With the flood of new technology items produced each year, not all of them are destined for success. Whether it was a solid concept done poorly, a wonderful product that was too pricey, a niche item that couldn’t find an audience, or just a futuristic notion that was well ahead of its time, here are 10 Biggest Tech Flops that couldn’t land.
Here are the 10 Biggest Tech Flops of all time;
1. The Newton Message Pad from Apple (1993)
The portable Newton MessagePad, a range of personal data assistants (PDAs), was anticipated to be Apple’s next major success after the Macintosh. The $699 first-generation computer, released in 1993, included handwriting recognition capable of recognizing 10,000 phrases straight out of the box, some excellent A.I. skills for arranging meetings, infrared technology for “beaming” data to other devices, and a lot more.
Regrettably, it was never widely adopted. Although Apple releasing a number of additional versions that improved over time, the Message Pad was regarded one of Apple’s greatest failures due to early poor publicity and a lack of convenient internet connection is considered as one of the Biggest Tech Flops.
After all, a high-priced Apple mobile device? What type of moron thinks that might be a hit?
2. Gloves of Power (1989)
It’s difficult to believe that a product dubbed the “Power Glove” could ever be a commercial Biggest Tech Flops, but it was. Mattel released it as a NES attachment in 1989, offering customers a new method to interact with Nintendo games via different motions.
While it became a cult success, it didn’t sell well at the time — and, like many of the inventions on this list, it didn’t operate as well as stated. Yet, it’s evident that this is the same principle that would eventually be more effectively adopted for technologies like as Nintendo’s Wiimote, PlayStation Move, and motion controllers for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
3. The Virtual Boy (1995)
The Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s initial venture into virtual reality, and it failed miserably in a variety of ways. To begin with, Nintendo’s original asking price for the headset was roughly $180 (around $300 today), a high fee for a mobile gaming experience, particularly since a player looking for a non-console setup could buy a Game Boy for significantly less money.
Nintendo couldn’t salvage the nascent Virtual Boy despite spending roughly $25 million on marketing and lowering the price. Other criticisms included cumbersome headgear, rudimentary visuals, and a variety of negative health impacts such as nausea and headaches. The product would be discontinued less than a year later. Although the headgear lives on in the annals of forgotten electronics, Nintendo’s blunder was a critical step forward in the field of virtual reality technology, with hardware and software that tech firms are still revolutionizing to this day.
4. Glasstron, Sony (1996)
The Sony Glasstron, which cost $900 ($1,350 now), was a head-mounted display that claimed to mimic “the viewing experience of a 52-inch TV at 6.5 feet.” There were two 0.55-inch LCD panels inside, each with a resolution of 180,000 pixels.
Put on a set of stereo speaker earphones and munch some popcorn, and you’ll feel as though you’re sitting in a genuine movie theater. On the outside, you seemed to be a bit of a jerk. Yeah, and it probably made you feel nauseated as well.
5. Polaroids and Polavision (1977)
Imagine being able to use the immediate technique to photography pioneered by Polaroid to moving images. It may not seem very amazing in an era when whole movies can be filmed on cellphones, but it surely did back in 1977.
Polavision contained a camera, film, and movie reader, allowing you to quickly produce and watch your motion picture. The difficulty was that the movies had no sound, lasted just 2.5 minutes, and needed very high lighting to shoot owing to the poor film speed. In the near term, most individuals used Super 8 cameras, even though this required sending your films out to be processed. VHS cassettes and the introduction of the camcorder eventually superseded both.
6. LaserDisc (1978) (1978)
Anybody who believes that DVD was the first disc-based home video format should reconsider! LaserDiscs, which debuted in 1978, provided significantly improved picture and sound quality than VHS cassettes, and pioneered the kind of movie “extras” that eventually became a fundamental component of DVD and Blu-ray presentations.
However, the discs were easily damaged, the pricey LaserDisc players were very loud, and there was no way to record TV episodes with them. They finally died out in the 1990s.
7. Copland (1994–1996) (1994–1996)
Apple attempted and failed to replace its old System 7 operating system with a newer, more reliable operating system that enabled multitasking. Work on System 8 had started under the Copland codename by 1994, but the project quickly broke apart. Copland became a collection of features rather than a workable operating system as a result of poor project management and feature creep.
The Copland project was formally discontinued in 1996, but not everything went wrong for Apple. The business went out and purchased Steve Jobs’ company NeXT and third-party system modifications to develop a new operating system. Features created for Copland were later incorporated to subsequent OS versions, laying the groundwork for the contemporary macOS.
8. Bob from Microsoft (1995)
It is true that Microsoft has been a driving factor in how we use computers, but it is also apparent that much of Windows was stolen wholesale from Apple’s macOS. In 1995, Bill Gates and team decided to put their own twist on a user-friendly operating system, which proved to be a colossal failure & one of the Biggest Tech Flops.
Microsoft Bob was a strangely happy newbie-focused operating system that cost over $100 and had a variety of chatty “guides” that walked you through your experience. It was widely touted, but the system requirements were expensive, and the productivity apps supplied were basic. A fun fact: the widely despised Comic Sans font was created for Bob but never utilized.
9. Lotus Jazz Ensemble (1985)
To be honest, Lotus 1-2-3 was a top productivity software in the 1980s. The spreadsheet application was a major selling feature for IBM PCs, allowing users to collect and compare data more quickly and effectively than ever before. Lotus became a big success, earning more money than Microsoft at the time. Then it attempted to follow up and had one of the worst sophomore slumps in computing history.
Jazz was a productivity package for Macintosh computers that included a word processor, spreadsheet, and database software. It was released in 1985 cost a stunning $595 and came on four floppy disks that had to be switched and changed while running the program—and it was a huge commercial disaster and Biggest Tech Flops.
This “klutzy multifunction program…fell far short of Lotus’s reputation for speedy, inventive, highly useful software,” as we reported in the November 1987 issue(Opens in a new window) of PC Magazine. Its black-rubber package, complete with a vest-pocket container for the disks, is now considered a collector’s item.
10. The GNU Hurd (1990–Present)
Unix was invented in the 1970s. The GNU Project concluded in 1990 that it was time to replace Unix with a free offering named GNU Hurd (Opens in a new window). GNU Hurd has yet to be published as a viable operating system for public use, thirty-plus years after development on the project began. Several GNU components were transferred over to build the Linux operating system, so it wasn’t a total loss, but Hurd is a perfect illustration of how software development is fluid and never-ending and it ends with the Biggest Tech Flops.
