Tech Flops, Fails and Misfires

of pleasure you get from seeing someone else fail. I'm not proud of that. It is a factor, But mostly I like to cover these things to really look at what went wrong when that is you know, determinable. So was it just a bad idea? Was it a good idea but ahead of its time? Was it you know, poor execution? So it had nothing to do with the idea. Was just the way that people tried to, uh, you know,

take advantage of it? You know? Was it crumby people scamming other folks or sacrificing the health of a business for their own self gain or was it some combination of these things or something entirely different. So today I thought we would revisit some various companies and tech products that failed and see what lessons we can learn, if any,

and maybe maybe you know, indulge our schadenfreude along the way. Also, some of these are stories that I've covered in other episodes of Tech Stuff, but since we recently passed the one thousand, six hundred episode mark, I figure a lot of y'all probably haven't heard those. I hope you'll forgive me for going back over some stories I've talked about in the past. But let's get to it, because there are a couple of them where I feel like I

need to make some updates. So I figured to start this all off it would be fun to talk about Microsoft Bob, because not only was this a notorious flop, but it also spawned some stuff famous the famously irritates people to this day, like like the comics Sans font Um often gets lumped in with Microsoft Bob. Let's let's break this all down. What exactly was Bob Well? In the early days of personal computers, using a computer was a bit daunting for the uninitiated before g u I

or gooey operating systems. That's graphical user interfaces that would be stuff like the Mac operating system and Windows. Before all that we had DOSS. This was a command line based operating system. That means you would have to type in stuff to navigate the file systems and to execute programs, and it wasn't exactly intuitive, like you'd be doing c

D to change different directories and things. That these systems were a bit of a barrier to entry for a lot of folks because it just looked like, you know, gibberish if you were to glance at the screen not really understand what the command's all meant. But then you had the gooey systems, the graphical user interface systems, so you had stuff like Windows and mac os where you can represent programs with icons, and clicking on an icon

launches a program. This is way easier to grasp than using directory commands typed into a text based operating system. But even this could be a little intimidating for new users who had never worked with a computer ever, and so some engineers at Microsoft came up with an alternative. Bob replaced the familiar desktop layout of Windows three point one with a cartoon representation of various rooms and the objects in the room would stand end in as icons

for different programs. So if you wanted to check your schedule, you could click on a calendar that's hanging on the wall in your room. Do you want to look at your monthly budget, you click on a little binder has a dollar sign on it, and that's sitting on a little coffee table. You even had a little dog named Rover who would pop up in the corner and he would give you either helpful tips or irritating ones on

how to navigate and use the system. Rover would serve as a model for another Microsoft creation that would get tons of hate over the years. That would be Clippy, the paper clip that would pop up and say things like, it looks like you're trying to write a letter, would you like some help with that? And for the record, I actually did not mind Clippy, except for the times when it would try to help me do something that

I had done a thousand times before. The goal of Bob was to map various computer functions to the real life equivalent of the activities you would, you know, do to manage the same thing. So it was to strip all the computer stuff away and to make it really intuitive to use. So what happened? Why did Bob flop? Well, there are several reasons. One was that Microsoft's major update to Windows, which was Windows, was right around the corner, so getting an overlay for Windows three point one just

before Windows launched probably wasn't the best timing. Another was that Microsoft Bob was a one dollar purchase at launch, which is a pretty pricey piece of software. It was also resource hungry, so to run Microsoft Bob you needed a computer, and that was at least a four D six meaning Ahead and Intel four a D six processor or better. You needed eight megs of RAM and thirty

megs of disk space. Now today that's nothing. Your phone has far more capabilities than that, But back in the mid nineties this represented a fairly hefty computer, and not that many people had them. But wait, there's more. According to PETTERI Jarvinen and I know I've butchered the name, I apologize anyway, a writer for a computer magazine, Microsoft

Bob also had non existent security. Alright, so Bob was designed to work not just for individuals but for households, So you could create a password for your account to let you access Microsoft Bob. But apparently this was more for personalizing your experience rather than securing it. As the review said, if you entered a password incorrectly three times, the assistant like Rover would pop up to help you reset your password. Do you see an issue with that?

Let's say you and I share a computer, and I happen to know that you've got a digital personal diary on that computer, but I can only access it if I were to log in as you, because you've protected it in a private space that I don't have general access to. Well, if this is true, if this piece in Computer magazine was accurate, I wouldn't even need to guess what your password was. I could type anything three times in the password field, and then reset your password

to something I know and log in as you. Then I can read all your juicy secrets in that diary. When you try to log in, well, first it looks like you're locked out of your account, but if you enter the wrong password three times, you get to reset the password again, and so it goes. Or you could log into my account and reread Havock. I should add that there were only a couple of reports that this

feature existed. Like I looked around to see if I could find verification that in fact, this was something that Microsoft Bob did, And in our episode where we talked about Microsoft Bob many years ago, we talked about this feature because that's what we were finding the reports on. However, I do not have Microsoft Bob installed on my machine, so I can't actually verify that that really happened, and I did see some discussions that suggest that maybe that

wasn't the case. Maybe they were using an earlier version of Bob or something. I don't know because I've never personally used it, and I cannot verify this, So it's a it's good to say that this is a possibly apocryphal story, and I sure hope it is an apocryphal story, because otherwise this is effectively the same as having no password protection at all. Again, unless the password didn't exist to secure things, but rather to create a personalized experience

for each individual who was using that computer. So everyone with access to that computer would be able to log in and see the UI that's laid out like a house, and each person could create their own private rooms, and they could even lock those rooms with password protection, but there would also be public rooms that everyone shared. What's more, you can make changes to public rooms. Actually can make changes to your private rooms too. You can move stuff around.

You can even delete icons that go to applications. You could vandalize rooms in other words, and I don't know if the room passwords were connected to the user passwords, or if they were if you could use the same password trick that I mentioned earlier to get through it, but either way, it's not a good solution. Even if you logged in as a guest, you can make changes

to all the public rooms. You could delete stuff and move things and hide icons in different places and just make life generally unpleasant for the other people who use that same shared computer or One last thing that really killed Bob was that Microsoft didn't really want to make deals with o e MS, or rather wasn't able to make any deals with O E M S. And O e M is an original equipment manufacturer, and those deals would have had Bob pre installed on new computers, but

Microsoft didn't really pursue that. This is typically how companies like Microsoft get their products on brand new machines. So if you buy a computer off the shelf at a retail store or online through most providers, chances are it comes with an operating system and a suite of software that's pre installed on that machine. So behind the scenes you have these big deals going on, and Microsoft just didn't really do that with Bob very much. So Bob

didn't Bob, Bob sunk. What's next. Let's talk about Microsoft a little bit longer, just for a moment. There are certain builds of Microsoft's Windows operating system that received a really bad reputation. So, for example, Windows Vista, which was released in two thousand and six, became the punching bag for a lot of computer review magazines. It was following

up on the massively popular Windows XP operating system. In fact, that operating system is so popular that there are still some people out there using it like two decades later. Windows Vista confused people like right all the gate because upon launch there were six different versions of the operating system you could choose from. There was Starter Home, Basic Home, Premium, Business, Enterprise,

and Ultimate. That immediately caused some confusion right away. Windows Vista also required a pretty beefy PC to run well, so people who wanted to just upgrade from Windows Xpedo Windows Vista and still use their old computer, they often found that the new operating system made their computer is

really sluggish and unresponsive. And I have complained multiple times on this podcast about how I hate an operating system that hogs up computer resources because back and rag J years to dang dang, dsh prompt, and yet I liked it, and it just it was a much lighter lift for your computer, so more of your resources could go to all the programs you want to run, not the operating system that's in the background. Vista did improve over time, but that initial launch version turned a lot of people off.

It was a really bad first impression. Microsoft would seemingly learn its lesson, and when Windows seven came out, the company incorporated the best of Vista's features while leaving out the worst of them. And then came Windows eight. Alright, so let's go ahead and do this one too while we're here. Windows eight launched in twenty twelve, and you know what, when I start looking at this list, I see a lot of entries that hover around twin eleven

and twelve is launch dates. There was something about those years anyway. This was Microsoft's attempt to unify the PC

and the tablet experience. I suppose the thought was that there were all these computers coming out they had touch screens, you know, laptops and just regular displays that were touch screen displays, and that we were all going to migrate to using computers that had these touch screen interfaces, even though most people I talked to who have machines that do have touch screen capabilities very rarely use the touch screen part. But this meant that Microsoft really doubled down

on a user interface that just didn't take off. It was really optimized for like that tablet touch screen experience, but that didn't really work so well for desktop users. And as a result, the operating system was not really simple to use, and people hated it. Many people hated it enough that they uninstalled it and went back to

Windows seven and again. Microsoft addressed many of the issues of Windows eight with updates, but it really wasn't until the launch of Windows ten that people came back round two being excited about a more recent Windows build. I don't know what happened to Windows nine, don't ask me. And we'll have to see if the release of Windows eleven will show that the company has actually learned its

lesson or if it will repeat its past mistakes. All right, let's look at two thousand and twelve and get away from Microsoft. Two thousand twelve is when Google introduced a spherical media streaming device called the Nexus Q. And by introduced, I mean unveiled, not launched. Uh. It kind of looked a bit like a black bowling ball with you know, a logo on it. It was sort of a predecessor to Google's Smart Speaker homes system and the Google Chrome

Cat gadgets. The Nexus Queue was meant to bring streaming media to the living room. Now by streaming media, I should be really clear, the Nexus Que had very limited options. You could stream YouTube videos, you could stream Google Play movies and TV shows, or you could stream music from Google Play Music, and that was it. This was two thousand twelve. Netflix had been streaming content for five years already.

There are plenty of other streaming audio services out there that were really interesting, and critics lamented that you had such limited options on the Nexus Q. To control the Nexus Que, you needed to pair a smart device with it, whether it's smartphone or a tablet, and there was a special app that you would run on that Android based device. This would effectively turn your phone or tablet into a remote control. There was no voice integration with the Nexus Q,

and it was expensive. The base model was meant to retail for two dollars that didn't include speakers, so if you wanted to use your Nexus Queue to listen to music, you would have to shell out some extra dough for speakers. Unless you just happen to have some speakers that had you know, banana plugs, that's the style of plug that would go into the Nexus queue, then you could repurpose those for your Nexus queue. Otherwise you had to buy

new ones that could be a few hundred bucks. Buying the cables would also set you back another fifty dollars or so. Google handed out free Nexus Q units to attendees of the IO event that year. I did not go. I've only been to one I O event and it was one of the ones where Google had nothing to hand out. So uh, I mean, I'm not big on getting handouts anyway, because I don't review products, so it'd

feel weird to get them. But this was one of those things that sticks in my craw the fact that the one year I go was Yere where there was there was no goodies anyway. Apparently Google got some feedback about how the Tech was lackluster in comparison with other similar streaming solutions on the market, and Google pushed back the planned launch date from the summer of twelve to never. Google abandoned plans to launch it, so now they're just kind of collector's items. I guess maybe now I could

do an entire episode just on Google failures. In fact that I think I might have done that at some point. So instead of that, we're going to cover some other notable misfires in tech after we take this quick break. All right, we're back. Let's get back to two thousand eleven, two thousand, two thousand and twelve and magical time and tech. A startup called color Labs started up it right in twenty eleven. They wanted to take aim at photo sharing

on smartphones with a brand new app called Color. Bill Nuen, fresh off a massive deal in which he sold off an earlier startup he had founded called La La. He sold that to Apple for a whopping eighty million dollars, founded Color Labs, and it was intended to compete with apps like Instagram, which was not yet part of the Facebook family back in twenty eleven, but it was going

to do this in a fundamentally different way. So rather than follow specific people like your friends or celebrities or you know, dogs that you know, I might be talking more about my habits on Instagram here. Instead, you would use color to look at photos that were taken an uploaded near wherever you were in the world at that time. So, in other words, you would wander around the world. Maybe it's just your town, maybe it's a city you've never

visited before. You would whip out your phone, you'd open up the Color app, and you would see who had taken what photos near the spot you were in, which I guess sounds interesting for certain types of experiences and photos, but to me, it also sounds kind of like just peeking in on the photos of people you most likely don't know most of the time. I suspect that's pretty boring.

Or you're looking at photos, it's something that you can actually see for yourself right where you are at that moment, so you can say, like, hey, look, honey, someone uploaded a picture of a tree that's right there, which doesn't seem super compelling. Now I can see how such an app might be interesting during big events that are happening in a specific place like if you attended a concert or a festival, or the Olympics or something, then you might want to open up Color and look at photos

of other people were taking and uploading. But again, and you'd likely get a ton of people who are taking pictures with their friends, and you know, without knowing anyone in the photos, you'd just be looking at random pictures. Add to this issue the fact that the user interface on Color was needlessly up tous, and you had a recipe for failure. And that's exactly what happened with Color Labs. The company is stuck around for a little less than

two years. Before it closed up shop. Color was a flop. You know. One recent flop I feel like I need to talk about briefly was Quimby, which I've done episodes on before. Quimby was a failed service that that crashed partly due to just incredibly bad timing and partly because I'm just not sure that the actual use case for Quimby was that compelling to start with. In other words, you could blame the pandemic for Quimby's demise, but I'm not convinced Quimby would have stuck around even if we

hadn't had the pandemic. Now, if you don't remember Quimby, don't blame you. Even though it launched just last year. It was a video streaming service in which subscribers would be able to watch exclusive, highly produced content on mobile devices. The whole use case for Quimby was that people like to be on their phones. So you might, you know, get in line somewhere like at the coffee shop, and you look at your phone as you wait. So the thought was, why not design an app that specifically targets

those people. This design extended not just to the user interface, but also to the content itself. So, for one thing, you could watch quimby content either in portrait mode or in the landscape mode on your device, and your view would shift to get a full screen experience, no matter

which way you were holding your smartphone, for example. But this meant that content creators needed to be aware of that, and that meant that they needed to be really careful at how they film thinks, because if you were viewing it in portrait mode, you know long ways like up and down, you might miss out on important details that would otherwise be at the edge of the frame. If you were watching it in landscape mode, so filmmakers had

to take that into consideration. Otherwise, you know, like let's say you're watching a mystery and there's a visible clue if you're holding your phone and landscape, but when you hold an in portrait, it's punched in and you don't see that clue, You're missing out on something important. As for the content piece, Quimby content was meant to be short, like ten minutes, bite sized, quick bites. That's what Quimby was.

Content creators can make long form shows and movies, but the user would access these in chapters that maxed out at ten minutes. This meant that as a content creator, you needed to structure your work so that you could tell a story or at least an effective part of

a story, in ten minute chunks. For movies, this would mean that would ideally have a piece, though it end on a cliffhanger, and that kind of encourages the viewer to keep watching and go to the next chapter, which is sort of like a Dan Brown novel and just as awful. I admit my bias is showing and I don't care. The subscription models for Quimby came in two flavors.

You could cough up five bucks a month to watch the content, along with ad support thrown in so you would get commercials, or you could up that to eight dollars per month and get an ad free experience. It wasn't as expensive as some other streaming media platforms, so at least it had that going for it. Back in ten, when Jeffrey Katzenberg of Disney and DreamWorks fame first founded the company, he brought on Meg Whitman to serve as CEO.

Even then, the idea was a long shot. But then when the service launched in April of twenty the world was in a very different place. COVID nineteen outbreaks meant that the world was going into lockdown. People weren't finding themselves in these situations that Quimby's founders had envisioned as being the perfect scenarios to engage in Quimby content. Because you know, there were no more lines, people were at home,

they could watch stuff on computers and television's. The short form approach that was optimized for mobile just didn't make much sense at that point. Making matters worse is that the company really front loaded the content for launch. They spent an enormous amount of money to have a library of shows and films for users, and Quimby offered a pretty generous free trial, but saw that many people simply canceled their accounts rather than switching to becoming paid subscribers,

so it was unsustainable. Quimby was only around for about half a year. The company announced it would be shutting down and in early one it sold off all remaining assets to Roku. Let's go from Quimby to Quirky. This one was a heck of a one to look into. I went down a rabbit hole while researching quirky. Uh, And this one's an outlier in our list because Quirky is maybe still around today, but it's in a different

form from what it was at launch. So back in two thousand nine, there was an entrepreneur, an inventor named Ben Kaufman who launched this new company and the purpose of this company was to give would be inventors an opportunity to monetize inventions and turn them into real products. And that was a kind of nifty idea. Of the idea is that the inventors would submit their ideas Quirky analysts.

Analysts for quirky nut analysts who were quirky would review the submissions and the good ones would get turned into products, and the people who submitted the invention would get a royalty on a per sale basis. Uh, it's one thing to come up with the world's next hit invention, but it's another thing to actually bring that invention to market.

So inventors are not always, you know, in the employee of a big company, and so that's where Quirky was really stepping in, and inventors could submit their work and then they could possibly profit off of that. The royalties were very small, like one and a half percent per sale. But if you think about it, if you don't have any way of actually producing your invention and bringing it to market yourself, then it's not doing you any good at all. So it's it was kind of like a

better than nothing kind of alternative. Kaufman's team raised around two million dollars in various rounds of financing, and the company did bring some products to market. In fact, several products to market, including an automated home hub platform called Wink, but not all the products were hits, and the costs of manufacturing were such that Quirkies broad approach became unsustainable.

In early Quirky change strategies and rather than produced stuff itself, it would seek out licensing partnerships with established big companies like Ge and Amazon. But Quirky was still losing money, and in the summer of the company was out of cash and filed for bankruptcy. In that process, the company sold off its wink platform for fifteen million dollars to

another company called Flextronics. Flex Stars had actually been contracted to manufacture the Wink products, so they just bought the i P and a group of investors bought out the rest of Quirky's assets, and a couple of years later, Quirky returned with a slightly different approach. The new Quirky doesn't get into the manufacturing side at all. Investors get that one point five percent royalty on the wholesale price of the product inmming from their invention, and that's paid

out once per quarter, so four times a year. Max Gina wald Horn, who had co founded a company called Evolation, took over as president of the new organization, but according to her LinkedIn profile, she stepped down in two thousand nineteen. However, her Twitter bio still reads that she's president of Quirky. I honestly don't know who is in charge of Quirky

right now. I did a search and everything. I even searched the Secretary of State website to try and find out more information, but everything pointed back to Gina, who appears to be pointed away from Quirky. She now serves as the chief operating officer of the Sports Innovation Lab. So I don't know who's in charge of Quirky at all, or if Quirky is still an ongoing thing. The company hasn't posted a video to its YouTube site since two

thousand seventeen, or I'm sorry two thousand eighteen. It hasn't posted an Instagram posts since two thousand nineteen, so I don't I don't know if it's currently active or not. All the sources I found say it's active and the website still up. You can still create an account there

and everything, so I don't know anyway. Next, let's talk about a company that was aiming to shake up the smartphone space a bit, and I'm talking about Essential Products, a company co founded by the Android founder Andy Ruben in two thousand fifteen. This was before the allegations about misconduct and sexual harassment, and worse about Reuben. It was before all that became public, Reuben was seen as as

a kind of tech genius. The Android operating system had become the most popular mobile os in the world, and people were eager to see what Reuben would bring when given the chance to head up the DESI line of a new phone and not answer to Google. The company worked largely in secret for two years before announcing the Essential Phone in two thousand seventeen, and the design was

pretty attractive. The screen on the phone was more or less bezel less, meaning the screen just covered the entire front section of the phone phone except for a tiny notch for the phone's camera. The company received a billion dollars and investments from various big companies like Amazon and Fox Con as well as other investor groups, and the Essential Phone debuted two months late, and early reviews found

a few flaws. Uh there were bugs in the software that made it difficult to use, the camera wasn't nearly as good as what had been promised, and making matters worse for the company was the launch of the iPhone ten, which had a similar form factor without the issues of the Essential Phone. So sales were disappointing. They were lackluster. The company announced plans for a second phone, but that

second phone never materialized. The world heard about the allegations against Reuben and the subsequent enormous golden parachute he received from Google upon leaving the company, and that seriously overshadowed anything that Essential was working on. The company folded in early twenty Now, our next entry requires a bit of an ancient history lesson, So scooch closer to the fire and let old prospector Johnny tell you a tale of m m O RPGs, or masterly multiplayer online or ale

playing games. Now, before there was a world of Warcraft, which for some people is synonymous with m m O RPG, there was a little fantasy game called EverQuest. Ever Quest was the was not the first m m O RPG either. I want to make that clear. That's a story for a different time. Ever Quest is a game that technically still running today. You can even play ever Quest for free. But the thing I want to talk about was a

proposed spinoff of EverQuest called ever Quest Next. This would have gone beyond an expansion pack or an iterative update it was in some form of development, since at least the ideas for ever Quest Next were really ambitious. The world of EverQuest Next would change organically as players interacted with it. So one example I heard is that imagine that you and some other players clear out of space.

You go adventuring, you you clear out of space of monsters, and you decide to decide to establish a town there, and you you build houses and you've got a town. But then you go off adventuring and you're gone for a really long time, and there's no one left behind at your town. You might come back and find that your town has been resettled by bandits or orcs or something like that. So, in other words, there would be emergent gameplay that would develop on its own, just based

on what was happening within the world. This is in contrast with the way most online world's work, in which game developers design scenarios for players to go through that have a beginning, middle, and end that's already pre written and there's no lasting impact on the online world itself. Creating a changing online world is a tough path to follow.

I mean, imagine if a game server were invaded by griefers, and the griefers set about just trying to change the online world in such a way that it becomes unwelcoming to everyone else, for example. But it was a really

cool idea. Unfortunately, it was a cool idea that was really hard to do, and the developers went back to the drawing board at least once as technology continued to improve while the game development languished in developmental hell, we saw a very similar issue with the game Newcombe Forever, which famously was considered vaporware for the better part, in fact,

more than a decade before it finally came out. And part of the reason it was considered vaporware is that the head of that project kept demanding the game be rebuilt essentially from scratch in order to take advantage of the latest in game engines and computational abilities. So the team would be working on a build of the game, then you would get a better game engine, and the lead of the project would say, all right, well we need to make this game for this new game engine.

Subscribe everything and start over. Meanwhile, other issues were complicating matters for the EverQuest team. In two thousand fifteen, Sony, which had been uh you know publishing ever Request under Sony Online Entertainment spun off that division into a new company with the name Daybreak Game Company, So now Daybreak Game Company was in charge of EverQuest Next. A year later,

development on EverQuest Next came to an end. Reportedly, the reason for stopping was because they had been working on this property for several years and the end result just wasn't fun to play, So rather than chase a moving target, the company focused on other titles, including ever Request to a more traditional M M O RPG one where the world doesn't change with player activity. When we come back, we'll look at a few more random failures in the

tech world, but first let's take a quick break. The next one is another story that has an addendum to it, and we get to go back to two thousand twelve.

I mean, there's something about that year right Anyway, That's when the world learned that Valve, the company famous for the computer game online marketplace called Steam as well as for creating really notable games like Half Life Portal and stuff like that, was going to release some hardware, and not just any hardware, but a dedicated game console that would be able to play PC games. In fact, The console was essentially a Linux based PC running a special

Linux distro or version called Steam OS. Valve partnered with various companies to make it all come true, and therein was part of the problem. It was kind of like what happened with the old three D O game console years earlier, and the result was that you had Valve working with different PC companies and they were each producing Steam machines, so that meant that different companies produced their

own version of the Steam Machine console. That meant there was no unifying design or set of specs, so you could look at two different Steam machines and find that they have wildly different features, really confused market. It also didn't help the game developers were kind of thrown under the bus for this. Even game developers that hoarded games to run on Linux found that those games weren't necessarily running so smoothly on Steam operating system. Sometimes they couldn't

run at all. Many of the manufacturers chose to include Windows as well as the Linux distro, or some of them would just sub Windows in entirely and get rid of the Steam operating system. That was not a great look. The consoles did start to come out around two thou fourteen, but they got pretty mediocre reviews. Uh, the Steam controller had a little more love than the consoles did. By two thousand eighteen, most companies had just stopped making Steam machines.

They were pretty much extinct. But life, uh finds a way. Recently, Valve announced it was producing a handheld gaming device capable of playing PC games. And it's called the Steam Deck and its supposed to be available starting this December one. I do wonder how the semiconductor chip shortage is going to affect the supply of the Steam Deck. Don't know about that yet, but it is an interesting design. It kind of makes me think of the Nintendo Switch when

you're using Nintendo Switch in handheld mode. Uh. Just like the Nintendo Switch. You will be able to connect the Steam Deck to a television using a dock or cables. This one will come in a few different loadouts. The prices range from three dollars for the base model up to six for one that has greater storage capacity. The Steam Deck will run on an updated version of the

Steam operating system. The Linux users will also be able to take advantage of the normal Linux desktop if they want to, and just navigate to other sources, not just Steam, in order to get the content on these these handheld computers, that's what they are. I'll likely do a full episode about this later on, maybe when we get closer to launch. But this is not the time to talk about unreleased tech.

It's time to talk about tech fails. And hopefully the Steam Deck will not join that list, but it's too early to say. So let's get to things that we do know failed. Now. Some fails seem inevitable in retrospect because and even casual examination of the technology reveals problems. Let us talk for a moment about the Juicero Press, which was a curig like device that could produce a fresh glass of fruit or vegetable juice at the touch of a button. So you would purchase the juice and pouches.

You would insert the pouches into this machine, which would scan the the pouch and then it would, you know, you touch a button and the machine would squeeze the bag empty and the contents of the pouch would go into a glass beneath the machine. Or alternatively, if that was too much work, you could just grab one of the juice pouches by hand hold it over a glass, squeeze the bag yourself, and you would get the same result. So the Juicero Press was a very expensive pouch squeezing machine.

So how expensive while at launch it costs seven hundred dollars and on top of that, you would have to subscribe to the company to get a selection of fruit and vegetable juice pouches sent to you on a regular basis. You couldn't just put like fruit in there. I had to be these pouches. But wait, it gets worse. So the Juicero Press did have a little more tech to

it than just a pouch squeezing mechanism. It had a scanner and it could connect to WiFi, and you use that scanner to scan the pouches that had a little Q hard code on them, and you'd have to do that before you could enjoy a glass of juice. It

wouldn't squeeze the pouch until you scanned it first. Now, the company claimed the purpose of this feature was to verify that the juice was fresh, because these juice pouches had a shelf life of a little more than a week, so you wanted to make sure you weren't drinking spoiled juice. That's not a great idea. So the company said, the Juice roe Press will verify that the pouch is actually good to go before actually squeezing it into your glass.

But other people pointed out that this specific approach also meant that the company could deny any other organization from making compatible juice pouches. If the Juice eoe Press first has to scan a code before it can squeeze out some juice, then it could effectively be a form of

digital rights management. That QR code is DRM. It prevents anyone else from making their own pouches, and that a juicer row the monopoly or at least opened up the opportunity for Juice Road to have like licensing deals so no one can make pouches without the company's permission. By two thousand seventeen, the company was calling it quits with the press. They were calling the sold units and refunding customers, and it became a symbol for the excesses of startup

culture in general and Silicon Valley in particular. I mean literally, this machine was not necessary. You could just take those pouches and squeeze them yourself and get the same, you know result, And you could do that, you know, it was far cheaper to just go and buy pouches of fruit juice. Like doing the subscription didn't make much sense. I think the juice pouches were somewhere of it between five dollars and eight dollars a pop. It's very expensive,

definitely access. Sticking with two seventeen, that's when Apple announced a product called air Power, and it was meant to be a new kind of wireless charger capable of charging up to three Apple devices simultaneously. So wireless charging was already a thing, of course, using you know, inductive coils

to recharge nearby tech. Typically you nestle the tech on a dock or you lay it down on a pad, but Apple's goal was to create a charging pad large enough to have say, an iPhone and Apple Watch and some air pods all charging on it at the same time, and all without having to find the specific you know, hot spots on the pad where charging could occur. The idea being like, you just lay your tech on this pad, You're good to go. You don't have to fuss with it.

Apple unveiled this idea while revealing the iPhone eight and the iPhone ten. Again we skip over nines, and they said that the air Power would come to the market in two thousand eighteen. But then two thousand eighteen happened and air Power didn't. In the spring of twenty nineteen, tech journalists reported that Apple had quietly canceled the project. So what happened Well, Reportedly, the engineers at Apple discovered that their goal was harder to achieve than they first thought.

It was tough to create a working pad that didn't have issues with interference or overheating and offered for you know, charging across the entire pad so you didn't have to worry about where things go. So after several failed attempts to actually create a reliable and working and safe product, the company pulled the plug, so to speak. Recently, mac rumors reported that Apple is actually still investigating the possibility of creating a wireless charging pads similar to what the

air Power was meant to be. And also, according to those same rumors, Apple is also looking into alternatives for charging pads, seeking out solutions that could allow for wireless charging over greater distances. Now, typically that's pretty tricky. He usually requires you supply more power to the charging device in order to reach these greater distances, and at some point you reach a stage where it's just inefficient and expensive to do that. Now, some fails don't look like

fails right away. They can stick around for a good long while. And that's the case for our final one. And it's a shame because this company made some really neat stuff. And I'm talking about Ankie or on Key a n k I, and I'm talking specifically about the hardware company that specialized in robotics and AI in toys. Founded in twenty ten. The company first got attention in when it unveiled the Onky drive product. And this was a really cool idea. So imagine your typical toy race

car racetrack in the old days. You would have a handheld controller with a trigger on it and that would just let you, you know, control the speed of your vehicle as you raced it along your designated lane in a pre built track. You know, maybe there's two lanes, but there's like a little divide or there, so your cars in one and your opponent's cars and the other. Well, Anki took this idea and brought it into the future.

The tracks and Anchi drive are wider than your typical toy race car track with no dividers, and there are multiple lanes on these tracks. The toy cars had AI incorporated into them and would connect to your smartphone via an app, and they could actually change lanes so they weren't stuck in one specific pathway on this track. You could, you know, kind of like in a highway. You could change lanes that way. So you would build out a

race track using some pretty darn expensive pieces. Then you would put your vehicles down the track to travel the entire length of the track in AI mode. This would let the AI learn the tracks layout, kind of mapping it out. After doing that, you could race against an AI controlled car, so AI would control one vehicle and you would control the other, or you could race against

friends who are controlling one or more other vehicles. In addition to speed control, you would tilt your smartphone to the left or to the right to trigger the accelerometer. That would cause your car to switch into a different lane, so your toy car wasn't stuck in that same lane all the way around. You could change lanes to pass someone else or to avoid an obstacle, and the app also had a couple of features that let you use

quote unquote weapons against other players on the track. Uh, if you got close enough to an opponent and you activated a weapon, then a little signal would pass between the two cars and it would cause your opponent to maybe slow down or even spin out. It was pretty neat, and if you wanted a set, you also needed a really nice, big place to set everything up because these tracks took up a lot of space, and you would also be spending around a hundred fifty dollars just for

the basic set. If you wanted any additional vehicles, each one would cost you another fifty bucks, and I think it was sixty dollars to buy an expansion set of track, So if you didn't have all you needed when you were setting up at first, you would have to shall out even more money. So yeah, it was a large and very expensive toy, but it had some genuinely neat

features that I thought were pretty cool. A few years later, and Ki released a robot called Cosmo Robot that kind of made me think a lot of Wally and Wally to be clear, was a movie that came out eight years before Cosmo launched. It looks a bit like a little bulldozer. It's got a little digital screen for a

face and very expressive digital eyes. You could interact with Cosmo using an app, and you could play with it as it moves around, you know, it picks up blocks and stacks the blocks, or turns them around, or or just explores its environment on its own. And the app included several games that you could play with or against Cosmo. And I've watched videos of this thing. It's really super

duper cute. If you ever want to watch a video of it, it's Cosmos spelled c o z m o Aki released a different robot that had a very similar form factor to Cosmo, called the Vector. Vector had some virtual assistant features incorporated into it. It connected via WiFi to home networks and used four microphones to pick up sound and voice commands, and it also had an integrated camera it could help the robot navigated, also allowed it to take photos. But in twenty nineteen, Andy found itself

running out of money. The company had been selling robotic toy products for about six years. It raised nearly two million dollars in funding, but the bottom line was that despite having sold more than a million and a half robot products, it just was not bringing in enough revenue to stay in business. A company called Digital Dream Labs acquired ankees I p including the Vector robot, which they

the Labs said it would continue to support and develop. Now, because the Vector relies on the cloud for much of its functionality, to get the most out of it, you need a persistent Internet connection, and now you need a monthly subscription to connect the Vector to cloud services. That subscription is seven dollars per month or forty seven dollars

per year. That more than upset a few Vector owners who had already spent a couple of hundred dollars just buying the robot, and they were saying, why do I have to keep paying to make the thing I bought keep working? But the reality was that Ankie was gone, that company no longer existed. Their servers were going to be offline without some other companies stepping in. So no matter what, the Vector was going to change. Right if Ankie was just gone and the servers would be offline

and all that functionality would disappear. It does stink to have purchased something and then have to pay an ongoing fee to have it continue to work. But these are the risks we encounter in the world that is increasingly dependent upon cloud based services. And that's just a few examples of some big tech fails. I might do another episode about this and get another collection to include up here, just to illustrate how different pathways can lead to failure.

And again, it might be a poor design, it might be a bad business plan. It maybe because there was some external change, maybe like a change in the market that affects you. Or it could be that the original idea was just no good. Uh So keep any year out. I might do another one of these and play around with some more failures and talk about those, because we

do learn a lot in the process. Hopefully when we talk about these failures, no one like lost their shirt or anything in the pros says and learned something along the way. But you know, failure is no fun. I've failed plenty of times and I've never enjoyed it, but I can at least appreciate what I learned as a process of failing. If you have thoughts about things I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, do not fail to send me a message. Do so on Twitter.

The handle for the show 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.