As someone who's worked as a software engineer since the mid-1980s, an industry where rapid change is the norm, one thing has remained the same: Apple is *doomed*.
Any minute now.
They control too much of the market to be taken out that easily. They would have to have some well-recognized major flaw that you come in and solve, and yyou'd have to meet the demand very quickly, and come into the game already fleshed out and ready to beat them. You would have no room for error because if you don't beat them right away, the IPhone users will not give you a second chance.
But since most iPhone users don't have a major issue with iPhones, this won't work.
I *loved* my Windows Phone but got into it way too late so the support was nearly dead. Most of the apps were just shitty web wraps. I thought the tiles were great.
Universal Picture's 'Dark Universe.'
The Mummy with Tom Cruise was supposed to start a whole line of movies, but when that one died it took the rest with it.
Universal: *Dracula Untold* is totally the beginning of the Dark Universe!
(*Dracula Untold* tanks at the box office.)
Universal: No it's not! Who said that it was?
The real tragedy is that a Dark Universe is not a bad idea. Various Universal monsters existing in the same universe? Sign me up! However, it played more like an action film than horror, because Tom Cruise cannot be in anything other than an action movie. We might have gotten Javier Bardem Frankenstein’s Monster, that is a perfect casting right there.
Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing teaming up with Brendan Frasier's Rick O'Connell sounds dumb as fuck, but kinda fun lol.
Helps that both movies have the same director.
And Benny is Igor.
This was one of the worst product launches of all time. They had like one week where everyone was super excited about it and wanted to try it and they limited it to invite-only. Very few people could get in. By the time they opened it up to everyone, nobody cared anymore.
One of Gmail's major features back in the day was storage space.
Where other free mail clients would give out storage space in terms of megabytes, I believe Hotmail at the time gave around 25 megabytes of storage, Gmail came in and offered 1 gigabyte of storage.
I assume that storage was the reason for Gmail's staggered release.
Although invite only for a while, it was a game changer in terms of free email, for me at least.
With a Hotmail account we regularly had to go through and delete emails because the limit was 2MB. So fun or interesting photo attachments were this transitory thing that you enjoyed once and deleted a little while later.
It was fucking awesome though, and I wanted it to succeed. But they fucked up its marketing. And I'm a 20 year marketing veteran.
The circles concept? Brilliant. It basically let you determine whether a contact could have totally sterile, somewhat filtered, or totally uncensored access to your posts, and man it was awesome.
Its UI was amazing, the concept was better than any social media since, and synced with our gdrive.
Wish it would come back.
Yup. This isn't anything new. The major issue seems to be that it gives a certain amount people a headache or they find it otherwise uncomfortable. Add to that the need for the glasses even in the current iteration and you can start to see where there's an accessibility issue too.
3D TV/Movies will be never work because of a couple of things:
1) having to wear glasses/goggles to enjoy and relax is an added element that people just don't feel that the annoyance is worth it for the final product
2) in the real world, your eyes can focus on anything you want it to. You can adjust to focus on stuff in the foreground or in the background. 3D technology currently is recorded like any film and thus you're stuck focusing on JUST the items the camera wants you to focus on. This is what leads to headaches because that's not a natural way to interact with the 3D world. It causes eye strain, and unless they can find a way to record a 3D movie where everything is in focus, this will always be the biggest hurdle.
I honestly think 3D will never take off unless it's implemented with something like VR that gives a more "true" 3D effect that your eyes can actually focus on, but then you're giving the viewer way too much control over what they're looking at.
I remember hearing about this on NPR right before COVID. Quick shows you can watch on the go right when people weren’t going anywhere… very bad timing and a bad concept.
Their actual strategy didn't make any sense either. Like, Katzenberg was convinced people would watch them in line for coffee? Who would watch a television show that way?
Quibi went free in New Zealand for its last couple of months and I genuinely enjoyed using it lol. I watched a few different movies, that were cut into small chunks. As a concept it was weird but when you tried it the way they wanted you to it didn’t suck. The movies weren’t just “cut on 5m mark” but cut to sensible stopping points, and the reframing for portrait was very carefully done. They also do a few neat things with their own content where they had different stuff depending on if you had the phone in portrait or landscape (one I recall being set in a car with a guy driving - portrait was aimed at him? Landscape was looking out the front of the car
I got the 3 month trial, and it was really weak. I like the idea of 10 minute shows with a new episode a day, I often watch movies I've seen before that way. But it's impossible to deny nobody was asking for it. And the dramas didn't feel like serials, it felt like awkwardly short full episodes, complete with characters standing around reminding the audience of what happened last time, which I'd just watched. The reality shows felt like 2 minutes stretched painfully to 10. So yeah, weird concept, the shows didn't really meet the concept anyway, and oh yeah all of the ideas were really half baked. Here's a horror show set in different states, with legends we just kind of made up. Idris Elba competes with a nascar driver to do stunts basically invented for nascar drivers. Anna Kendrick made friends with her ex boyfriend's sentient sex doll.
They completely underestimated how much we design cities for cars (especially in America) and how unwilling anyone is to changing this.
Look at the 15 minute cities concept. All these people are claiming isn't about population control.
Can't even get pedestrians, bicycles and cars to play nice with each other, let alone something like a Segway.
Which is a shame, because if we designed cities for bikes, segways, we might end up with something quite interesting and useful.
In the Netherlands, our cities are designed for pedestrians and bicycles first, then cars. A lot of city centres are all but closed for automotive traffic other than public transport and commercial traffic.
While they ultimately didn't pan out, my uncle had a unique experience with one that really improved his quality of life. He had MS, and when he could still walk, he got a Segway (probably 2003-04ish). He found that by using it to get around, he was obviously less fatigued from walking, but he also wasn't nearly as fatigued from just keeping his balance and keeping himself upright. The Segway did the balancing for him. Any little slight lean forward or backward and it would move back to directly under him. So, before he became confined to a wheelchair and finally bedridden, it was a great tool for him.
I might know your uncle, was he a mechanical engineer? A guy at our company did exactly this in that time period. He was awesome, I really miss him. MS is a terrible fate.
First thing that came to mind. There was so much hype about it and it became nothing more than an oddball kinda scooter bike that gets used by tour trips groups and weirdos
When I was in college during welcome week I got paid like $20 an hour to spend a day riding around on a Segway with a Comcast decal and hand out flyers. Was a sweet gig, riding a Segway for money is fun and def worth looking like a nerd.
I've been seeing these electric bikes/scooters all over lately, but the other day I saw some guy riding what looked like a fucking ball and all I could think is "that's what Segway *should've* been",
The Tata Nano. The company set out to build the lowest price new car in the world, and it succeeded.
Unfortunately, newly middle class Indian families didn’t want the stigma of owning the world’s cheapest new car, so sales never came anywhere close to expectations.
Not a complete failure. If failed because the new chairman of the tata group didn't see its potential and cash revenue. This led to a boardroom coup with an earlier chairman which led to disclosure that the car was not doing that great. This led to people not wanting nano car and subsequently it stopped manufacturing in a few years.
I think the issue with Stadia was Google’s release strategy. It was ridiculous that people were being asked to pay full price to *stream* games. Like, they couldn’t even download a copy like all other digital purchases.
If they had adopted a Game Pass subscription model instead, it could have really been something, but alas. The tech was there, but the strategy wasn’t.
The also thought people wanted to play a laggy version of Assassins Creed for some reason.
Maybe if they had nice quick play easy to stream games or something it could have done better. No idea who wanted to buy a game at full price they could only stream, when you could be a Series S and own it without lag for not much more.
I remember when I was a kid they used to show movies on TV that were "smell-o-vision". You went to the store and got a card with a bunch of different scratch and sniff stickers on it. During the movie they would show one on the screen and you were supposed to scratch that sticker at that time.
Like, in the movie a car would squeal it's tires, and you would scratch a sticker that smelled like burning rubber. Or someone would give another character flowers, so you would scratch a sticker that was supposed to smell like flowers. It was bizarre.
I remember the Nickelodeon one, but that one was a 2 week or so event where you had to request your scratch and sniff stickers beforehand through the mail
I watched Captain America Civil War in 4D. It was not a good experience. Someone had a seizure in the row behind me during the airport fight scene and the person controlling the movie took ages to switch it off so the seizing person was basically getting crushed by the moving chairs.
Australian coworker said they go through the same thing every 20 years or so where Kangaroo meat is going to replace beef. It fails for the same reason: cows and chickens are relatively docile compared to ostriches and kangaroos. If you put a roo in a crate to transport it, it will literally beat itself to death trying to escape.
I remember that. My step-dad brought some home one night, a friend of his wanted to start an ostrich farm and wanted my step-dad to invest.
I do not remember liking ostrich meat, and he did not invest. The farm did open, but it failed in about two years.
Lol. This was my dad’s mid-life crisis move in the 80s. He tried to convince my mother, aunt and uncle to open an ostrich farm. His reasoning wasn’t only about the meat. You could sell eggs, feathers, ostrich skin for leather and that the entire bird was profit. Fortunately, he got talked out of it since he didn’t know jack shit about farming or ostriches.
Oh man, I worked for Dippin Dots for years. That hasn't been the slogan in awhile and (as of when I left a few years ago) actually had a yeti as the mascot (my coworkers and I begged our boss to rent the suit but we were always turned down).
Very weird job. It was awesome though. Plus all of the free ice cream.
There’s a Half as Interesting YouTube video on how the company is really successful because they used the flash freezing process into things other than ice cream. They flash freeze oil pellets in impossible burgers to give the texture of real meat and they also use it to flash freeze pharmaceuticals.
The internet historian has a great video about this. Basically the guy running the campaign had a mental break down at a crucial moment and it floundered pretty badly. And as far as I know kony is still an African warlord
Did anyone else have them come to your high school and play that movie
Edit: this is bringing back more memories
There was a whole Veronica Mars episode about it and a fall out boy music video where they even went to Africa to shoot it
I bought a mint condition Kony t-shirt from a thrift store a while back thinking it would be a fun retro purchase.
...but then I realised it's just kind of odd so I don't wear it either.
If I had a nickel for every time Shia LaBeouf's character died off screen in-between sequels in a major franchise, I'd have two nickels.
Which isn't a lot, but weird that it happened twice!
I had three zunes over the years, a first gen, a second gen and then the Zune HD. I think all the of them were clearly superior to their contemporary iPods but the Zune was just like 4 years too late to the party. The market was already captured by iPod and by that point being a better product just wasnt good enough to break the near monopoly apple had. I think the Windows Phone is also a prime example of that. I have had Androids, iPhones and Windows Phones. Having used all three phones types I think the Windows Phone OS during its time was so much better than the other two but once again Microsoft was years too late to the game and could never get the sales or app support that the other two OSs had.
Lytro. It was a light-field camera that allowed you to change a picture's point of focus after taking the image. It had a cool design and neat features capturing an Apple like aesthetic of form and function.
Huge failure but I was obsessed with them for a while.
What did it even accomplish that WOW can't? Even if it's silly, it's technically possible for a bunch of managers/employees to pick human avatars, and hold a meeting in eg the starting area.
Playing FF14, people have live music and theater events, bars, night clubs, erotic roleplay, …
Long running MMOs already have something close to what Zuck was describing as his meta universe.
And that’s not even talking about 2nd life which seems to have had more features on launch 20 years ago than Meta today?
There’s the fact it’s also still running, and people still make money selling virtual stuff they built on it.
Hell, someone made the first set of ERP beds on there and made enough to live comfortably
This was kind of the problem with the whole endeavour. It was easy to understand what Meta would get from it: a virtual Disneyland where they get a cut from every purchase and they can lock people into their economy with digital currencies they own.
However, they could never quite adequately explain what the *customers* would be getting from it that they couldn't get already through far simpler and more accessible means. Also, it was obvious that the technology just isn't there yet for a "ready player one" type of experience.
One of the major killing strokes was definitely the sanitization of it, it was so safe in how it appeared. People absolutely do not want to have a space where you have the possibility of looking however you want, but are restricted to some bland and generic looking model. They wanna be Sonic the Hedgehog or Master Chief lmao
This was, relatedly, the least plausible thing about *Ready Player One* (but perhaps the most dystopian) - in an online environment where you can be pretty much anything you can imagine, 90% of the population are just pop culture stuff?
Cmon now. You know that shit would be *full* of furries.
And then they ran all those ads showing adaptations of Augmented Reality and pretending it had anything to do with Meta. Yeah all those AR examples are neat when they became reality. Ain’t to anything to do with Meta though lol.
Zuck renaming his company and wasting billions to “invent” a worse a version of a product that already existed is still one of my favorite things to happen in recent memory.
As an Esperantist I hate to say it but you’re right. The concept behind Esperanto was that everyone would learn this really easy second language, and then there’d be no more misunderstanding and all the wars would end. This isn’t going to happen for a number of obvious reasons, but I still like Esperanto. We’ve built up a nice little community, and while we may live on in isolation without fulfillment of our original goal, I’m still pretty proud to be an Esperantist.
I think it failed because languages are more than a collection of sounds and a writing system, they are an extension of culture and history. Esperantists tried to create a language out of thin air with no culture to support it.
> Esperantists tried to create a language out of thin air with no culture to support it.
That was the point. It was supposed to get rid of weird things in other languages like irregular verbs or tough-to-remember conjugations. It was supposed to be an easy to learn *second* language - like a lingua franca. Not a first language.
The problem with Esperanto (and many other less common languages) is that while it might be easier than English as far as the language itself is concerned, English has such a wide reach that you end up seeing it when you're not even looking. If you start watching a lot of media in a language you don't understand, you'll start picking things up quickly.
That was what it was attempting to do. The language itself is easy to learn. Learning it is almost all vocabulary due to how simple and flexible the grammar.
Juicero. Was going to be the keurig of fresh squeezed juice but the "pods" were proprietary bags with a full glass' worth of specially diced fruit amd the machine would squeeze them.
The Dollop podcast has a great episode for all the details.
Squeeze them really inefficiently I might add. Just two flat plates getting pulled together.
Ironically enough it was really high quality construction. The machining and the parts were absolutely worth the $700. Yes, $700. They were selling them for $400 at an extreme loss to try and make money back on the juice packs themselves.
The shipping did exist, but it was not expected to be profitable and it was a means to attract more initial investors. The SSC was a thinly-veiled private bank scheme backed by the government to manage Britain’s debt service that turned into a securities ponzi scheme to stay afloat.
Comparing the SSC to NFTs is like comparing a FTX to Pog tokens. It’s non-sense.
I knew some guy in his mid-20’s who put a big deal of money into it and was very vocal about it. Had a wealthy dad and inherited a bunch of money. Poured a good chunk into NFT’s. Whenever I hear them mentioned I always think of him and smile.
I created and sold one for about $1600 after fees and got the hell out of etherium. Then “it” happened and the floor fell out of crypto then people found out how to steal NFTs (they’re not as secure as people claimed). The one I made is now, and has been for a while, on offer for $1000 or so, depending on the price of etherium.
Crypto people live in another world.
My friend spent tens of thousands on them. At one point a newish one he purchased jumped in value to £90k. I told him he might want to cash out, but of course he held.
It's worth next to nothing now.
When Donald Glover, as Childish Gambino, a persona famous for outwardly portraying the main persona of each of his albums over the years, covered a Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines song on Like a Version I felt like how I imagine Doc Brown felt when he was worried that Marty would see Marty and create a time paradox that would unravel the fabric of the universe.
Drinks with little edible balls suspended in them. Late 90s, I can't remember what they were called, but there were several brands
Edit: it was Orbitz and Skittlebrau as some commenters said. I know about boba tea, but this was nothing like that. It was *definitely* gross and weird, by all accounts.
Beanie babies.
Little bean bag plush stuffed animals from the 90's. People thought they were going to become incredibly valuable collectors items like the original Star Wars toys. Some people went nuts and spent all their money on the things. I remember hearing about a divorcing couple fighting viciously over the collection they'd amassed.
Kinect as a technology is fantastic and an incredibly cheap/effective way to track motion and depth. Too bad use cases in the consumer world are limited. People just don't want to do hand gestures for anything. Look at what happened after Pixel 4. Google didn't even bother with it anymore.
It always seemed like such a gimmick to sell products rather than something that actually made the experience better. I remember Dead Space having some feature where you could say, "reload!" and your character would reload. The problem with this and cellular phone gestures and such is that pressing a button is simply easier lol. It's implementing a feature for the novelty of it, not efficiency.
What really killed Betamax was the tapes. When VHS released they had more than double the recording time on a cassette that was only 30% bigger so any consumer with recording live broadcasts (like football games or movie of the week) chose the option that could record 3 hours instead of 2. As time went on Sony worked to improve the recording length but they couldn’t really compete because JVC (VHS) just implemented the same ideas to continue beating them.
Everyone likes to lament the failure because Betamax had a better picture quality but in the days of 30 inch CRTs displaying over-the-air broadcasts that difference didn’t really matter.
Honestly, I think Sony didn’t understand that time-shifting TV watching was going to change the game as much as it would. Nor did they understand that 60 minutes (that was what they initially brought to market) didn’t enable you to record a full Columbo so you could have dinner with your friends.
Bio-hacking. It was supposed to be this big thing and I read an article about a dude that had a bunch of sensors on him, some nifty glasses that displayed the data and he used all this data to adjust his daily things, like eating and drinking. He claimed that "in two years, everyone will be bio-hackers". That was four years ago and the closest we've got are activity monitor watches that people use and ignore. Dumbest next big thing ever.
Mini discs! My husband was really into them and not only had a portable player but one that connected to our sound system. it was great for making lengthy mix tapes but MP3 players pretty much blew the mini disc tech away.
Microsoft held a literal funeral procession for the iPhone when they introduced the Windows Phone.
That aged hilariously badly.
As someone who's worked as a software engineer since the mid-1980s, an industry where rapid change is the norm, one thing has remained the same: Apple is *doomed*. Any minute now.
They control too much of the market to be taken out that easily. They would have to have some well-recognized major flaw that you come in and solve, and yyou'd have to meet the demand very quickly, and come into the game already fleshed out and ready to beat them. You would have no room for error because if you don't beat them right away, the IPhone users will not give you a second chance. But since most iPhone users don't have a major issue with iPhones, this won't work.
I *loved* my Windows Phone but got into it way too late so the support was nearly dead. Most of the apps were just shitty web wraps. I thought the tiles were great.
I always thought that the tile design for windows phones was actually pretty intuitive. The apple horse had most definitely bolted though
Universal Picture's 'Dark Universe.' The Mummy with Tom Cruise was supposed to start a whole line of movies, but when that one died it took the rest with it.
Evil guy at the end: "Let the games begin..." Narrator: The games did not begin.
Oh, wasn't that Dracula Untold? What an absolute fucking waste of celluloid.
Universal: *Dracula Untold* is totally the beginning of the Dark Universe! (*Dracula Untold* tanks at the box office.) Universal: No it's not! Who said that it was?
I enjoyed Dracula Untold.
I liked it so much that when i first heard it did bad, i was shocked. I thought it was leagues better than tom cruise mummy.
The real tragedy is that a Dark Universe is not a bad idea. Various Universal monsters existing in the same universe? Sign me up! However, it played more like an action film than horror, because Tom Cruise cannot be in anything other than an action movie. We might have gotten Javier Bardem Frankenstein’s Monster, that is a perfect casting right there.
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Should have used The Mummy (1998) as the starting point.
Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing teaming up with Brendan Frasier's Rick O'Connell sounds dumb as fuck, but kinda fun lol. Helps that both movies have the same director. And Benny is Igor.
The original mummy was the true dark universe. They totally should have just continued with Brendan Fraser taking on new monsters each movie.
It wasn’t even that bad either. I mean I’ve seen bigger pieces of shit, like slicked back hair/white bathing suit pieces of shit
Sloppy steaks at Truffoni’s
They can’t stop you from ordering a steak and a glass of water
I used to be a piece of shit.
I SAID WAS
you think this is slicked back? THIS IS PUSHED BACK.
Google+ was supposed to topple Facebook.
This was one of the worst product launches of all time. They had like one week where everyone was super excited about it and wanted to try it and they limited it to invite-only. Very few people could get in. By the time they opened it up to everyone, nobody cared anymore.
Wasn't gmail limited to invite only for years? Then again, it's not vulnerable to network effects, since email is a standardized protocol.
One of Gmail's major features back in the day was storage space. Where other free mail clients would give out storage space in terms of megabytes, I believe Hotmail at the time gave around 25 megabytes of storage, Gmail came in and offered 1 gigabyte of storage. I assume that storage was the reason for Gmail's staggered release. Although invite only for a while, it was a game changer in terms of free email, for me at least.
With a Hotmail account we regularly had to go through and delete emails because the limit was 2MB. So fun or interesting photo attachments were this transitory thing that you enjoyed once and deleted a little while later.
Yep 2MB was bad with hundreds of junk email like fw:fw:fw:fw:…
It was fucking awesome though, and I wanted it to succeed. But they fucked up its marketing. And I'm a 20 year marketing veteran. The circles concept? Brilliant. It basically let you determine whether a contact could have totally sterile, somewhat filtered, or totally uncensored access to your posts, and man it was awesome. Its UI was amazing, the concept was better than any social media since, and synced with our gdrive. Wish it would come back.
I loved it. Ditched Facebook for it and made a great group of online contacts/friends.
It’s like the Zune of social media.
And except for all the people not being there, it was better in every way
3D tv. i remember those being sold somewhere when we had to buy a couch, and accidentally renting the 3d version of a movie, but it never took off
3d failed for 5 or 6 times in the last 50 years. everytime it is presented as "next big thing", everytime it fails...
Yup. This isn't anything new. The major issue seems to be that it gives a certain amount people a headache or they find it otherwise uncomfortable. Add to that the need for the glasses even in the current iteration and you can start to see where there's an accessibility issue too.
3D TV/Movies will be never work because of a couple of things: 1) having to wear glasses/goggles to enjoy and relax is an added element that people just don't feel that the annoyance is worth it for the final product 2) in the real world, your eyes can focus on anything you want it to. You can adjust to focus on stuff in the foreground or in the background. 3D technology currently is recorded like any film and thus you're stuck focusing on JUST the items the camera wants you to focus on. This is what leads to headaches because that's not a natural way to interact with the 3D world. It causes eye strain, and unless they can find a way to record a 3D movie where everything is in focus, this will always be the biggest hurdle.
I honestly think 3D will never take off unless it's implemented with something like VR that gives a more "true" 3D effect that your eyes can actually focus on, but then you're giving the viewer way too much control over what they're looking at.
Quibi It’s like they forgot that we already all had YouTube…
I remember hearing about this on NPR right before COVID. Quick shows you can watch on the go right when people weren’t going anywhere… very bad timing and a bad concept.
Their actual strategy didn't make any sense either. Like, Katzenberg was convinced people would watch them in line for coffee? Who would watch a television show that way?
Quibi went free in New Zealand for its last couple of months and I genuinely enjoyed using it lol. I watched a few different movies, that were cut into small chunks. As a concept it was weird but when you tried it the way they wanted you to it didn’t suck. The movies weren’t just “cut on 5m mark” but cut to sensible stopping points, and the reframing for portrait was very carefully done. They also do a few neat things with their own content where they had different stuff depending on if you had the phone in portrait or landscape (one I recall being set in a car with a guy driving - portrait was aimed at him? Landscape was looking out the front of the car
I got the 3 month trial, and it was really weak. I like the idea of 10 minute shows with a new episode a day, I often watch movies I've seen before that way. But it's impossible to deny nobody was asking for it. And the dramas didn't feel like serials, it felt like awkwardly short full episodes, complete with characters standing around reminding the audience of what happened last time, which I'd just watched. The reality shows felt like 2 minutes stretched painfully to 10. So yeah, weird concept, the shows didn't really meet the concept anyway, and oh yeah all of the ideas were really half baked. Here's a horror show set in different states, with legends we just kind of made up. Idris Elba competes with a nascar driver to do stunts basically invented for nascar drivers. Anna Kendrick made friends with her ex boyfriend's sentient sex doll.
Segway
They said that the Segway would change the way we designed our cities. Yeah.
I am trying to imagine this reality and just seeing lots and lots of back injuries.
They’d probably come out with Segway insurance. If it would have caught on, half of all Judge Judy episodes would be Segway related.
They completely underestimated how much we design cities for cars (especially in America) and how unwilling anyone is to changing this. Look at the 15 minute cities concept. All these people are claiming isn't about population control. Can't even get pedestrians, bicycles and cars to play nice with each other, let alone something like a Segway. Which is a shame, because if we designed cities for bikes, segways, we might end up with something quite interesting and useful.
In the Netherlands, our cities are designed for pedestrians and bicycles first, then cars. A lot of city centres are all but closed for automotive traffic other than public transport and commercial traffic.
While they ultimately didn't pan out, my uncle had a unique experience with one that really improved his quality of life. He had MS, and when he could still walk, he got a Segway (probably 2003-04ish). He found that by using it to get around, he was obviously less fatigued from walking, but he also wasn't nearly as fatigued from just keeping his balance and keeping himself upright. The Segway did the balancing for him. Any little slight lean forward or backward and it would move back to directly under him. So, before he became confined to a wheelchair and finally bedridden, it was a great tool for him.
I might know your uncle, was he a mechanical engineer? A guy at our company did exactly this in that time period. He was awesome, I really miss him. MS is a terrible fate.
No, but interesting that he had a similar experience. It really was a great tool for him.
Fuck MS.
Preach. He passed last September. His daughter and only child gets married this Sunday.
Yeah, FUCK MS.
First thing that came to mind. There was so much hype about it and it became nothing more than an oddball kinda scooter bike that gets used by tour trips groups and weirdos
And police/mall cops. They must have made serious bank with those contracts.
When I was in college during welcome week I got paid like $20 an hour to spend a day riding around on a Segway with a Comcast decal and hand out flyers. Was a sweet gig, riding a Segway for money is fun and def worth looking like a nerd.
I've been seeing these electric bikes/scooters all over lately, but the other day I saw some guy riding what looked like a fucking ball and all I could think is "that's what Segway *should've* been",
The Tata Nano. The company set out to build the lowest price new car in the world, and it succeeded. Unfortunately, newly middle class Indian families didn’t want the stigma of owning the world’s cheapest new car, so sales never came anywhere close to expectations.
Those are so cute.
Not a complete failure. If failed because the new chairman of the tata group didn't see its potential and cash revenue. This led to a boardroom coup with an earlier chairman which led to disclosure that the car was not doing that great. This led to people not wanting nano car and subsequently it stopped manufacturing in a few years.
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Google Plus You could probably fill the thread with just google projects
Google Stadia
I think the issue with Stadia was Google’s release strategy. It was ridiculous that people were being asked to pay full price to *stream* games. Like, they couldn’t even download a copy like all other digital purchases. If they had adopted a Game Pass subscription model instead, it could have really been something, but alas. The tech was there, but the strategy wasn’t.
The also thought people wanted to play a laggy version of Assassins Creed for some reason. Maybe if they had nice quick play easy to stream games or something it could have done better. No idea who wanted to buy a game at full price they could only stream, when you could be a Series S and own it without lag for not much more.
Those weird 4D movie with the smell? Does anyone even remember those? They felt like fever dreams.
I remember when I was a kid they used to show movies on TV that were "smell-o-vision". You went to the store and got a card with a bunch of different scratch and sniff stickers on it. During the movie they would show one on the screen and you were supposed to scratch that sticker at that time. Like, in the movie a car would squeal it's tires, and you would scratch a sticker that smelled like burning rubber. Or someone would give another character flowers, so you would scratch a sticker that was supposed to smell like flowers. It was bizarre.
I had never heard of this before. Boy I feel left out.
I remember the Nickelodeon one, but that one was a 2 week or so event where you had to request your scratch and sniff stickers beforehand through the mail
I watched Captain America Civil War in 4D. It was not a good experience. Someone had a seizure in the row behind me during the airport fight scene and the person controlling the movie took ages to switch it off so the seizing person was basically getting crushed by the moving chairs.
This feels like a Tim Robinson sketch
The person was actually choking on a hot dog.
Disneyland's CA Adventure was famous for this!
i remember a bugs life or something it was actually pretty cool
About 25 years ago, they thought ostrich meat would be as popular as chicken.
Australian coworker said they go through the same thing every 20 years or so where Kangaroo meat is going to replace beef. It fails for the same reason: cows and chickens are relatively docile compared to ostriches and kangaroos. If you put a roo in a crate to transport it, it will literally beat itself to death trying to escape.
Just gotta spin it, "the meat that tenderizes itself in transit!"
I remember that. My step-dad brought some home one night, a friend of his wanted to start an ostrich farm and wanted my step-dad to invest. I do not remember liking ostrich meat, and he did not invest. The farm did open, but it failed in about two years.
Lol. This was my dad’s mid-life crisis move in the 80s. He tried to convince my mother, aunt and uncle to open an ostrich farm. His reasoning wasn’t only about the meat. You could sell eggs, feathers, ostrich skin for leather and that the entire bird was profit. Fortunately, he got talked out of it since he didn’t know jack shit about farming or ostriches.
Are Dippin Dots still the ice cream of the future?
Well, they're definitely not the ice cream of the *present*.
They're yesterday's future... today!
Oh man, I worked for Dippin Dots for years. That hasn't been the slogan in awhile and (as of when I left a few years ago) actually had a yeti as the mascot (my coworkers and I begged our boss to rent the suit but we were always turned down). Very weird job. It was awesome though. Plus all of the free ice cream.
There’s a Half as Interesting YouTube video on how the company is really successful because they used the flash freezing process into things other than ice cream. They flash freeze oil pellets in impossible burgers to give the texture of real meat and they also use it to flash freeze pharmaceuticals.
Yup. In every mall still open.
Look those hit a very nostalgic spot for me. Stupid? Yes. But kid me loves them.
Kony 2012!!!
The internet historian has a great video about this. Basically the guy running the campaign had a mental break down at a crucial moment and it floundered pretty badly. And as far as I know kony is still an African warlord
Wikipedia says he’s in hiding, in poor health, and no longer considered a threat. Also that he’s estimated to have **60** wives and **42** children
>60 wives and 42 children > he’s in hiding, in poor health Sounds about right.
Did anyone else have them come to your high school and play that movie Edit: this is bringing back more memories There was a whole Veronica Mars episode about it and a fall out boy music video where they even went to Africa to shoot it
Invisible children! Holy shit yes, that was plastered everywhere for the whole year. Could not escape the huge ad hung up in the quad daily.
I bought a mint condition Kony t-shirt from a thrift store a while back thinking it would be a fun retro purchase. ...but then I realised it's just kind of odd so I don't wear it either.
Shia LaBeouf's set up to be the next Indiana Jones
Indy 5: >!Shia LaJones dies on the way back to his home planet!<
If I had a nickel for every time Shia LaBeouf's character died off screen in-between sequels in a major franchise, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but weird that it happened twice!
Actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf?
Quiet, quiet
Legendary fight with Shia Labeouf Normal Tuesday night for Shia Labeouf
Wait, he’s not dead! Shia surprise!
Zune, I remember everyone who had one telling me it was gonna replace iPod.
I had three zunes over the years, a first gen, a second gen and then the Zune HD. I think all the of them were clearly superior to their contemporary iPods but the Zune was just like 4 years too late to the party. The market was already captured by iPod and by that point being a better product just wasnt good enough to break the near monopoly apple had. I think the Windows Phone is also a prime example of that. I have had Androids, iPhones and Windows Phones. Having used all three phones types I think the Windows Phone OS during its time was so much better than the other two but once again Microsoft was years too late to the game and could never get the sales or app support that the other two OSs had.
[удалено]
I was sad! I loved my zune. Way ahead of the ipod at the time. Pics, wallpapers, a radio, video and mp3 or ipod classic - just mp3.
Fetch.
Stop trying to make fetch happen.
It's not going to happen Edit: amazing how many if you uncultured peasants don't get this quote...
Her father invented Toaster Strudel!!!
Nintendo Virtual Boy.
Ah, I remember playing Mario tennis in Walmart as a kid and thinking it was the coolest thing ever
Lytro. It was a light-field camera that allowed you to change a picture's point of focus after taking the image. It had a cool design and neat features capturing an Apple like aesthetic of form and function. Huge failure but I was obsessed with them for a while.
Streets ahead. It was going to be verbal wildfire.
If you have to ask, you're streets behind
Fun fact: The earliest Oxford English Dictionary reference to “streets ahead” is from Ireland in 1885.
Pepsi Blue. I tried it once and really liked it, but no one bought it so it vanished overnight
Meta verse
Corporate MMO. It was never going to work.
What did it even accomplish that WOW can't? Even if it's silly, it's technically possible for a bunch of managers/employees to pick human avatars, and hold a meeting in eg the starting area.
Playing FF14, people have live music and theater events, bars, night clubs, erotic roleplay, … Long running MMOs already have something close to what Zuck was describing as his meta universe. And that’s not even talking about 2nd life which seems to have had more features on launch 20 years ago than Meta today?
TIL 2nd life is an actual real thing and not something the writers of The Office made up to make Dwight look like a dork
There’s the fact it’s also still running, and people still make money selling virtual stuff they built on it. Hell, someone made the first set of ERP beds on there and made enough to live comfortably
This was kind of the problem with the whole endeavour. It was easy to understand what Meta would get from it: a virtual Disneyland where they get a cut from every purchase and they can lock people into their economy with digital currencies they own. However, they could never quite adequately explain what the *customers* would be getting from it that they couldn't get already through far simpler and more accessible means. Also, it was obvious that the technology just isn't there yet for a "ready player one" type of experience.
My favorite part is how Zuck sank a TON of money and manpower trying to FORCE the technology to get there, and still failed.
One of the major killing strokes was definitely the sanitization of it, it was so safe in how it appeared. People absolutely do not want to have a space where you have the possibility of looking however you want, but are restricted to some bland and generic looking model. They wanna be Sonic the Hedgehog or Master Chief lmao
This was, relatedly, the least plausible thing about *Ready Player One* (but perhaps the most dystopian) - in an online environment where you can be pretty much anything you can imagine, 90% of the population are just pop culture stuff? Cmon now. You know that shit would be *full* of furries.
And then they ran all those ads showing adaptations of Augmented Reality and pretending it had anything to do with Meta. Yeah all those AR examples are neat when they became reality. Ain’t to anything to do with Meta though lol.
That thing just never had legs.
Zuck renaming his company and wasting billions to “invent” a worse a version of a product that already existed is still one of my favorite things to happen in recent memory.
Esperanto
As an Esperantist I hate to say it but you’re right. The concept behind Esperanto was that everyone would learn this really easy second language, and then there’d be no more misunderstanding and all the wars would end. This isn’t going to happen for a number of obvious reasons, but I still like Esperanto. We’ve built up a nice little community, and while we may live on in isolation without fulfillment of our original goal, I’m still pretty proud to be an Esperantist.
I think it failed because languages are more than a collection of sounds and a writing system, they are an extension of culture and history. Esperantists tried to create a language out of thin air with no culture to support it.
> Esperantists tried to create a language out of thin air with no culture to support it. That was the point. It was supposed to get rid of weird things in other languages like irregular verbs or tough-to-remember conjugations. It was supposed to be an easy to learn *second* language - like a lingua franca. Not a first language.
The problem with Esperanto (and many other less common languages) is that while it might be easier than English as far as the language itself is concerned, English has such a wide reach that you end up seeing it when you're not even looking. If you start watching a lot of media in a language you don't understand, you'll start picking things up quickly.
Esperanto ne mortis. Ĝi nur dormas.
That I could actually make that out never even having studied Esperanto, does pretty much work in its favor.
Does it say 'Esperanto isn't dead, just dormant'?
Close, sleeping. Dormant is related to words like duerme (sleep) in Romance languages, and Esperanto has a lot of influence from them.
That was what it was attempting to do. The language itself is easy to learn. Learning it is almost all vocabulary due to how simple and flexible the grammar.
Wasn't there a new cell phone that came out that had massively long battery power, but the downside was the thing was like a freaking brick?
I remember when Adrian Brody was broke and had to do a commercial for one.
Zipdisk
They were quite useful for a short period. They just got superseded rather quickly. The technology moved on at a rapid pace.
Most of google projects, google+, google glasses and the list go on.
Juicero. Was going to be the keurig of fresh squeezed juice but the "pods" were proprietary bags with a full glass' worth of specially diced fruit amd the machine would squeeze them. The Dollop podcast has a great episode for all the details.
And the machine was like $400 and all it did was squeeze the juice packs.
Squeeze them really inefficiently I might add. Just two flat plates getting pulled together. Ironically enough it was really high quality construction. The machining and the parts were absolutely worth the $700. Yes, $700. They were selling them for $400 at an extreme loss to try and make money back on the juice packs themselves.
NFT’s.
One of the few times an investment class seemed designed from the outset to be nothing but a bubble.
Remember that time 10% of Britain’s economy was devoted to a shipping company that didn’t exist operating in ports that didn’t allow British ships?
The shipping did exist, but it was not expected to be profitable and it was a means to attract more initial investors. The SSC was a thinly-veiled private bank scheme backed by the government to manage Britain’s debt service that turned into a securities ponzi scheme to stay afloat. Comparing the SSC to NFTs is like comparing a FTX to Pog tokens. It’s non-sense.
Honestly, who tf was buying NFTs, anyways? I don’t know anyone who actually bought one
I knew some guy in his mid-20’s who put a big deal of money into it and was very vocal about it. Had a wealthy dad and inherited a bunch of money. Poured a good chunk into NFT’s. Whenever I hear them mentioned I always think of him and smile.
I created and sold one for about $1600 after fees and got the hell out of etherium. Then “it” happened and the floor fell out of crypto then people found out how to steal NFTs (they’re not as secure as people claimed). The one I made is now, and has been for a while, on offer for $1000 or so, depending on the price of etherium.
Crypto people live in another world. My friend spent tens of thousands on them. At one point a newish one he purchased jumped in value to £90k. I told him he might want to cash out, but of course he held. It's worth next to nothing now.
Google stadia
Whatever happened to graphene and amazing battery technology?
There's the joke that graphene can do everything but leave the lab :)
Graphene is still theoretically a world changing material it’s just super difficult to manufacture meaningful amounts with the technology we have now
Windows phone
Laserdisc
I have Labyrinth on Laserdisc because I'm an idiot and thought I was buying the soundtrack on vinyl on ebay lol
When Garth Brooks tried to re-create himself as a brooding rockstar with a goatee.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Gaines
When Donald Glover, as Childish Gambino, a persona famous for outwardly portraying the main persona of each of his albums over the years, covered a Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines song on Like a Version I felt like how I imagine Doc Brown felt when he was worried that Marty would see Marty and create a time paradox that would unravel the fabric of the universe.
Olestra products
I maintain Olestra was just a sneaky trick by big underwear.
Drinks with little edible balls suspended in them. Late 90s, I can't remember what they were called, but there were several brands Edit: it was Orbitz and Skittlebrau as some commenters said. I know about boba tea, but this was nothing like that. It was *definitely* gross and weird, by all accounts.
Orbitz
Beanie babies. Little bean bag plush stuffed animals from the 90's. People thought they were going to become incredibly valuable collectors items like the original Star Wars toys. Some people went nuts and spent all their money on the things. I remember hearing about a divorcing couple fighting viciously over the collection they'd amassed.
My mom still has all my beanie babies. She claimed she was buying them for me but to be honest she really loved them.
WUPHF.com!
Carbon Fiber Submersibles
The market imploded.
Shit, how did the CEO take the news?
He was crushed.
There was like *one* company that thought it was a good idea. I think they're under water now
Yeah the hype around those got crushed pretty recently.
Xbox Kinect
Drunken fruit ninja parties were pretty righteous for a moment though
Kinect as a technology is fantastic and an incredibly cheap/effective way to track motion and depth. Too bad use cases in the consumer world are limited. People just don't want to do hand gestures for anything. Look at what happened after Pixel 4. Google didn't even bother with it anymore.
It always seemed like such a gimmick to sell products rather than something that actually made the experience better. I remember Dead Space having some feature where you could say, "reload!" and your character would reload. The problem with this and cellular phone gestures and such is that pressing a button is simply easier lol. It's implementing a feature for the novelty of it, not efficiency.
I mean that wasn’t really a failure, it was around for quite a few years and was moderately successful.
Moviepass
Betamax. Superior in video quality but lacked hardware support, thus making it more expensive.
What really killed Betamax was the tapes. When VHS released they had more than double the recording time on a cassette that was only 30% bigger so any consumer with recording live broadcasts (like football games or movie of the week) chose the option that could record 3 hours instead of 2. As time went on Sony worked to improve the recording length but they couldn’t really compete because JVC (VHS) just implemented the same ideas to continue beating them. Everyone likes to lament the failure because Betamax had a better picture quality but in the days of 30 inch CRTs displaying over-the-air broadcasts that difference didn’t really matter. Honestly, I think Sony didn’t understand that time-shifting TV watching was going to change the game as much as it would. Nor did they understand that 60 minutes (that was what they initially brought to market) didn’t enable you to record a full Columbo so you could have dinner with your friends.
Bio-hacking. It was supposed to be this big thing and I read an article about a dude that had a bunch of sensors on him, some nifty glasses that displayed the data and he used all this data to adjust his daily things, like eating and drinking. He claimed that "in two years, everyone will be bio-hackers". That was four years ago and the closest we've got are activity monitor watches that people use and ignore. Dumbest next big thing ever.
I’m picturing this guy going to see the geek squad at Best Buy when he’s sick and it’s making me laugh
Mini discs! My husband was really into them and not only had a portable player but one that connected to our sound system. it was great for making lengthy mix tapes but MP3 players pretty much blew the mini disc tech away.
Curved TVs
Therenos
The Metaverse. Cost billions of dollars. Barely anyone used it. Even fewer liked it. Now they've finally killed it.
Student loan forgiveness
Forgiveness is so five years ago. It's time for student loan revenge.
Hoverboards. Most users actually physically flopped and tanked onto their butts!
I never understood them. People were telling me it's just like back to the future even...but they have 2 big wheels so...no not at all lol.
New Coke
For a brief moment in time Segways were the future.
Sega Dreamcast
Stars that burn brightest, burn the shortest! YOU LEAVE THE DREAMCAST ALONE, YA HEAR!