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AnchorDesk

AnchorDesk Staff
Our favorite tech flops: The can't-misses--that did

AnchorDesk Staff
ZDNet AnchorDesk
Monday, February 12, 2001
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Next week marks the opening of the DEMO 2001 conference in Phoenix, a new venue for an old show that rates as one of my all-time favorites.

Unlike most of the bloviation-fests which make up so much of the conference circuit these days, DEMO is actually worth the price of admission because you can comfortably nosh on new on technology without risking a brain embolism fighting through sweaty, Comdex-size crowds all day.

And DEMO is all about new technology. Some of it great, some of it goofy. Some of it winds up in best-selling products, like the Palm handheld, while a lot of it winds up on the cutting room floor.

In fact, most of the new products getting their first public airing at DEMO wind up on the cutting room floor. But if you pay attention, you stand a fair chance of walking away from the conference with a sense of where particular technologies are heading. Or at least what some of the brightest minds in the industry think about future directions.

BUT AS ANYONE WHO ever paraded their stuff at DEMO will tell you, this is a crapshoot. Truth be told, I was once involved with a product that appeared at Demo and actually won a best of show award.

The product, Interchange, was the first fruit of a project to bring to market a proprietary online service. Looking at that decision from today's vantage point, I can say without qualification how remarkably dumb we were. Yet I should add this was in the halcyon days when America Online was a veritable puppy and Prodigy was considered state-of-the-art. As they say, timing is everything and with the World Wide Web about to enter our collective consciousness--well, you can guess the rest of that story.

Predicting how a technology will fare is always a crapshoot. And over the years, I've made my fair share of bone-headed predictions. Prodded into action by a newslist discussion with fellow column curmudgeons, I wound up with a checklist of some of the memorable "can't-miss" products or services which I or colleagues have recommended--only to watch them sink into obscurity.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION, a brief detour down memory lane:

  • PointCast and push technology: This tops the list. Remember when push technology was going to transform the world? It was a CAN'T MISS! Or so we were led to believe. But the world didn't want to be transformed and PointCast founder Chris Hassett returned to obscurity, a few shekels shy of Bill Gates.

  • Jini: Irrelevant. Nobody outside of Scott McNealy's flunkies gives it a second thought. But that didn't stop Sun's marketing machine from hyping it to the high heavens.

  • Microsoft Bob: The social interface for idiots, Bob turned out to be one of the biggest product flops in Microsoft's history (right up there along with Windows for Workgroups). Interestingly, a certain Melinda French was intimately involved with the Bob project. As luck would have it, she was also intimately involved with the boss and ultimately became Mrs. Bill Gates.

  • IBM's Butterfly: I loved this ThinkPad notebook with the expandable keyboard. I thought it would it would sell like hotcakes but it was the screens that basically dictated the size of the keyboard. Once screens got bigger and notebooks got wider, you didn't need to pull any fancy tricks with the chassis.

  • Compaq's Concerto: Also a notebook, this one with a detachable keyboard that could double as a notepad. Pricing and timing conspired to send this one to the junk heap. Compaq priced this black and white too high just as color portables were going mainstream.

  • Simon: The first Internet phone, also courtesy of IBM with the help of Bell South. Good idea but one big problem: It was the size of a brick.

  • Anything from Novell: The well has gone dry the last two years.

  • Xywrite: Another one that I dearly loved. Coming out of the Atex world in two previous jobs, I thought this DOS-based word processor was hog heaven. I can still remember the key commands, almost 15 years after moving to Windows-based rivals.

  • Telescript: Marc Porat's idea for electronic agents and personal intelligent communication sounded brilliant in the early 1990s. Unfortunately for Porat and General Magic, it was ahead of its time.

  • WebPC: Dell thought it had a winner. So did a lot of reviewers. The product wasn't bad but the marketing was miserable.

  • OS/2: At one point, OS/2 was the better operating system. Not to dredge up the history of the storied OS wars of the 1990s once more, but this turned out to be a financial sinkhole for IBM--in no small part because of Microsoft's Windows double-cross. Still, Big Blue gets the blame for lame marketing and severely underestimating the capacity of its archrival in Redmond.

What are some of your favorite tech flops? What new trends and products today are poised to flop tomorrow? TalkBack to me.

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