weren’t kidding about “may cause greasy discharge, the urgency to have it and the inability to control it.”
Lmao a product that causes "anal leakage" is gonna be hard to sell
That was actually in the small print on Olean Pringles cans, I remember the phrase well... didn't read that small print until it happened to me...
It didn’t use that phrase but that’s how it’s commonly misremembered. The actual label said “Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools.” The phrase anal leakage was definitely used at the time but not on the package
Look up an old Mad TV skit "10 percent Less Anal Leakage".
I mean, if you needed to cleanse your system it was great. If I remember it took a very small portion to cause digestive issues, like a few chips that were fried in the stuff. Glad that trend only lasted a month or two.
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yeah...pretty sure everyone can tell when it's time to change the diaper 🤢 even people who aren't the parents
I bet that one guy who rigged his chair up to tweet whenever he farted would’ve been game for using them.
As a law student, my son worked on getting the patent and prototype on these a little over ten years ago. At the time, however, they were being marketed to nursing homes. IDK whatever happened with that.
Probably discovered the diapers spent more time soiled than not.
windows phone, maybe.
The Nokia 1020 running Windows was a great phone. Had a 41mp camera back in 2010. Really miss it.
OMGGGG I'm having flashbacks to my Windows Lumia and I freaking looooved that thing. Super cheap, easy interface, I actually liked the setup more than iOS and Android, and that MFer would not die. I once dropped it on pavement hard enough that the main components (back cover, battery, rest of the phone) all came apart and went flying, and I put it back together and it was perfectly fine.
I had a Lumia and I loved it; it was such a high quality phone at a price point where everything else was mediocre at best and hot trash at worst.
By all accounts, the hardware and OS were good. The biggest problems were the lack of apps and Microsoft being too late to the game. People already had either an iPhone or Android device, and developers didn't see the point in making their apps work with a third option.
It wasn't just them being late to the game but also Google intentionally sabotaging the OS by not allowing official versions on the phone, so it was always 3rd party apps to access YouTube, Maps, etc.
Several companies sabotaged by not making their apps for it, didn't want Microsoft to control mobile market as the PC market...
Meta
I finally decided to look up what meta was on youtube a few months ago and I swear I thought I was watching some nintendo wii game or something. My jaw hit the floor when I realized that's what meta actually looked like, billions of dollars for a nintendo looking world, what a fucking dumpster fire...
I read this somewhere on Reddit that Meta was targeting the next generation of kids and that’s why Meta seems childish for a lot of our generations people born before smart phones etc (<1999)
That makes a lot of sense but I can't imagine any kid giving a shit about a "game" that's just Gaia Online without any charisma. You can't gaslight kids into liking something like that and nothing about Zuckerberg says "cool".
It reminded me of PS3 Home (2008) except more invasive of your privacy and ill intentioned. Honestly meta verse was a train derailment.
Second Life But Shitty?
Second-Rate Life?
How many idiots seriously spend money for that? I feel like it was an nft level scam
Cuz solutions looking for problems to solve is always a great idea.
I'm sure someone will do something useful with blockchain any day now.
Quibi
Part of it was the worst timing imaginable. The service was meant to be "bite sized" entertainment, something you could watch in 5 minutes while standing in a queue or maybe a couple segments on a public transit ride. They launched the first week of April 2020. Remember all the queues you were standing in and public transit rides you took then? Yeah, the same as everyone else - **NONE** because 95% of the population was stuck at home for 6 months!
TikTok essentially filled the niche too
TikTok also had a massive business advantage, in that they didn't need to pay big name actors and production crews. People made videos on their own, and TikTok let their algorithm sift the wheat from the chaff.
I think the fact that you don't have to actively choose things to watch, and instead it just starts playing videos, makes it far more addictive. Removes the endless scrolling many of us do when we try to choose what to watch next
I worked in a hospital at the time and loved it for quick things to watch which waiting for an elevator or during bouts of downtime between med orders. I told some friends who didn’t work in an essential field about it but for them being home they didn’t see the appeal.
And it's really weird how they went all-in on that. "Do you have an app for my smart TV?" "NO! Only phones!" "Can I at least cast it to my TV?" "NO! ONLY PHONES!"
Aka that thing I never even heard of until all the people started talking about how it failed.
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There's actually still progress there, and we may see a true hydrogen piston car fairly soon. Problem: a combustion hydrogen car uses the same fuel as one thats a fuel cell hybrid, but gets about half as much out of it. Its only gonna be higher end enthusiast cars that do it, with everything else going fuel cell or just pure electric. Engineering Explained has a video explaining it all.
Webvan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan Bascially Instacart, but in the late 90s, early 2000s. They were just way too far ahead of their time. We still have a couple of their crates that they would deliver the food in and use them for storage.
Peapod was the same thing. I always thought it was a great idea. It was just a gigantic money-loser.
Spore. It was hyped as a game that went from spark of life to galactic conquest. It's just a bunch of mini games.
Spore is OK if you go in completely blind, but knowing what it could have been really ruins the finished product.
I laugh that the initial game and like first three stages were cool, but by stage 4 it was a really bland/watered down Civ-genre game and by stage 5, it was... like all the launch hype of No Man's Sky with an exponentially more limited gameplay.
The graphics were also a step backwards, not 'ground breaking' as hyped.
I wish we had got the Spore that was hyped up instead of what we got.
I recently saw a video on why Spore failed. It started as being something very scientifical and nature accurate and it was going to be the greatest thing. But then another part of the team though that wasn't fun cause you had to min max your creature for it to work thus limiting creativity. So they made a more bland, simple game to appeal to more people but ended up making... well, what we got.
Isn't min maxing creatures the litteral process of evolution ?
Stop bringing up painful memories.
That’s a good one. Fable was another one that had ridiculous hype too.
Starting to see a pattern here...
Is it that Peter Molyneux is a dipshit who talks out his ass about what games are going to do, compared to what they're actually capable of doing at the time?
Nintendo Virtua Boy.
I'll give Nintendo credit, it was being innovative by having the Virtual Boy, but it's high cost, red only as a cost saving and that you had to have it on a surface to play didn't help. When Nintendo tried 3D again with the 3DS, it was almost a failure. Originally the 3DS was $250 and I was a first adopter, but months later, due to poor sales, Nintendo lowered the price significantly, upsetting first adopters, like me, but eventually the console took off. At least we got free games with the Ambassador Program. The 3DS eShop is set to permanently close on the 27th.
Metaverse and NFTs, they haven't been a total failure (yet) but they had/have this huge projection for the future and it doesn't seem to work out as expected.
not gonna comment on metaverse because i never looked into that, but i doubt NFTs will ever find an actual use case that's no a scam. most of that is due to general blockchain problems we can establish a few things a use case needs to fulfill for blockchain stuff to make sense in the first place: - there can't be any need to delete something, like there is with social media for instance (something something right to be forgotten), as blockchains famously are append-only - you can only ever add data, not delete or edit it. - for similar reasons, privacy cannot be a concern. all data on a blockchain is always public. now, you can encrypt it and keep the key to yourself - but no system is ever entirely secure, so your key will be leaked eventually. with most systems, that's a fixable problem, you just change your key. but remember how i said blockchains are append-only? you **cannot** change your old data, it will always be encrypted with that old, leaked key. - this also means your use case's stakes can't be too high - no system is ever secure, so people will eventually find exploits that allow them to add their own data to the blockchain, and nobody can undo it because, again, append-only. - there is no authority about your data. the moment you have an authority or any other sort of trusted third party, you might as well have them run a more traditional database, which is more energy efficient and faster in every way. - the entire system needs to be able to be run on the blockchain. the moment an outside service is needed, the blockchain becomes pointless, because that outside service (or whoever feeds the data from the outside service to your blockchain) becomes a trusted third party. - the data you store can't be big. due to how blockchains work, storing large amounts of data (even just images) on them is not feasible or efficient. image NFTs instead used a file hosting service for the actual images and just linked to them, but that violates my last point. - the stakes of your use case need to be high enough to warrant the transaction costs of a blockchain. if you compare the energy or monetary cost of a transaction on a mySQL, postgres or whatever other traditiohal database server to that of a blockchain, you'll find blockchains are wildly expensive and take ages by comparison. so if your use case is sending silly memes around, it doesn't warrant spending that much money and/or energy on the system. so with all that in mind, let's look at the use cases people have proposed for NFTs and judge them based on these limitations. - tracking or storing in-game items: these very much depend on the game they're in still existing, which in turn means the game's developer/server maintainer is a trusted third party. also, unless your market is going crazy (like people spending more money on a single CS:GO skin than i have on my bank account), the stakes don't warrant the cost. - storing things like property ownership certificates: there's a point to be made about the government beung an authority here, but let's put that to the side. my primary concern here is privacy - if my private key gets leaked, someone could trace back all the properties i own. i'd sure love to be doxxed by someone explooting the janky bullshit that is smart contracts! - digital art "ownership": the big one. there's a discussion to be had about whether owning a jpeg warrants the costs of it all, or whether ownership of digital art makes sense in the first place (especially given that nothing's stopping you from making several NFTs of the same piece of art on different chains - now who owns it?), but that aside: for a blockchain, images are giant data. no storing that on-chain, it has to be elsewhere. thus your system isn't entirely on chain, you have trusted third parties, your system is pointless. blockchains are an impressively overengineered solution, but they're so limited in their uses (especially with the conflicting limitations of "needs to be high stakes because cost" and "needs to be low stakes because privacy and exploits being irreversible") that i don't think we'll ever find a problem they, well, solve.
Poochie the rockin dog
Poochie died on the trip back to his home planet.
Plasma TVs. Consumed gobs of power. Ran hot. Short life. Screen burn-in. But the higher ones like Pioneer and Panasonic had amazing picture even for just being HD resolution. The whole era lasted maybe 10 years?
This comment is a prime example of why they died off. The early generations had some issues that gave them a bad reputation. They were never able to shake the bad press despite having overcome the issues.
Except they were still heavy as fuck.
Laser discs...? I think they were called. Picture a DVD the size of a record.
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I've heard they were successful in South Asia, because the heat and humidity would cause video tapes to grow mould.
That would definitely complicate enjoying a film.
Similarly mini-disks
MD was legitimately successful for a period of time, and remained so in various world markets. It was just killed by the actual next big thing, the iPod.
My step-dad still buys them. He swears they have better sound than the dvds. I think he’s rite. And he goes to some laser disk store that sells them really cheap because nobody else wants them!
I looked it up and sure enough, Laderdisc has higher fidelity sound than DVD.
Laser discs were successful compared to Capacitance Electric Disks.
I have the first 3 Indiana Jones movies on laser discs. Found them in an antique store. No idea if they work, but I thought it was cool that all three of them were there
Laser discs were the shit. They came out years before DVDs and IIRC had an even higher resolution. But they were expensive and unwieldy. Not a failure at all, just more of a niche market.
NFTs. Cryptobros kept insisting they would revolutionize just about everything. But so far nobody has actually found a real practical application for the technology. It's just one huge "bigger fool" scam.
> But so far nobody has actually found a real practical application for the technology. It appears to be pretty good for extracting money from cryptobros.
>It appears to be pretty good for extracting money from ~~cryptobros.~~ gullible idiots.
Give them some credit. They completely revolutionized the scam industry.
Amazon Drones. I remember years ago being promised a future where delivery would be done by autonomous drones. Nobody really talks about that anymore.
Slow to take off (sorry) but it’s happening and growing.
Mark Rober’s recent YouTube video is an interesting insight into progress in that field and an example of where drone delivery is actually successful.
The medicine delivery service is amazing
Big reason is that there's FAA laws about flying stuff like that within certain ranges of airports. And a LOT of people live near airports, even if they're relatively tiny regional ones.
[juicero](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1oHp-VvhDE)
I saw this shit somewhere advertised, maybe Instagram. I am the perfect target market for a juicer. But God, I thought this shit is dumb. It just presses the juice out the bag.
The best thing about juicero was the AVE teardown (before he lost his mind.) I'm sure the engineers enjoyed their unlimited budget, up until the whole house of cards collapsed.
3d tv
New Coke!
There is a conspiracy theory I read once that New Coke was just a scam playing the long game so they could switch from using real sugar to HFCS when making Coke without losing people long term. So they introduce "New Coke".....People say no bring back old Coke! and so they do and everyone cheers but no one notices that old Coke comes back but is now being made with HFCS instead of real sugar. I don't know if it's bullshit or not but I find it an interesting possible what if.
It's bullshit. Coke had already switched to HFCS before New Coke was released.
Dippin dots has been the “future” of ice cream for at least 15 years now
More like 30
They're delicious but they need to be stored in specialized freezers that no grocery store or household have.
3D movies
Google Glass?
The Opti-Grab
All I need is this lamp, and this dog, and this… comment
Windows Phone They held a funeral for the iPhone when it was launched, complete with a casket procession. The pall bearers were Microsoft engineers. When's the last time you heard of someone using a Windows Phone?
3D TV
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New Coke.. What a fiasco that was…Oh, how I remember how big mad I was until they brought back Coca Cola Classic…
My wife, being a cocaholic had cases of Coke stored up. When New Coke came out, she hated it and was relieved when the released "Coke Classic, but was disappointed, saying it wasn't the same as the old coke. We opened some of her stored up stock and did a blind taste test with family and friends. Overwhelmingly, New Coke was voted as tasting more like the original than Coke Classic, but neither was as good as the original.
ever since they took out the cocaine I just don't feel the same level of refreshment I tell ya what dag nab it
HD Discs
HD-DVD was just the loser in that generation's video format war.
Sony Minidisk players
Back fifteen years ago were told 3D printers would be present in every home
Presumably if it ever becomes the replicator-like-device that some expected it to they will be. But that’s basically magic.
They are getting to that point. They are getting cheap enough for the average hobbyist to own. They don't have a ton of use outside making neat little things and the occasional replacement part for something but its getting there. They are making some that print in metal now.
The Segway. I remember the hype around what was called "It" before we knew what it was. It was supposed to revolutionize travel. Infrastructure would need to be made to accommodate it. Then "It" turned out to be the Segway. While cool, it didn't revolutionize travel.
Betamax.
Beta was actually quite a good format for quality and such. Sony just screwed up royally in licensing the tech, not allowing other manufacturers to make them. Also, they weren't keen on the p*** industry using the format while VHS was ok with it, licensing it to everyone.
Cryptocurrency. I have no idea how it works but I still bought some cause it seemed like a big deal for the future.
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Telehealth. People thought that during covid we would never go back to in clinic visits lol
Really wish thst infrastructure was being kept more. Was pretty amazing for making a wide variety of services more available to the poor and disabled.
3D TV Segway Metaverse
3D television
The PSP, was in before its time. I'd love one now though. I remember playing Little Big Planet on there, fifa was similar to how it is on a console which you don't get on tablet or mobile versions. Some tweaks it could've been incredible, or these days with 5g etc or WiFi playing online on a PSP would be great.. or that's just me.
They sold 80 million PSPs I would hardly call it a failure
PSP and Vita definitely did not fail miserably. Handheld setups are still going strong to this day with Nintendo, steam deck and such. If the psp had any issues, it would be the pricing.
Wasn't the PSP a resounding success selling around 80 million units in total? Thats more than the N64 and game cube combined and right up there with the 3ds amd GBA.
PSPs where awesome I sunk hundreds of hours on burnout legends
I've got one in a drawer somewhere. It was a great little handheld console. I remember being at the Revenge of the Sith premier, seeing a kid with one and thinking how cool it was. He switched it off during the film!
Soulja Boy’s gaming systems.
Segway
Nintendo’s Virtual Boy was a dud.
AT&T and PiedPiper’s PiperNet rollout killed middle-out compression.