A friend and I were talking about making an anti time capsule; essentially listing technologies that were super hyped at the time but quickly sank into oblivion. So here is my top 5 list with a bonus phoenix at the end.
Segway
This may be the king of the hype cycle with no less than Steve Jobs claiming that it was going to change the way cities were built.
“If enough people see the machine you won’t have to convince them to architect cities around it. It’ll just happen.” — Steve Jobs, quoted in a book proposal
Google Wave
When Google first announced Wave people clamored for invites. After they released the first 100,000 there were blog posts about how one could get invited. Having a Wave account showed you were on the cutting edge and in the know.
Google Wave was only around for a year, but we will all remember it as a hugely hyped failure from Australia.
Webvan
Webvan, the grocery delivery service started by the founder of Borders books stores, took $1.2 billion in funding during the dotcom bubble. To be fair, today Fresh Direct seems to be doing just fine, so this is a failure in execution over vision. But it is still a pretty spectacular failure.
Zune
Discontinued in 2011, Zune was Microsofts ill fated attempt to compete with the iPod.
This product was probably DOA due to the DRM imposed my Microsoft. You could either buy an iPod that would play any mp3 you had, or a Zune player that would only play WMA files. Apparently you could convert an mp3 to a WMA file, but at the time I remember thinking it was a brain dead decision to require DRM on all files.
A Small World
For a time the early social networking site that billed itself as Myspace for Millionaires garnered attention and investment. The exclusivity and high society angle made it good fodder for newspaper and magazine articles: W Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and their long list of press articles.
But then Facebook came along.
While the company has pivoted several times it now has a bit of a sordid history of lawsuits.
YouTube ???
As an special bonus, while researching the Zune failure, I found this 2009 Time Magazine article declaring the 10 worst failures in tech including YouTube.
In November 2006, Google (GOOG) bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. There is a fairly good chance that the search company will never get a return on that investment.
Oops. I guess it isn’t a good idea to call the fight before it’s over.
There are others that should probably have made my list, but these are the ones that were most personal to me. Which tech disasters do you remember most vividly?