What was supposed to be "The Next Big Thing!" but flopped?
As a car enthusiast, I can think of a good one, the Ford Nucleon.
During the 1950s and 1960s, there was considerable interest in nuclear power and its potential applications. This led to the idea of using nuclear energy to propel cars. The concept behind a nuclear car was to utilize a small nuclear reactor to generate steam, which would then power the vehicle's engine.
Of course back in those days, this was extremely futurustic and some at the time thought this would be a game changer, but ultimately, the safety aspect was one of the biggest reasons why this idea was dropped, and I probably don't have to explain why it may not have considered to be safe, I mean, it was using nuclear power, so even if the engineers tried to make it as safe as possible, IF something went wrong, it would have been catastrophic.
Ever since then, the interests in the automotive sector has shifted to Electric and Hydrogen.
Still, a very intriguing concept car and idea.
Outside cars, you have blimps, and I personally believe if we tried to make something like a hindenburg today with existing technology, we might have been a lot more successful than back then (as it goes way back to 1930s), there are still some blimps used occasionally, I also don't believe those use hydrogen(?), but they are not the "game changer in air travel" it was once seen as, although we can't rule out a comeback.
Only a few people saw it, mostly CEOs and billionaires. They said it could revolutionize cities, which is technically true, as part of a larger transportation shift. But the rest of the public just heard 'this will revolutionize the world'. And they didn't do any focus groups or beta testing or anything outside of their own company, so they didn't have anyone telling them 'I'm not gonna pay $5k for a fucking scooter'.
And then they launched, and people started telling them 'I'm not gonna pay $5k for a fucking scooter'. And then powered skateboards became the Next Big Thing, and then some Chinese companies realized nobody wants to learn to skate just to get around so they put a battery and a motor on a Razor scooter and suddenly Ninebot blew the fuck up.
Then Dean Kamen (inventor of Segway) got killed riding one, and Ninebot bought what was left of Segway.
fwiw looks like Dean Kamen is still alive; it was another owner - the one who bought the company from Kamen - died in the accident. someone named Jimi Heselden apparently.
I loved 3D movies and still do. Ultimately people don't like wearing shit on their face or having to hold their heads in a certain position (inb4 the one eyed people and the people who get nauseous chime in), but oh well - I'm glad I was able to really enjoy the experience when it was at its peak
To be fair, that applies to real life also. The sense of depth from a single eye comes from your brain interpreting cues like shadows. I wonder if that makes you more attuned to regular flatscreen 3d so it's more immersive to you than the average bear. You were definitely not their target market!
MiniDisc. When the format was first released in the 90s people claimed it was going to replace CDs, but then hardly anyone bought them and they pretty much disappeared after a few years
MiniDisc. When the format was first released in the 90s people claimed it was going to replace CDs, but then hardly anyone bought them and they pretty much disappeared after a few years
MD players were never hugely popular, but I used the crap out of mine. When I was a in the Navy I had a MD player and it could hold something like, 100 ish songs per MD? It was clutch for going underway. This was like a revolutionary amount of size for its compactness, but more importantly, the durability of the disks. No worries about scratching, you could just throw them in with the rest of your crap. I used mine endlessly and it was also a cool color scheme (like white with orange accents. sony I think).
I remember seeing them for sale at Best Buy when I was in highschool and my friends and I all wanted to try it out, but no one could afford the player, and no one's parents would buy it for them since we all already had CD players and a bunch of CDs lol
Wow that sounds really good, sad how even CDs no longer enjoy the popularity they once had, everything has become more digital and for physical stuff you have USBs now.
Laptops, cars, and etc have also slowly stopped allowing CD inputs. They don't even have that option any more these days.
Although, there is one area where CDs are used a lot till date, consoles, Xbox and PlayStation especially, I am surprised even the new generations have that.
Wow that is interesting. If I am understanding this right, was minidisc called that way because it was smaller than a traditional CD? Or what is just a different format? What really was it's benefits back then over conventional CDs?
Imagine you can make cuts anywhere in your CD tracks and move the segments around. You can also name each segment so they don’t just have to be 00-99+.
I had a great time recording radio shows, cutting out the DJ and entering all the song titles. The LCD display would show the song / artist title while playing which was big back then :)
It was more like a floppy disc from a computer. It was a small writable disc inside a cartridge housing. It sounded just as good if not better than a CD with the added bonus that it couldn't get scratched up, and wouldn't skip like a CD if the player moved around.
It didn't help that the hardware cost a small fortune and there weren't many albums released in the format. In terms of tech it's fantastic, but that doesn't matter when few people can afford it and there's not much to use it with even if they can.
I bought one and used it like an mp3 player. They immediately stopped selling more disks so I just kept reusing the one I had. Still have it and it works to this day. Not much point in using it though when you can just stream from your phone.
It was definitely the precursor to an MP3 player! I used to like making mixtapes, and you could do that with CDs too if you had a CD burner (I didn't have a PC that could burn CDs until I was in college) but it was time consuming and they skipped all the time if you wanted to listen to it while you were out walking around.
The Metaverse, I guess? It's funny how living in a virtual world has been this hyped-up concept for decades and it finally comes out and it's just kind of...lame for lack of a better word. Maybe it's too early to tell, but it feels like the Web 3.0 Metaverse push hasn't lived up to the hype.
Aside from that, I'd say the Xbox Kinect. Maybe it's just me, but I remember that when the Kinect came out there was a lot of hype about how it was going to revolutionize how people played games. But I don't think we ever really got a Kinect game that lived up to that hype. To be fair, I remember a lot of articles of people doing interesting things with Kinect it's just that none of them really had anything to do with gaming.
They are just too far ahead of the technology for it to be relevant yet...a bit like Windows support of touchscreens mentioned in this thread. Nobody cared about touch screens in the 90s, by 2007 most people had one in their pocket.
When ar/vr is a regular looking pair of glasses you can leave on all day (probably with the processor in your pocket) it will absolutely be useful enough to compete with a phone screen for your time. When you consider it in that context then yes, social media will happily jump into virtual space. Will today's hyped up metaverse portals still be around in 10+ years when they are finally as relevant as the rest of social media? A handful I'd guess if they evolve.
Touchscreen interfaces on work/desktop computers. Twice even! Once in the 90s when touchscreen hardware became cheaper to make, then again around 2010 with Windows 8 and Steve Sinofsky pushing the "everything has a touchscreen interface" approach that bombed horribly.
If fucking windows actually worked half ass with a touch screen, then this would have worked, but windows 8 felt horrible to use and windows in general was just frustrating to use on a touch screen for years after 8's release.
Windows 8's UI actually worked really well on a touchscreen, see 10's nerfed version of how it's backwards in many ways.
Thing is, the programs for Windows generally didn't make the switch, and why'd they? The market was still in mouse-cursor mode, and having a UI for touchscreens would probably have even more users up in revolt. So it ended as this jarring mess that MS couldn't really resolve.
Funnily enough, I've recently been looking for the touchscreen interface in Windows 10 (probably the first human to do so) because I realised it would make it easier to interact with the desktop in VR. But turns out it's not there. Either it was just W8 thing (which I skipped) or it was removed.
Back in the Windows 8 days, Microsoft tried to push Universal Windows Platform (UWP), a new application format that could run on any devices running Windows 8: desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets and even Xbox without any modification while being much more secure by default.
It failed for a multitude of reasons:
It was a big break from the previous application model. You had to rewrite everything.
To improve security, it enforced many limitation that legacy apps did not have.
While it was the only way to create and distribute apps for Windows Phone and Windows RT (a Windows 8 variant for low-powered laptops) their low market share did not incentivize developers to migrate to or create UWP apps.
It was strongly tied to the divisive Metro UI of Windows 8. People already hated interacting with this part of Windows 8, they had no desire to install apps that would force them into this UI.
UWP still lives on in Windows 10 and 11 as well as in Xbox One and Series: many system apps are now UWPs, as well as all Xbox games and apps, some cross-devices games from Microsoft Studios and some apps in the Windows Store.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I hate using "apps" on my desktop machine. They're always designed to be friendly for touch interface and smaller screen size, and are terrible to use on my 30" monitor with a 1/8" cursor. I just want my menu bar, toolbar on the left, and status on the bottom, please and thank you.
I hate using most apps on my phone. It's not that I'm a curmudgeon. I'm a developer, and I don't see any good reason for so many damned apps when a browser works just fine.
Nah, you're not. It simply is not possible to have a single UI that works just as well on both a touch-driven 5-inch interface and a pointer-driven 20-inch interface. Different input methods require different UIs. But publishers are lazy so they try to pretend you can.
Wave was simply ahead of its time and made by the wrong company. Google never supports anything it creates long enough for it to establish a path forward. Now, people don't support Google products much because they know Google will cancel it within 3 years.
I liked Wave too. The core technology of Wave ended up being added to Docs, which is when it became possible to have more than two or three people actively editing a document at the same time without it getting incredibly slow or glitchy.
The rest of the works keyboards are QWERTY by default. Dvorak is everywhere too though. Just a few clicks in Linux, macOS or Windows and you’re set up.
That said, I learned it because I had RSI at the time. 20 minutes a day for about three weeks (when I was young and my mind was absorbent) and I was almost at my original typing speed.
Crypto? Flopped? Damn, there is still a crowd that hardcore loves crypto, I always felt it to be too scammy by nature though.
Segway, I am surprised, why? I have a few friends that have segway and sure it's not as popular as bicycles but it seems like one of those cool new personal transportation, and I thought they are rather a new product, guessing I am wrong here?
OMG I LOVE 3D TV, especially those glasses they gave you in cinemas, gosh...
Metaverse.....Yeah, that's just BS in my opinion, make something even worse than social media and make people get stuck in those virtual worlds, disconnecting them from the real world, I really don't think metaverse is healthy, yes social media isn't either, but that is, just another extreme in my opinion.
There will always be fans who love the flops. BetaMax, 8-tracks, LaserDiscs.
There were a few people that loved the Amazon Fire Phone, although these days I wonder if they were just astroturfing.
Crypto never achieved what it claimed it would, and is just limping along as a scam platform. Yes, there's a cult built around it. No, you're not gonna get rich with it.
Where are you that Segway is new? It came out in 2001 to widespread derision. Yes, sometimes you'll see a mall cop on one, but it never revolutionized travel.
3D TV is not the same as 3D movies - and even the fad of the latter has died off. There was literally no content for the 3D television sets being sold.
Nuclear for sure. Reading old science fiction from the '50s is pretty eye opening on what promise it appeared to hold.
In my lifetime, the Genome project. I'm sure a lot of good has come of it, and will continue to do so, but when they first decided to try to decode the human genome, the promise in the air was eradication of so many diseases, increased health and longevity to humanity, etc.
The Internet for sure. It went from something that would allow the entire world to access knowledge, be better informed, make the future a real meritocracy. Instead, we ended up with magats, vaccine-effectiveness deniers, and aggressive stupidity.
I am willing to accept the absolute worst of humanity on the internet, because we can also have so many amazing things that weren't previously possible.
Accessibility of information to the masses is incredibly important. Isolated populations can learn about the bigger world, get help, and share their experiences. Friends and families can stay connected. People can work together from anywhere, and create value as a team in ways that weren't previously possible. When I was a kid it was just a dream, and now we are living it.
This is true, a lot of people, especially some people from older generations like to talk shit about the internet and modern age (not just social media), and it's effects on us which can be bad but that also depends on the person, with good moderation, internet really is a dream come true isn't it? And we are living it.
Something we shouldn't take for granted for sure in a way.
Nuclear for sure. Reading old science fiction from the '50s is pretty eye opening on what promise it appeared to hold.
I remember reading a story in which a housewife casually scattered radioactive salts around her vegetable garden to kill slugs. And that became a story about the dangers of manufacturing radioactive salts, not using them.
The Genome project is very interesting for sure, and wow, I am learning a lot of knowledge from others here on this thread because there are some stuff that I had no idea existed before.
Fun fact, we are currently on the 38th major revision of the Human Genome (Google GRCh38). In the 20+ years since we completed the project, we've been able to design 100s of thousands of kits for genetic testing of human genetic diseases, anything from inherited diseases like Huntington's to developed diseases, eg, cancer. Within the world of biotech, it's one of the greatest achievements of all time.
The one flop that sticks in my mind the most was "IT". "IT" was going to revolutionize the world, nothing would be different, it would make each person richer than Bill Gates, and so on.
"IT" was the Segway. It was a two-wheeled vehicle that could go a max speed of 12 MPH/19 KPH for a distance of 25 miles/40 km and it cost Twelve Thousand Dollars. Know what else balances on two wheels and goes 12mph? A bicycle. And I can pick that up for a few hundred bucks depending on what I want. At the time, you could buy a very nice motorcycle for $12,000 and it would go much farther than 25 miles and considerably faster than 12 mph.
As someone who was born after the whole Segway fiasco but has heard about its apparent crazy marketing, is there a QRD on what exactly made it so unwlderwelming? Or some kind of video that made the Segway's release as infamous as it is? I've seen this answer a lot in these kinds of threads
The segway itself could've lived up to the hype.... If it were as affordable as a vespa! it could have taken over that non-highway travel niche but it cost 10 times as much and had less range. The hype was tone deaf to the average person's disposable income. You can't revolutionize the world if only independently wealthy people can afford your toy. I'm sure that wealthy tech bro ceo was very out of touch with working Americans wages. Later he died by driving off a cliff on a segway.
You see them and their successors now in crowded pedestrian spaces (often for security guards) and it's arguably less intrusive than a skater but with long distance potential. That said I think the monowheel electric skateboards are the best thing for that now and not nearly as expensive.
In the early 2000's there was So. Much. Hype. This guy was making a huge deal out of this device but wouldn't say what it was, and he got a bunch of his useless billionaire friends to promote it too. When the big reveal finally came, it was just... a scooter? Who cares? An E-bike was already a thing that existed and you could pick one up for $400. You could buy an actual car for $12k. In the early 2000's there were several cars that could be bought new for the price of a Segway.
It was like someone hyped up their new life-changing invention for years, and it turned out to be a suitcase with fancy wheels on it, and it cost as much as a new Honda Civic.
Let's also not forget to mention there were no good compilers for titanium - along with no x86 support - they hoped the big money vendors that had the big iron Unix market would port their 64bit apps to itanium, but every vendor said nope
What did Beta do better than VHS? It's a load of hype from Sony that Beta was better - magnetic tape was magnetic tape and compare the picture side by side (which most homes couldn't because beta machines cost 2x as much as VHS). There is no difference except buyer's denial they paid more for the less runtime (Beta has an hour long format while VHS was 2 hours).
Yeah but sony made VHS also... It was their Alpha release. They intended to wait a bit and release beta, which has already been developed shortly after vhs hit stores. What they didn't expect was to be copied by a competitor before that happened, effectively making VHS a standard. As you say, magnetic tape is magnetic tape and they thought their first attempt would quietly fade into history when they put out version 2. Instead it was a desperate marketing war for relevance.
People like to claim that blockchain will sold world hunger but really it's just a database system so unless your problem is database related blockchain isn't going to fix it.
The problem they tried to use blockchain to fix was I don't like the government controlling what I do with the money and knowing I commit crimes. Which isn't really a database issue it's a getting caught issue. If you don't get caught you don't need to use bitcoin and you don't need to use blockchain.
Blockchain is a massive innovation for certain industries. Tragically at this point when I read it, I default assume it's a buzzword techno babble selling point for a system that absolutely doesn't need it.
In the 1990s VR was right around the corner, but we didn't have processors, network, it displays we needed to make it happen. Thirty years on, we have the hardware we need, but it remains a niche/enthusiast technology. Motion sickness remains an issue.
We’re now running into the soft problems of VR. Things like the weight of the device, the hazards and downsides being disconnected from the real world, the lack of large indoor spaces, etc. are showing the weaknesses in the model of VR we envisioned.
Also, VR platforms are really tightly controlled. PCs got big because you didn’t need to use Dell or Gateway’s App Store to do things. Jail breaking is a thing but not for most people.
Until VR stops feeling like a brick strapped to your face and has true AR capability I don’t think it will get big. And it definitely won’t get big with a bunch of closed ecosystems.
VR is probably the biggest I’ve seen it already. I got my son a Valve Index about 2 years ago now and it’s still seeing frequent use. There’s quite alot of games out there already. As interested as I was for Apple’s glasses, I’m not sure that it’s going to cause a big revolution in AR/VR. Maybe, it could, but their promo for it was a bit weird and the price seems crazy high for now.
I think the big hold up are the games. The good games require an expensive PC, expensive headset, and a dedicated space. They can't get returns for big budgets until headsets are common and people wont dump big money unless they think its worth. The only option is the slow burn. It's a lot of fun but selection is a bit dull once you burn though the big names.
Yeah that's certainly a good one, I am still wary of VR, due to how close it is to your eyes.
I am more hopeful about AR though because you are not locked into a virtual world and that extremely close screen to your eyes, it's basically like see through glasses with computer, hence I am guessing it might be better for your eyes than pure VR?
Cost is going to be an issue for a good while though, and I still don't think they will ever replace or be as big as phones, as some believe it could be, the portability is just unbeatable with smartphones (flip phones making that aspect even better), although maybe AR can compete with computers more?
I'm personally skeptical but a very interesting and futuristic sci-fi tech for sure.
Personally, I don’t think the Nucleon meets the criteria for being a “flop”. It was just a concept. They didn’t even build a full-size prototype, never mind a production model. By my own definition, the car can’t really be called a flop because there weren’t ever any attempts to sell it.
Cars I do consider flops were the Pontiac Aztec, and if we want to stick to Ford, there’s always the infamous Edsel.
The Nucleon was definitely an oddity, though, and it’s an interesting piece of automotive history. Thanks!
Good question. I don’t know. I always assumed it was because they were relatively expensive, and produced in limited quantities (but I can’t remember if that production thing was just a guess on my part, or based in actual fact).
It's gonna take a few more self destructive moves by reddit, but we are getting there. I'm always low key suprised reading people here talk about their reddit accounts. 😂
DCC, Digital Compact Cassette. It was introduced by Phillips in 1992 and was supposed to be the successor to the old music cassette. It was digital, with sound quality comparable to a CD, but the players were also compatible with the old cassettes. In theory this was a great idea but it never went anywhere, and the format was discontinued on 1996. I think Techmoan has a video on it.
Reminds me a lot of Laserdiscs, which were digital (kinda, the media was digital but stored and read manually, making it technically analog) media discs, basically like a 12" vinyl, made to replace VHS tapes. Their only relevance in the past two decades has been a single episode of Regular Show
IIRC Laserdisc actually was the best quality home video format for a while, and it had a nice content library. Wasn’t it quite popular in Japan? DCC never went much anywhere. Its main competitor, MiniDisc, had some niche appeal for portable players, but once mp3 players took off it too was finished.
You might enjoy the 1971 novella "A Meeting with Medusa" by Arthur C Clarke. It follows the captain of the last nuclear blimp as they become irrelevant, then later when his specialized skills are needed again. Giant blimps are used to explore Venus and the gas giants since they can't be landed on and lag time makes remote piloting impossible.
This is interesting since blimps over Venus was recently in the news again for better or worse and is a relevant proposition. We will certainly have blimps over Venus someday (though probably not manned). The gas giants put out too much radiation and autonomous flight is too well developed for the Jupiter story to hold water now though.