Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum Here. Some of the biggest, richest, and smartest companies in the world have a long track record of spectacular fails. Remember Google Glass Time magazine named the augmented reality I wear one of the best inventions of but the public strongly disagreed and decried its wearers
as glass holes. And Apple, arguably the most successful technology company in the world, was also the creator of the doomed Newton clunky touchscreen PDA from the late ninety nineties, plus during the same time period, a six dollar gaming console called Pippin that absolutely no one bought before the article. This episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Samuel West PhD, an organizational psychologist and the founder and curator of the Museum of Failure, a touring collection of
product flops and fiascos. According to him, it may be easy to laugh at the misfortunes of billionaires, but it's also instructive, he said, we need to accept failure if we want progress and innovation. You can't have innovation or progress without taking meaningful risks. And as soon as you try to be innovative, there's going to be failure. There's
no way around it. For every iPhone, Oculus, and Netflix, the Museum of Failure reminds us that there was an Amazon fire Phone, a Nintendo Virtual Boy, and a Blockbuster video. You can't hit a home run without taking a swing, and it's okay if some of those swings are full blown whiffs. When West launched the first Museum of Failure exhibit in Sweden, in he wanted to show corporations and
organizations that failure itself isn't bad. He had noticed companies were averse to taking the kind of risks that can lead to very successful innovations. The only real failure, he notes, is failing to learn from your mistakes and adapt, a popular engineering concept known as failing forward. But what surprised West was how much the general public embraced the museum's message.
He said, people felt liberated. Did see all of these big, bad multinationals with all of their resources and knowledge and realize, if they can foul up, so can I. The Museum of Failure has dug up some true technological turkeys that should never have existed. Take the Twitter Peak. This was a two d dollar device. Released in two thousand nine. That did one thing access Twitter. You might be asking, wasn't there already a Twitter app for smartphones in two
thousand nine? Yep? And wasn't it free? Also yep? So why would anyone pay for a second handheld device just to read and send tweets? They didn't, as it turned out. Or take Google TV. It was ahead of it time, though not in a good way. Back in the search Giant knew that would be streaming YouTube and movies on the small screen, but Google's TV execution was clunky. The technology just wasn't ready for prime time. Exhibit A is the Sony Google TV remote, which included a staggering eighty
eight buttons. The Museum of Failure features a fair share of food and beverage fails. To release of new coke was one of the most famous marketing disasters in recorded history. Even the Coca Cola company admits that it was foolish to mess with the year old formula for its flagship soda, Even if hundreds of thousands of taste testers said that they preferred the new flavor, The product only lasted a few months before Coca Cola bowed public outcry and reintroduced
the classic taste. But let's not forget about some other high profile food and beverage blunders. Remember Crystal Pepsi, a Coke's rival, tried to capitalize on the year and natural craze of the nineties with a clear cola. Why did it flop? A former Pepsi CEO O David Novak said in a two thousand seven interview with Fast Company, it would have been nice if I had made sure the
product tasted good. Another food fat from the nineties was olestra, the magic ingredient in fat free, low calorie versions of snack foods like Pringles, Lays, Ruffles, and Derrito's. Procter and Gambles spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars developing an artificial fact that tasted just like the real thing, but wasn't absorbed by the digestive tract. Unfortunately, the science of a lestra backfired, literally, leading to unpleasant side effects
arranging from painful gas to urgent diarrhea. A West might giggle at fumbles like Google Glass and Google Wave, which was an early and overly complicated version of Slack, but says he has nothing but respect for what he calls Google's evolutionary approach to innovation, basically invest tons of resources into hundreds of new ideas and seeing what sticks. In evolution, generally only the beneficial mutations are passed on, and so
it is with innovation. The bad ideas either go extinct or are folded back into the gene pool for a new and improved development later. If you want a lesson in failing forward, check out the Google Graveyard, a comprehensive list of every single Google product and service that's been killed since two thousand one, all two hundred and sixty four of them. You can find it it killed by
Google dot com. So before you let your own dreams get derailed by a minor setback or a major flop, consider this quote from Alberta Alesie, an award winning product designer and favorite of West's. He said, revel in your glorious failures. Dance on the borderline between success and disaster, because that's where your next big breakthrough will come from. By the way, the Museum of Failure does not have
a permanent site, but tours around the world. It's currently in Taiwan, and Samuel West welcome suggestions for other items to include. You can send your ideas to info at Museum of Failure dot com. Today's episode is based on the article The Museum of Failure Celebrates Flops and Fiascos on house to works dot com, written by Dave Rus. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership with how stuffworks dot com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang.
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