It’s funny; with my dad working at IBM, and living in a community where the #1 employer was IBM, I saw tons of these growing up. It seemed to me like they were the most popular computer out there.
Not that I’m a sports expert, but 2 sports leagues come to mind. Remember in 2001 there was the XFL? In the 1970’s there was the World Hockey Association - an attempt to compete with the National Hockey League. No doubt there have been many other similar attempts.
In the late 1970’s Polaroid™ developed PolaVision - instant home movies. There were two problems with this. No sound and it was released just at the time when video cameras, and video recorders were coming into prominence.
Crystal Gravy
The Adobe (automobile)
Yard-A-Pult
Three Legged Jeans
Bass-O-Matic
I was a Radio Shack employee trying to sell these pigs. It was not a popular machine.
Ah, the good old TRaSh**-80**. What a clunker. 
I guess Betamax is a failure in the respect that it never caught on with the public, but my wife worked in broadcast journalism - the only video decks at the stations she worked were Beta. It was the industry standard for video in the field until very recently.
Speaking of formats, while Iomega had a nice niche the the 100 MB zip disk, they had a number of larger formats that never caught on - Jaz, I think, was the name.
Remember those mini CDs? My GE CD player (circa 1990) has an adapter that makes it possible to play those little fuckers.
Would Hypercolor clothing qualify? I knew a guy who bought a shirt… pretty disgusting as it changed color in the pits.
Actually the so called TRS-80 "Trash-80" was a VERY popular computer, and was a cutting edge design for the time. The Model 600 was several years later, and and was a close, but “not quite” IBM compatible 8088 clone(ish) machine.
They still make those! Only now, they’re blank, and are used in some models of camcorder. For audio, they hold 21 minutes (or up to 24, depending on what brand) of stereo, 44.1 music. For some reason I can’t fathom, they’re way more expensive than 5" CDs.
The pre-recorded ones went out of style ages ago, and any surviving ones are now highly collectible. Got a whole set of The Beatles 3" singles? No, I didn’t think so. Not too many people do, including me. Paul McCartney has a few of them, and they contain bonus tracks not available elsewhere. They were a good concept, but EPs never caught on in North America on vinyl, either.
There is some debate about “New Coke”. Sure, the product itself failed, but the public hue & cry and all got Coke lots of advertising, more shelf space (which means less shelf space for competitors) and many Coke drinkers now claiming to be hard core zealot REAL Coke drinkers.
TI made a computer that competed with the Commodore 64 (Bill Cosby was their shill.) It was a bit of a clunker, but worse, it was more expensive to make than the C64, and they decided to compete on price. TI took a tremendous bath. Its quality might have been better (at least to start) but it was a disaster that almost took TI down.
Microsoft Bob.
And it’s worth noting that in some places, New Coke still exists, labeled as Coke 2 (my guess would be Coke 2 is in the markets that New Coke did well).
An interesting, more current example is Sony’s UMD movies, and by extension their PSP portable gaming system. The UMD’s are movies on little discs that cost more than their DVD counterparts, and only play on sony’s prohibitively expensive and unpopular PSP gaming systme. Major retail stores stocked many UMD titles at first, but they’re vanishing left and right a mere year after their introduction.
The Apple Newton
IBM’s OS/2
Sega Dreamcast
Marvel Comics’ “New Universe”
Okay, YMMV with the last one…but Marvel’s a big brand and the NU was a big flop.
I don’t think you could quite say the WHA was a failure of the magnitude we’re looking for here, considering they survived 8 years and put 4 franchises into the NHL (the fact that 3 of them relocated in the 90’s has little to do with that); it’s the same thing with the American Basketball Association and the American Football League.
The USFL, on the other hand…
Can we call UMDs a failure yet??
I made a point about the Sony Memory Stick and had all this great analysis on how Sony still hasn’t learned it’s proprietary lesson from Betamax but the hampsters ate it and now all you guys get is this vague mumbo jumbo. So:
MEMORY STICK v. memory stickKleenex/XeroxBetamaxnew technology is better than proprietary BSBuncha dumbassesetc.
Small CDs! They’re 8 cm in diameter, where regular ones are 12 cm. They also make 8-cm recordable DVDs.
Most tray-style disc players will handle the 8-cm discs. That’s what the inner indentation is for. The ones you really have to watch for are the ‘slot-in’ style, where you insert the disc partway and the unit grips it and pulls it the rest of the way in. Those will NOT work with 8-cm discs.
I have one pre-recorded 8-cm CD. It’s for a band called the Dregs, and it’s a 1988 promotion for them and Ensoniq music synthesisers. It’s in a standard-sized CD jewel case, but as you open the case, the disc rises away from the back of the case on a hinged holder.
I don’t remember seeing any 8-cm CDs in stores.
Tidbit: The new Nintendo Wii, which uses regular 12-cm discs, does accept the smaller 8-cm GameCube game discs into it’s slot loader.
Consumer DAT decks had the copy protection. “Pro” decks did not. I guess the makers figured if you could afford to spend about $300 more on your deck you could pirate all you want.
Several consumer decks offered copyright protection which could be disabled by snipping a single wire inside.
The whole thing was a complete joke.
I had a friend whose family had a TI-99/4A that looked just like the one here (well, it didn’t come with Bill Cosby.) By the late 80s/early 90s we were the only ones who used it and all we did with it was play games.
This was a format that made no sense-it came out just as shock-proof CD players came on the market. It was actually quite good-but the audio cassette was winding up its life cycle. PHILIPS was never successful in getting SONY or JVC to support the format-and as a result, DCC dies a quick death. I remember that it made its debut in the electronic stores in September-by November, it was gone! PHILIPS lost over 3$ billion on this-oddly enough, their test marketing program told them it was a flop-but the forged ahead!
As for the Ford “EDSEL”: it is a classic marketing tale: take an inferior product, saddle it with a 19th century name, plaster it with vulgarisms (the EDSEL had something like 24 nameplates, logos, etc., plastered all over the car), and support it with an advertising campaign that told buyers how much beeter they would be than their neighbors 9if they bought one), and you have a classic disaster.
The line lasted barely 3 years.