Nixie tubes were not a flop.
They were an enormous success, and were produced by the multi-millions. They just happened to have a relatively short product life (maybe 2 decades). But before they were displaced by better and cheaper technology, they dominated digital displays.
Re: videophones. Isn’t the hugely popular Skype not basically a videophone? Thats how everybody I know uses it, talking face to face with people over a webcam.
Don’t know how big Skype is in America, but I have seen it used everywhere I have ever been. Seems like videophone is alive and well to me?
And PDAs are also alive and well, and nearly ubiquitous. They’ve just got a new name now, and most of them are also phones.
Goddamn fucking zombies. Ignore that post I guess. I doubt Skype was as popular back when the original discussion took place.
It is interesting to see how 7 years ago people were complaining about PDAs and Tablets and videophones and e-readers and how they didn’t work. Well, it’s 2012 and everyone’s got one now. Most people aren’t using the videophone feature of their phone, but they could it they wanted to. I’ve used facetime on my iPod touch plenty of times to chat between me, my wife and my kids when the family is separated. But that’s the thing. I only want to use facetime with my loved ones. I have no desire to see or be seen by anyone else.
Years ago, there was an Andy Rooney segment on “60 Minutes” where he demonstrated a really neat gizmo a fan had sent him. It peeled citrus fruit.
It vaguely resembled a potato peeler. You cut through the rind around the equator, inserted the blunt end underneath the peel at the cut, and separated the fruit from the peel.
The two halves of the peel would come off, and VOILÁ! A perfect, naked citrus fruit!
I said, “I GOTTA have that!”
A few years later, I actually found the gizmo. I bought several for gifts.
I still have mine around someplace. It DOES take longer to use than doing the traditional peeling.
But it is STILL incredibly cool!
~VOW
Aye, that’s correct.
2 + 16 = 28
3 + 17 = 30
4 + 4 = 19
10 + 11 = 101
That’s what I was taught in school, along with my ABQs.
Um, Snowboarder:
You work for GSA by any chance?
~VOW
As recently as 6 years ago a coworker - an engineer - was very proud of his calculator watch and was stunned that I didn’t own one. I couldn’t imagine having one now with so many other gadgets that do much more and have a calculator on them. Heck, even he carried a cell phone that had one on it.
(but *way *back in the day, when I got one for Christmas, I thought it was pretty cool.)
Interesting to look at this thread after all this time. The Segway was considered an utter flop that went nowhere. Three years ago in a press release, the company said they’d sold over 50,000 units. I seem to remember them costing around $5,000. If I came up with a gadget and sold a quarter billion dollars worth of them, I wouldn’t think of it as a flop!
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I had one of these things-it was net to useless.
Looked cool, though
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:91, topic:305928”]
Interesting to look at this thread after all this time. The Segway was considered an utter flop that went nowhere. Three years ago in a press release, the company said they’d sold over 50,000 units. I seem to remember them costing around $5,000. If I came up with a gadget and sold a quarter billion dollars worth of them, I wouldn’t think of it as a flop!
[/QUOTE]
Unless you spent half a million on R&D before you even sold the first one…
Segway may be a mildly sucessful product in absolut terms, but it’s a flop relative to the hype before it came out: “100,000 units the first year”. “More money in the first year than any startup in history”. “As big of deal as a PC”." More important than the internet." And all the hype about how it was going to revolutionize transportation.
So basically, Kamen was trying to pull a Steve Jobs, without the benefit of actually being Steve Jobs 
Actually, I don’t think it was Kamen’s fault at all. There was a ton of hype surrounding ‘Ginger’ that he didn’t like. You’ll find all the major quotes came from other people. (One of the quoters being being Steve Jobs.)
I’d have to say they are more Smokey Stover-esque than Jetson-esque. Two wheels, not none.
Nthing the PixelVision cameras. I actually had one of these when I was a kid. It was evidently so little known, at least where I was, that I thought I had made the whole thing up until I saw it mentioned on the Dead Media List working notes.
There were lots of audio and video formats that never quite made it. MovieCDs (not Video CDs – these were for computers, coded in some variant of QuickTime, and the last one I found proudly proclaimed it would work on Windows 3.1), CEDs, Betamax (which did go on to accomplish something on the industrial side, dying out as a consumer format), MiniDisks (which were popular in Asia but died quickly here in the US), SelectaVision (which was holography-based, in 1969), true quadrophonic record albums, and even weirder things.
One thing I kind of wish had hung on is the automat. Some of the BoLoCo shops here in Boston have a quasi-automat setup, where you punch an order into a touchscreen near the door and only pick up/pay at the counter. I can understand why they died – as noted, inflation made it difficult to pay for meals with only coins, and bill acceptors took a very long time to function reliably – but there’s no reason one wouldn’t work now that everyone uses magnetic cards to pay for things.
They are fun as hell but also extremely dorky looking which is a big marketing drawback. You can’t look cool on a Segway. I took a date on a tour of Segway tour of Newport, RI a couple of weeks ago and my date didn’t even want anyone to know she did it.
They aren’t difficult to ride but it is hardly hop on and go either. They are like standing on a balance board and it requires some stamina and skill. There are no controls other than the handlebars that swivel slightly and those are very sensitive. Segways sense body weight shifts for control so you have to think about what you are doing all the time. You can’t fidget or dig through your pockets or god forbid, text someone while on one.
If you look over your shoulder at something, you will tend to go there. They top out at about 12 mph but that is plenty fast to get hurt especially with cars around. As a matter of fact, the owner of the Segway company (not the inventor of them) got killed on one of the off-road models a couple of years ago.
Segway spent half a million dollars on R&D and made a quarter billion in sales? Even with a modest profit, that sounds like a win to me.
I know I look at things differently than most people, but I ignore hype in considering success. The market may say if you predict sales of a million units of something and actually sell 100,000 the product is a loser. I say if that 100,000 generated great profits for you, it’s a win. Similarly, companies get slammed on market share. (“OMG! They only have 10% market share! They’re losers!”). If that 10% market share is generating massive profits and fantastic cash flow, then they aren’t losers. (NOTE: None of my examples here apply directly to Segway).