What were some of the biggest “losers” - ill-fated products that people nevertheless had high hopes for - of the past decade?
HD-DVD?
Gizmondo?
Windows Vista?
Nominate your choices.
The Nokia N-Gage from 2003 is my choice. It was a cell phone and shoddy game system, that required people to “side talk”.
The Eye-Toy for the PS2. Once ahead of the game, Sony are now behind in the gesture/gyro based games.
The Microsoft Kin phones, which were pulled from the marketplace within a couple of months of being introduced, after Microsoft spent a billion dollars on the development and marketing effort.
Edited to add that I’m not sure anyone had “high hopes” for the Kin.
My nominations are the Segway and HD Radio - neither of which have lived up to the hype, and both of which sucked up a lot of development dollars.
We loved the Eye Toy - which hit about the time our kids were perfect “jump in front of the TV” age. And never figured out why it didn’t have a bigger market.
Microsoft’s Zune. I was hoping it would be a serious rival to the iPod but it never really took off and still hasn’t launched outside US/Canada. Still these days a separate mp3 player seems a little uncalled for with lots of newer phones having enough storage to serve both tasks nicely.
CueCat - although apparently it’s enjoying a second life among book collectors.
As to “things I bought”, I’d go with any pre v.7 Windows Mobile device. I had a T-Mobile SDA and that thing was fucking useless.
Google’s track record, post-Gmail, is decidedly mixed. While Android’s success is pretty stunning, you’ve got things like Wave, Buzz and Google TV that are now, respectively, non-existent, a total non-entity and a bust-in-the-making. And then there’s the vaporware that is Chrome OS.
Apple’s G4 Cube was also a big flop, but that was the last serious one they had, now that I think about it. They even managed to turn the Apple TV into a pretty respectable product. Though Ping, the social media thing shoehorned into iTunes, seems to be not long for this world.
There’s a G4 Cube on display at the New York MoMA, so I don’t think it was entirely a flop.
Unless Apple is getting a cut from the admissions at MoMA, I’m not sure they’d agree. 
Plus, even the aesthetics failed - there were widespread problems of cracks developing in the casing.
I do agree that it was a beautiful machine. And, even though it probably led to some innovations that helped Apple down the road (the Mac Mini is clearly its heir), it was still a commercial failure.
Google TV only recently launched, so I think it might be a bit premature to say it failed. And Chrome OS is vapor-ware no more, Google recently shipped thousands of free demo Chrome OS laptops to beta-testers around the US (world?). I have a friend who managed to score one.
It wasn’t a total failure, and there’s still time to turn it around, but I’d argue that Sony’s PlayStation 3 was a big loser. The PS2 was the biggest-selling game console of all time, but in the latest generation of consoles the PS3 was definitely a distant third to the Wii and the XBox 360.
Not really. Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 were distantly behind the Wii, but the XBox 360 has 27.9% share to PS3’s 25.4%. Cite.
Also, keep in mind that Xbox 360 is barely used in Japan, which is a significant chunk of the console gaming market. You might be able to call the PS3 in the US a distant third, but we’re still talking 17 million domestic consoles, hardly a “loser”.
Not that distant. As of October, it was XBox 360: 44.6 million; PS3: 41.6 million. They’re both way behind the Wii, though (76 million).
ETA: Beaten to punch.
I’d say the Zune was more successful than the Dell DJ. I’d considered buying one before going with the iPod. It seems like a lot of iPod competitors were contemplated as the serious rival to the iPod but never managed to capture more than a tiny share of the market before vanishing.
Office 2007. The ribbon interface seemed to annoy expert users who felt they no longer had the same level of control. It also bewildered average users who could no longer find anything. Neither group was comforted much that future users will probably learn how to use Office quicker. (I didn’t have that much trouble with it and there are some great features. Just the SUMIFS and COUNTIFS functions for Excel are worth the ribbon IMO.)
Civilization V. At first I thought the wailing that went up on the main Civ fan forums was just the usual they-changed-it-now-it-sucks ruckus. When players started posting walkthroughs on beating Deity difficulty within weeks of release, yeah, something’s rotten. I actually considered buying a new computer just for Civ V. I’m so glad I waited.
I’m sure both of these are/were profitable products and by that measure weren’t losers. I’m just thinking of things I remember causing a lot of complaints.
I’m not sure it’s fair to call the EyeToy a failure. It was a fun novelty at the time, but that’s the point, it was never expected to be anything more than a novelty.
“Significant” isn’t a word I’d use to describe Japan’s video game market. Sony has kept it close because the PS3 is a huge hit in Europe, surpassing the 360 by a few million units.
I don’t know if the EyeToy is a failure either. There’s a long history of peripherals that may work very well, but only for a few games. More importantly, the EyeToy is similar to the Eye, which is an integral part of getting the PS3 Move to work. Though the Eye did come out a few years before the Move released and there are several games that use the Eye without using the Move controllers.
Now, how big the Move will do is an open question, and could always wind up on a list like this.
The Kin phones were sacrificed so that their ideas could be rolled into Windows Phone 7. It seems to have worked out. They may make a comeback of sorts, from what I’ve heard.
I’m going to say: CD writers/writable cds. First, DVD writable disks displaced them with larger file size. But more importantly, USB flash drives are now simpler, cheaper and ubiquitous. These days, you don’t need a cd drive or even a dvd drive in your computer - as long as you have internet and a USB port.
I suspect that ten years from now, we’ll dispense with flash drives too and store almost everything remotely.