Flops, Failures and Falls from Grace

get when you see someone else fail. Now there's a little bit of that going on sometimes, but really, to me, the interesting thing about failure is that you can learn from it. By learning what doesn't work, you can refine your approach and find ways that do work. Or sometimes you figure out the thing you wanted to do isn't necessarily possible. So in this episode, I'm going to look at some projects, gadgets and campaigns that didn't succeed for

various reasons. Because for every iPhone success story, there's a massive flop that hardly anyone remembers today. Long time listeners know that once upon a time, I very confidently predicted that Apple's iPad would be a failure. Obviously I was as wrong as wrong can be about that. So there's our first fail. It was mine. But at the time I felt pretty sure of myself. After all, no one had really made a successful consumer tablet computer at that point.

There were tablets on the market, or slate computers they were sometimes called, but for the most part, the only place you found them were in certain occupations or specific use cases. No one had really hit it big with a general use tablet computer. Q Michael Arrington, co founder of tech Crunch, he wanted to create a useful tablet or slate computer. He also wanted it to be affordable. He really wanted to aim for a two dollar price tag,

which was pretty darn ambitious really. He and his team got started in two thousand and eight on the concept, and they were able to build a couple of prototypes, and it turned out that making a tablet was really hard, particularly getting the capacity of touchscreen just right so that there was a good input method for the user. I mean, obviously there's no keyboard or mouse. You have to have

a way to interact with the device. And after those first couple of prototypes, Errington's team partnered unofficially it turns out with a company called Fusion Garage, and that really

ended up being a bad choice. Now. At first, everything was going okay, but then on November two thousand nine, Errington got a message from the CEO of Fusion Garage, and the message said that Fusion Garages shareholders felt that Errington's team was superfluous and that their company, Fusion Garage, should just move forward with this device on their own, cutting Errington out entirely to make matters worse. This was just days before Errington was going to show off the

working prototype at a live event. He had already talked about the crunch Pad publicly and people were eager to see what it was that his team had been working on. It was supposed to be the launch of the product, and the plan was to even take pre orders for up to a thousand units, and boom, Errington gets this message. Now,

as you can imagine, that didn't go down well. Fusion Garage announced that the tablet, now renamed Juju that's j o O j o O, would go on pre sale in December for five hundred dollars, more than twice the price Errington wanted to aim for when he had started working on the project. A couple of years earlier, Errington sued Fusion Garage, but because there was no formal contract about their agreement, a judge dismissed a lot of the

arguments that Errington's legal team made against Fusion Garage. But it seemed like the whole thing would end up being a moot point anyway, because during the court case, it was revealed that the Juju device had only received ninety that's nine zero pre orders before it finally began shipping in March of The tablet was absolutely hamstrung by the Apple iPad, which we first learned about in January and

which began shipping in April of that year. So a lot of people were saying, well, if I want a tablet, I'm just gonna wait for the iPad. While I don't know how those court cases ultimately played out, I couldn't find that when I was researching this episode, I can tell you that the Juju Tablet didn't last very long.

Fusion Garage decided to stop supporting it before ten was even over, So we're only talking about half a year from the point it launched to the point that Fusion Garage stopped supporting it, and Fusion Garage itself didn't last a whole lot longer. That company went into liquidation in twenty twelve. I think there's some real lessons to learn

from that story. One is that making a particular form factor consumer friendly is really hard, and while Apple made it work, countless other companies have made slates or tablets that saw very little traction in the general tech consumer market before and since the introduction of the iPad. Another is that you always get those business agreements in writing always. Now, let's take a leap, In fact, let's call it a

Magic Leap, a decade ahead. The company Magic Leap started in two though it kept a pretty low profile for the first few years. We would later learn that the primary focus of the company was the development of an augmented reality headset. Now, just in case you're not familiar with that, term, augmented reality or a R refers to using digital information to enhance a real environment in some way.

Typically we experience this digital enhancement through a screen or a headset, though you could do it with audio like with headphones, or even other methods of sensory input. But the technology interprets what we are focusing on within our environment and then enhances our experience in some way. So a super simple implementation are the various filters on phone apps that let you, you know, take pictures of yourself with bunny ears, or you can turn into a dragon

or whatever. Magic Leap was working on a headset that could overlay digital information on your view of the world, and the applications for this technology are practically limitless, from

entertainment to productivity. And obviously there are other examples of this technology on the market, such as micros offs hollow lens, but Magic Leap had a sense of mystery and well magic about it, and it attracted a lot of attention and a lot of investors, who poured around two billion dollars in the company years before it had a product to even show off. In two thousand eighteen, Magic Leap

introduced its first headset, fittingly named the Magic Leap. One had a steep price tag two thousand, three hundred dollars per headset. The CEO's original hope was that the company would sell one million headsets in its first year, but in the official company projections that got reduced down by an order of magnitude, down to one thousand units, but reality was far more harsh. After the first six months, the company had only sold around six thousand units, according

to Alex Heath of The Information. The Information Is a website. By the way, Addie Robertson of The Verge got to try out the Magic Leap and fell that the experience was interesting but fell far short of expectations. Given all the hype around the Magic Leap one for years, the tech world had been teased with hints at what was to come and lots of conceptual videos that really made

it seem phenomenal, and the anticipation was really high. But by the time it finally came out, after the hollow lens had already been demonstrated, the Magic Leap one just

didn't quite live up to its reputation. Magic Leap chose to pivot towards catering to enterprise clients, meaning instead of offering a consumer electronics product, the company was aiming at something for other businesses to purchase, and the rocky launch had some pretty big consequences, including massive layoffs like a thousand people laid off at the company and the CEO and founder of the company stepping down. Today, Magic Leap

is planning the release of their second headset. This one is lighter, and the company says it will have a larger few old of view, but there aren't many details beyond some general statements about the physical specs of the the high tech specs. It may be that the experience of using them will match more closely with the perception of what it was going to be like, but we'll

have to see. I personally get the feeling that a R is kind of going through what VR went through back in the nineteen nineties, which is when the actual experience of VR ended up being a pale imitation of what everyone thought it would be and then interest dropped like like a stone as a result. But I hope that they're successful. I would actually love to see more innovation in the a R space. So while I have reservations, my hope is that they make it work. Meanwhile, Magically

has some other challenges. It seems like a lot of the planned partnerships that the company had with other big companies have sort of stalled out, and in Florida, the company has asked for an extension on a promise it made to the Broward County Commission. Magic Leap had promised to create seven jobs with an average salary of one thousand dollars per year, and in return they got some

pretty sweet incentives to set up shop in Florida. But due to the fallout of the Magic Leap one release not going as planned and the subsequent layoffs and the pandemic on top of everything else, the company needs more time to make good on that promise. I'll keep my eye on Magic Leap and I'll continue to hope that the team is able to rebound. Let us now turn our sights to Microsoft. Now, Microsoft has tons of candidates

I could choose from when it comes to failures. Years ago, I did an episode on Microsoft Bob, arguably one of the biggest flops in tech history. Also, it's the flop that introduced the world to comic Sands. I could also talk about Windows Vista or Windows eight, but instead let's chat about the Zoom. The Zoon wasly a suite of technologies centered around a portable media player called the Zoon. It was kind of Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPod. Microsoft

launched the Zoo on November two thousand six. The original Zoom device had thirty gigabytes of storage space built in FM radio and a three inch screen, but two thousand six was pretty late to get into the portable media player game. Apple had introduced the first iPod in two thousand one and had worked to create an ecosystem with iTunes. An ecosystem I should add that worked okay if you were on a Mac, but I maintained it was a nightmare to use it on PC, at least in my experience.

Microsoft was trying to make up for some lost time and lost ground, and it didn't go so well. When it came to market share, the Zoon was never able to get as high as ten percent of the whole market. It was always in the single digits. The company stuck with the product line for a file, including the introduction of a touch screen Zoom in two thousand nine that was the Zoom hd UH. Some first generation Zoom thirties failed.

They froze entirely. Microsoft later said that the reason for the Zoom's freezing was because of a third party internal clock that failed to account for a leap year the host pesky clocks. One capability the Zoom players had that got a lot of snark was that you could wirelessly share a song from your library with a friend who also happened to have a Zoom. Also, you could actually

send that song to any nearby Zoom device. If your Zoom detected another Zoom within thirty feet, you could send a song you know, or other piece of media like a podcast their way, and the recipient would get a little notification and they could choose to either accept or deny that offer, and then if they accepted it, they would have three days to you know, listen to the media before it disappeared from their vice, and they also

had a limit of listening to it three times. And hearing that you might think, well, was there to be snarky about. Well, the snark wasn't about the capability, It was the name that Microsoft gave to it. Microsoft called

it squirting. The lackluster sales of the Zoom ultimately led to Microsoft deciding to stop development and production on the Zoo in the company continued to support the Zoom software service, which allowed you know, existing Zoom users to listen to songs they had purchased through Microsoft and Stuff, or they could listen to a catalog of streaming music for a monthly fee, but all of that got shut down in two thousand fifteen and while Microsoft would you know, move

users over from their service to a new service, the Groove Music Service, not all the copyright licenses made that shift. The the library of the zooon uh universe was different from the Groove universe, so that wasn't great. It meant a lot of Zoom users found themselves unable to listen to music that they had previously purchased on the Zoom platform. And it was also a reminder that the media model we have these days where we don't really have copies

of media. Typically we normally access the media through streaming services. That means that there can come a time where we can't access that stuff anymore because of licensing issues that are on the back end. So bye bye Zooon. We hardly squirted d. On a related note, there was the Panto, famous for its association with musician Neil Young. The bitch

for Panto is pretty simple. Most digital music we encounter these days has been compressed, and in that compression process you can lose fidelity, the quality of the audio, the dynamic range of the music. That's the range between the softest and the loudest bits of a piece that gets reduced. So it makes the music more flat right, The softer parts get boosted a little bit in volume, the loudest parts get reduced in volume, and you have less variation.

You might also lose some harmonics because compression algorithms typically determine if a sound is within the range of human hearing, and if it figures that the sound is outside the range of human hearing, it drops that information, thinking that's not really important, but that can help shape the sound a little bit, so that's also an issue. The Panto

would let you listen to uncompressed digital music. Ideally, you would experience music as if you had been in the recording studio when the artists were laying down the tracks for the first time, or maybe more realistically, you would be in the studio after audio engineers had worked on a track to sweeten it up a little bit before recording it to a master. Neil Young first started talking

about Panto back in two thousand twelve. A Kickstarter campaign helped fund the project initially, though the company called Ponto Music reportedly had industry backing as well. Despite all this, the project dragged on and it bled money, with the company having to launch a crowdfunder campaign later to raise even more money, so it had two different crowdfunding campaigns in the company released the Panto music player device. The

sales must have been pretty lackluster. The Travel Insider blog estimates that perhaps around fifteen thousand Pantos were sold as part of the crowdfunding campaign, sort of pre sales. It was an expensive piece of technology. It started at four hundred dollars and ultimately I think Ponto failed because when it comes to considerations people give for portable music, the

convenience factor typically rates much higher than fidelity. Plus, we were starting to shift from downloads to streams around this time too, And besides, there's a diminishing returns issue when it comes to fidelity. Yes, you can from a nickel level see an improvement in audio, like you can look at the different meters and say, okay, we detect more precisely that this recording is more uh accurate a representation

of the original sound than this other recording. You can do that from a technical perspective, but a lot of us have trouble telling the difference between a good music playback session and an excellent music playback session. It's very easy to tell bad from good. But once you get up to good things, get a bit more subjective. The Pano players stuck around for two whole years before it

faded away after various partners had already gone bankrupt. There was talk of Pano leading to another service, you know, kind of evolving into something else, but so far nothing has come of that. Now when we come back, we're gonna get all googly up in here, But first let's

take a break. Well, I've already spoiled it. But one company that has had a very long history of abandoned projects is Google, and that shouldn't be a surprise because for more than a decade the company encouraged its employees to experiment and think outside the box. Until about the general policy at Google was that Googlers could spend twenty of their time working on their own projects that could potentially benefit Google down the line, but they weren't part

of the employee's normal work. So that could mean that Monday through Thursday you work on your official projects, and then on Fridays you just kind of experiment and build stuff that might or might not ever see the light

of day. This was Google's way of encouraging innovation within the company, and a lot of elements of Google products emerged because of this policy, but we also saw stuff that would get a launch or get incorporated into something else and over time and Google would just step back from it. Sometimes I think the problem was that Google didn't really know how to launch and promote some of

these products. But in other cases it really was more that the products just didn't appeal to non Google engineer types, or that you were looking at something that was questionably useful, or it just wasn't very user friendly in general. Anyway, there's a bunch of Google products we could talk about that didn't go very far, and a few that never emerged beyond an announcement. Oh and before I forget, you might wonder why Google abandoned that you know, employees get

time to pursue their own projects policy. Sometimes around it's not because the company changed course on innovation, but because of managers. See, managers at Google are accountable for the productivity of the teams they manage, and that time really eats into the number of hours teams can dedicate to official Google projects, and that hits the managers when it

comes to review time. So there was a shift within the company to eliminate the loosey goosey time component to boost productivity and go with a more top down approach to innovation. Anyway, let's talk about some Google products, some which may have been spawned from that time policy that ultimately flopped. And this is just a sampling. I could do multiple episodes about all the different products from Google that ultimately got the AX. So consider this more of

a sampler platter, arranged in no particular order. And we'll start with a Google product that lasted all of one whole day. I'm talking about Google X. Now, this is not the moonshot Google X. That's a division inside Google that focuses on bleeding edge R and D. It's kind of Google's version of Lockheed's skunk Works. No. No, the Google X i'm talking about was a different approach to Google Search, and it was only available on March six,

two thousand five. Back in two thousand and five, the basic Google search bar allows you to indicate what sort of results you wanted to look for before you hit search or I'm feeling lucky. The I'm feeling lucky button would just take you to whatever the top search result was for your query. You could search the web for pages related to your query. You could search images, you could search for news articles and so on. That stuff still exists, by the way, but now it's after the jump,

after you've done that initial search. But in the old days you could do it before you actually hit the search button. Anyway, Google X was a new layout for search, with icons replacing the text above the search bar. So there was a portrait in a frame icon that represented image search, there was a newspaper icon that represented news, and so on. It looked a lot like Apple's Mac os ten or os x doc like a lot a

lot like it. Chakai O Haasama, the software engineer presumably behind the redesign, acknowledge the connection to Mac os ten. But here's the thing. There are certain companies that have a reputation for really jealously guarding their I p. Apple is one of those companies. In fact, the company has been known to send legal teams after other companies that

looked like they were kind of copying Apple style. This, by the way, is pretty rich if you know the history of Apple's graphic user interface and how Steve Jobs himself was famous for stealing other ideas and making them Apple's own approach. Anyway, while neither Apple nor Google said anything about it, the OS ten like layout of Google Search was gone by March two five. Next is Google Lively,

which I honestly don't remember being a thing. Now. It's possible I heard about it at the time, but Google launched this back in two thousand and eight. That is the same year we paunched tech Stuff, So it's also entirely possible that it just completely escaped my attention. It wasn't around for very long, so it's not like I had a lot of opportunities to get familiar with it.

So what the heck was Google Lively? We'll simply put Google Lively was a way of creating online three D spaces that kind of served as a sort of chat room. You can think of something like Second Life but for Google, or something that's kind of like an M M O RPG, just without the overt game elements. It all fit inside the web browser experience, so you didn't have to download

a program or anything. When it launched. It worked only with PCs running Windows, specifically either Windows XP or Windows Vista anyone remember those, and it was also compatible with Internet Explorer or Firefox. I don't think It was even compatible with Google Chrome, though to be fair, Chrome did not launch until September two eight, so the same year that Ly came out. The company planned future versions that we're supposed to work on Mac and Linux computers as well.

Rooms within Google Lively had their own u r l s, so you could link them together within Google Lively, and moving from one virtual room to another was essentially the same thing as clicking on a link and going to a new web page. Google Lively could be embedded into other websites, so a web administrator for a big brand could incorporate Google Lively into the brand's own web presence

and allow visitors to wander around a virtual space. You could have some limited interactions with virtual objects and with other visitors to the three D room, you could chat. Your messages would appear in a little word balloons above

your avatar's head. You could also open up a separate chat window if you preferred, which made it a lot easier to follow a conversation, and several actions were also included as animations for your avatar, so rather than just typing in something like hugs, you could have your avatar hug. Another one Google Lively was one of those projects that grew out of the twenty percent employee time policy. But one thing it didn't have was a way to generate revenue.

There was no plan on how to use Google Lively to make money, and so while it was kind of interesting, it also didn't serve much of a business purpose, and a lot of tech journals of the time pretty much dismissed Google Lively, calling it more lame than Second Life.

That's their words, not mine. At the time, the world was also sliding into a recession, which was affecting the ad revenue business kind of like what we saw in and since AD revenue is the way that Google makes the vast majority of its money, leaders within the company decided that Google Lively was a distraction and that really all hands were needed on deck to deal with the lagging AD dollars. It launched in July two and Google killed it at the end of that year, so it

wasn't around for very long. Moving up to two thousand and nine, we get to Google Wave, which was a real time online collaborative editing tool. You had create a document called a wave, then you could invite other people to join it, and then together you could all make changes all at the same time, and you could see people making changes to stuff in real time, and you

could chat or leave comments about it. Now. At the time it came out, I was preparing to launch a tech Stuff video series with my original co host, Chris Palette. We used Google Wave to help plan out our episodes. We would build our show in Google Wave and we had tech news segments. We also had some goofy stuff in there. We had a tweet of the week segment. Gosh, those were fun days. Anyway. Google Wave lasted only slightly

longer than our video series did. While some features would find their way into other Google products, Google Wave itself was washed out by when Google said it would no longer support development for the platform, and Google a Fish deleted everything that was on Google Wave in April of tw Some of the features from Google Wave would find their way into another failed Google product called Google Buzz, which launched in two just a couple of months after

the company said it wasn't going to support Wave anymore. Google Buzz was kind of a bridge between Google Wave and Google Plus, and here's a news flash, none of those products are around anymore. Google Buzz was all about adding social features to Gmail, and Buzz was itself incorporated directly into Gmail. That in itself would become a pretty big problem for the company. But here's how Google described

it in their initial blog post announcing the service. Back in quote, Google, Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch. It just works. If you think about it, There's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings the network to the service by automatically setting you up to follow the people

you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy to use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos, and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately, so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences. Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time. End quote.

Buzz would let users or force them, depending upon your point of view, aggregate feeds from their various social circles into one place, so for example, you could see tweets posted by your friends pop up and Google Buzz, assuming you had those friends listed as contacts and Gmail. And it wasn't just Twitter. You could aggregate stuff from other services like Flicker because a friend, feed, Blogger, and YouTube and I'm sure a couple of those names were blasts

from the past for some of you out there. You can also post to Google Buzz directly, similar to making a post on Facebook or Twitter. You could include pictures or links, and friends could comment on those posts and create a threaded conversation. Nothing groundbreaking, you know, but it

was all nested within Gmail. And then came the problems. See, by incorporating Buzz into Gmail, it turned all Gmail users into Buzz users, and that wasn't necessarily something that Gmail folks wanted, and they weren't too terribly keen on their contact lists becoming public or that stuff they thought they had been posting to a small group of friends was now circulating among much larger groups thanks to the fact that Buzz would helpfully point out friends of friends that

you might know to expand your circle. In short, the implementation was a pretty big min as far as privacy and trust are concerned. Google was actually taken to court and lost over the matter, and they paid out more than eight million dollars As a result. Buzz got a couple of changes to make it less intrusive, but it just wasn't meant to be. It would be phased out to make way for Google Plus, though the two services did exist side by side for a short while. And

of course now Google Plus is gone too. But I do have one last Google product I want to mention, and it's not Google Plus. As I said earlier, I could do a whole episode on all the different Google products that came and went, with some of them having features that found their way into other stuff. And one of those gadgets is the Nexus Q. Now, the Nexus QUE is special because it never actually came out as a consumer product. It was announced Google unveiled it at

the company's Io conference for developers in twenty twelve. In fact, people who were attending that conference actually got a Nexus Q, which I guess makes it a special kind of collector's item since Google pushed back the release date of the consumer version until the whole thing just got canned. So

what was the Nexus Q simply? But it was a media streaming device you would connect it to speakers or to a television, and you used an app to control the Nexus Q. You could send content to it that then would play out either on the TV screen or on the stereo speakers or whatever it was connected to. The design of the gadget was very striking. It was spherical with a flat section, so it could sit steady on a table or on the floor, wouldn't just roll around.

It also had a circle of tiny led lights going around it, kind of like an equator, but at a forty five degree angle relative to the sphere. It weighed about two pounds or not quite a kilogram, and it looked pretty darn nifty. But that's sort of where the positive remarks end. See The Nexus q was limited to streaming content from Google server says like YouTube or what was then Google Play. There was no support for any

other streaming services. The control scheme was somewhat confusing, according to multiple reviews, and on top of everything else, it was expensive. The projected price was two dollars, which also didn't include stuff like speakers if you wanted to make it a sound system, so this wasn't like the later Google Home smart speakers or anything like that. It wasn't as robust as the chrome Cast devices that would come later, which allow you to stream all sorts of content to

a television using a connected phone or computer. It was a limited media streaming device at a premium cost in a world that already had stuff like Apple TV, Roku and so Nose devices. Ultimately, Google chose not to release the Nexus Queue. Instead, many of those features would go into devices like the aforementioned chrome Cast and smart speakers. They wouldn't be quite as striking from a stylistic standpoint is the NEXTUS queue, but they did prove to be

more versatile. And that's our Google section for this episode. Like I said, I can talk about tons more. Let's say about Google Fiber, which I'm still waiting for here in Atlanta. There's a Google Fiber office near our studios downtown. I signed up years ago to connect to Google Fiber, but never built out to my neighborhood, which actually sits between two major points in the Google Fiber infrastructure in our city. But that story would require a whole episode

on its own. And I'll just go to break so I can be bitter for a bit. I'll be better not bitter when we come back and I'll talk about a few more flops, but first let's take another break. In a recent Text of News episode, I talked about an Apple TV Plus series about the not really a tech many called we Work, and I figured we should probably do a brief overview of we Work, because while it isn't really a tech company, it consistently positioned itself

as if it were a tech company. And while this story isn't over yet, it has had a massive fall from grace so sky high overview. We Work as a company that secures spaces and buildings and then leases or subleases those spaces out to other professionals. So that can include freelancers who just need a workspace of their own, or companies that don't have their own offices yet. So if you're launching a startup and you don't have the cash on hand to get a space of your own,

you could rent some space from we Work. And it came with some perks, like an internet infrastructure, so you could just connect to the we Work offices internet. They also had some goodies like free beer, no kidding. For a while, that was one of the perks of a wee Work in environment a breake area stocked with free beer, oh and also wine. But the days of wine and Bruskis were not to last. The company was leading up to holding an i p O, or initial public offering

in two thousand nineteen. That's when a privately owned company makes the transition to a publicly traded company and joins the stock market. We works i p O was highly anticipated. Investors had been pouring a lot of money into the startup and it had reached a peak valuation of almost fifty billion dollars that's billion with a B, a princely sum.

But then things went pear shaped. Well really, the pear shaped stuff was kind of in the works for a while, but it really came to a head at the i p O when the company filed the i p O S one registration document with the SEC. Because that document seemed to belong to another universe. This is a document that lay is a lot of information about a company before it goes public, so stuff like the corporate structure and succession planning. But this one didn't seem to belong

to our universe. It seemed to belong to a cartoon universe. It included a corporate hierarchy in which you had at the top the WE Company. Underneath that was the WE Company m C l l C. Then under that you had the WE Company Partnership, under which was the We Work Company's ll C. So it's kind of like a

Russian nesting doll more than an organizational chart. Moreover, the company had some massive expenses in there, like a private jet for the CEO and co founder Adam Neuman, and there were questions about the fact that Neiman had been purchasing real estate on his own then leasing that real estate to we Work, which would suble sit down to customers.

If you're the CEO of a company that is funded by investors, it seems to me like it's a little bit of a conflict of interest if you take the money of the company to least real estate from yourself, using essentially investor money to fund your pockets. But it gets stranger the deeper you go. Another co founder of We Work is Adam's wife, Rebecca, who is first cousins with Gwyneth Paltrow. Now I mentioned that because I detect a similar sort of magical thinking in Rebecca as I

see in Gwyneth, And that's not a compliment. Magical thinking means you tend to believe that unrelated events have some sort of causal link to them, you know, like if you step on a crack, you will in fact break your mama's back kind of thing. It's the opposite of critical thinking. Anyway. Elements of that were in the I p O filing as well, which is unusual to say the least. The I p O prospectus gave current and

potential future investors pause. Maybe that fifty billion dollar valuation mostly thanks to major investors SoftBank, maybe that was a little bit off the mark, and everything then began to crumble under criticism. The company withdrew its IBO filing and postponed the offering, which to this day is still postponed. A bit later, the board of directors demanded that Neuman resign as CEO. But don't worry about him. He got to leave with about one point seven billion dollars worth

of wealth because of a soft Bank buy out. Soft Bank took over we Work as majority shareholder and controlled the company. The value of the company at that point had plunged by around nine percent. SoftBank divested we Work of some side businesses that really had nothing to do with office space. Like it owned a wave pool company at one point. A report in October twenty from the company stated that it might be profitable by the end of one and that it's going to explore as for

an I p O again. More recently, there have been rumors that We Work might go public through a special purpose Acquisition company or sp a C. Now these are shell companies that have their own i p O. So it's a company that doesn't own anything, doesn't do anything, but it goes public. Then it uses the money that's raised by that i p O to buy a private company, and the private company, now owned by a public company,

becomes a public company itself. So in other words, this process bypasses the I p O process for that private company. And you might think that sounds fishy, but this is actually legal and accepted, though it can also be risky. As I record this, We Work hasn't gone through with the sp a C approach, nor has it announced formal plans to hold its own I p O. I think that we Work team are weighing their options, and we're

getting to the end of this episode. And as I said, there are tons of companies and products that we could talk about and not just from Google. So, like I said, there's no shortage of those either, Like we could talk about the Windows Phone story or the Facebook Phone or movie Pass, but I'll save some of those for a future installment of what I'm sure will be an endless series. For this episode, I thought I would end with a notable flop that brings another F word into the mix.

But not that one, not the dirty one. I'm talking about the Samsung Galaxy Notes seven, which brings the word fire to our a literate mix of failures, flops, and falls from grace. On August, tech reviewers received the first round of the Galaxy Note seven smartphone from Samsung, and

the initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The phone had a really nice design, apparently felt great to use, had an amaze in display, and the early consensus was that the phone was just really well designed and potentially the best smartphone of the year. And then they started to explode, and yeah, that's what some of them did. Less than a month after those review models went out, there were

reports of thirty five exploding Galaxy Notes sevens. The company rushed to recall the Notes sevens that were still on the market and tried to suss out where the problem was. The company's engineers in Korea tried to replicate the issues, but they couldn't get any of them to explode, and the company was eager to fix these problems and get the handsets back on the market after this, you know, little hiccup, perhaps limiting the damage of that initial crisis.

After all, the phone received such great critical praise when it was reviewed, it could still be a big seller if the company could just make sure that none of the other ones would blow up. Samsung stated that the problem was likely due to the batteries that the company had installed in these handsets, and those batteries came from

one of the company's suppliers. In fact, the company's supplier being itself Samsung SDI or you know, a subsidiary company of Samsung, and so they decided they would go with a different supplier. They chose a Chinese company to produce the batteries, and thus they began to install them into

the handsets and get those handsets back out on the market. Unfortunately, the reports of exploding phones didn't stop with these new batteries, indicating that either two different suppliers had the same faulty batteries or there was some other issue at play. In the meantime, Samsung recalled the phones again, and airlines began to issue official statements banning passengers from carrying the Galaxy

Notes seven on board a plane. That's not a good look, and there was a real danger of this crisis spreading to other devices that might be perfectly safe, but without knowing for sure the would be too high. Samsung kept trying to get to the bottom of the issue. Ultimately, after two recalls, the company halted production of the Note seven and then scrapped the phone model entirely, a really costly decision, but probably not as expensive as dealing with

numerous lawsuits should future phones continue the explosive trend. Three months after discontinuing the Notes seven, Samsung issued a release explaining the company's findings in an investigation as to what caused these fires, and Samsung reps said that the first battery had a flaw in the design. At the upper right corner. The battery had a flaw where the negative and positive terminals of the battery can make contact with

one another, which would cause a short circuit. Instead of the electricity flowing through the circuit try of the phone, it was going straight from one terminal to the other terminal in the battery. That would make the batteries start to heat up very very quickly, to the point where it would catch fire and then explode. As for the second battery, Samsung said there was a welding defect in the production of some of those batteries, which led to

another short circuit issue and subsequent pyrotechnics. Apparently, the Chinese company was really rushing these batteries into production in order to meet these sudden demand and some corners might have been cut in the process. So, in other words, according to Samsung, the reason the Notes seven exploded was due to two separate problems with two different batteries. Now I'll likely do several more episodes about flops and failures, which, again,

these are not always tragedies. Sometimes we learn valuable lessons from them. And on Wednesday's episode, we're going to follow the career of a particular entrepreneur who has been associated with some very high profile, very flashy failures. Hell's that for a tease, And if any of you out there have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a person ality in tech, a specific technology. Maybe it's a trend in technology.

Any of those things let me know. Reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.