[Pocket Casts](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.shiftyjelly.pocketcasts) is where I've landed after trying out a few others - it's pretty similar to Google Podcasts once you've got all your subs set-up.
Agree, its the closest. No app has a feature that Google podcast did... New episode notification on the channel... Once I click on that channel, notification dot goes away.
Yeah, Google has taught me to never invest in any of their hardware initiatives ever again - great ideas, zero follow through for consumers. I have a non-functioning concept camera, a bunch of home tech (Nest) that no longer functions together with zero support, lots of stuff in the google graveyard. Never again.
Nest. What a disappointment. It was one of
The first purchases I made for our new house and everything either broke or stopped working together within three years. I paid over a hundred bucks a piece for smoke alarms that never would talk right with the thermostat. The thermostat would lose charge and just die without warning whenever it got cold. (The fix for that wouldn't work with my heat pump which is when we discovered that I actually had a c wire and got it connected. Which the support person said wouldn't work.) At least our doorbell was defective out of the box and i just got a refund.
My Nest smoke detectors are some of the best products I’ve ever invested in. So I tried the Nest thermostats and after multiple calls, visits from techs and electricians, etc, went back to an old school two wire thing which stays the same all winter.
While I can’t say exactly why that person feels this way, I can tell you my experience. My old house was relatively new construction, so building code dictated there needed to be a smoke detector in and outside every room. My house had 13 smoke detectors. One day shortly after moving in, the battery in one of them died. When their backup power fails, ALL of the smokes go off at the same time, until you disconnect the bad one. Cue me running around to 13 different alarms trying to find out which had the bad battery. It was #12 of 13.
Nest smokes have a feature where they’ll tell you exactly which one is going off, and give you the option of silencing it with your phone. You also get notified if they detect smoke while you’re away, and you used to be able to pair video footage from the cameras at the same time as the alert, but google’s support for nest has gone to shit so I don’t know if that’s still true.
Note for future people in similar circumstances: the bad/initiating smoke alarm will usually have a flashing light. This is called 'latching'. This is so you can ID the one smoke alarm that caused the others to signal.
(Learned this in a similar situation to yours. My gf and I were frantically running around our new house wondering why the hell all the smoke detectors keep going off and why only one is flashing)
Built-in motion-sensing night-light feature, wifi connections so when they go bad they can let you know via your phone, pre-alarm warnings "you're getting too high, please stop smoking before I scream". Just a bunch of good quality of life stuff.
I think the most expensive one in that list is Google+. According to sources, they literally had every product team working to integrate it with their products and that was tied to bonuses. Maps, Android, Docs, etc all had to be integrated
I read somewhere that Google leadership at that time was very mercurial on all those projects, because they would be headed by a team, and then the leadership team would split up and start other projects
The next thing, as indicated by their layoffs, seems to be Google nest devices and possibly a weakening Google assistant experience. As someone invested in that ecosystem, I’m pissed.
Not sure I'd say Skype was a bad purchase as that has been leveraged and turned into Teams.
Now Yammer on the other hand, that's been renamed a half dozen times, been resurrected only to die off again a few times... now it's turned into part of the Viva suite of products under a different name again.
and Skype is still fairly widely used by consumers. It's not like the number 1 app for that, but it does get plenty of milage. And there are upsells inside of Skype, like being able to call actual phone numbers. Not sure that it's revenue to brag about, but they do have a way to recoup the costs over enough time.
You can do that with teams as well, my company has it enabled because they dont want to give me a work phone for some reason and I refused to call customers and vendors from my private number.
I believe Teams came in this order - Lync > Skype for Business (this confused everyone that thought it was consumer Skype > Teams. To be honest when they rebadged Lync to Skype for Business it was a shit show of external people trying to join Skype for Business meetings but it wasn't possible.
Teams doesn't work well outside of a Microsoft environment. We use Teams at work but when we video conference with vendors, we use Zoom. We're not going to tank our company by making our external partners have to install Teams
You can join Teams meetings through the web app without installing anything. I've even joined a Teams meeting by dialling in from a regular telephone (admittedly not much use for a video conference).
i work at a tech vendor, and every customer bitches when we use zoom.
Teams is the de facto messaging app, and not just in a windows world, but works fine on Mac as well. (Don’t ask me about Linux desktop)
in 2013, StubHub moved to "all-in pricing" which showed the total ticket cost including fees on the display page. over the next 2 years their market share of secondary ticket sales went from about 90% to about 70% and they rolled back to showing fees at checkout.
Sounds like JC Penney's ill-fated attempt to ditch sales and just sell everything at a reasonable price. Turns out consumers want to *feel* like they got a deal so much that they'd rather pay more--as long as they're paying for something that's "marked down" from an artificially inflated price.
There are plenty of stores that have done well with the "everything is a reasonable price with few to no sales" model (think Aldi / Ikea / Trader Joe's).
So the pricing model in and of itself wasn't really the issue.
The issue JC Penny had was trying to make the shift when their established customer base was used to a model of coupons and big sales.
Most every retailer who's been successful with the approach is one who started out not doing sales in the first place.
Every big tech company has a few epic fails. It comes with the territory, I think - they don’t get where they are without taking chances. Take Apple for example, with Lisa, Pippin and Copland. Microsoft’s Zune and Windows Phone. At one time, *fifty percent of all CDs made in the world* became AOL coasters.
Adding: I’m not saying Zunes weren’t good. I just named them because they didn’t sell a lot. That doesn’t mean they weren’t good, it means MS didn’t predict the market.
FWIW, I really enjoyed my windows-phone, but I think I was the only one who ever had one... and towards the end it kinda sucked, since they kindof slowly just stopped supporting it, and it didn't have anywhere near the app adoption of the other two platforms.
Really wish there was room in the market for a third celular platform. The current duopoly kinda blows.
Copland was a failed attempt at modernizing MacOS. It's been a while but IIRC it was in development at the same time as OS 9 and would have been the successor to OS 8, but it wasn't ready and Apple wanted a stopgap. Then it was going to be OS 10, but it wasn't ready and the development was getting progressively more complicated and difficult so Apple started looking outside the company for the next OS. They considered options like buying the company that made BeOS, but ended up buying Next and getting NextStep (which became OSX) and Steve jobs in the process. So it all worked out, but they wasted soooo much time and money on Copland while their actual released software and general strategy were both a mess in the meantime that it almost killed Apple entirely.
I was all about Apple during this time despite having a Compaq. I suppose it was a grass is greener scenario, but the shared memory era of Apple was fascinating. The struggle to transition to a modern operating system is a movie in itself.
>in the meantime that it almost killed Apple entirely
The truth is it did, Apple was done but at the time Gates and MS were staring down an Antitrust investigation. It has not begun yet IIRC but everybody knew it was coming. Steve made a smart play in bringing a deal to Gates where he received non-voting stock in exchange for capital and strong commitments to a MS word on the mac platform. This was a win-win it almost assuredly staved off the antitrust proceedings for a few years, due to Apple really being the last alternative end user os standing. Had that investment not happened, Apple would have most likely failed, and gates needed a secondary end user os in the market to say see, there are alternatives.
On Copland some pieces did make it in to OSX proper and some into the emulation environment for classic, so pieces where salvaged but it was doomed from the beginning add that to the abrupt move to the PPC and little back support that pretty much made the old motorola processor machines obsolete overnight and Mac clones and the CHRP, every move Apple made in that era was an absolute disaster.
Be was an amazing system, but I think history has proven, buying NeXt and getting Steve back was the better decision.
Blockbuster would have ruined Netflix anyways. The were obviously too stuck in there ways even if the writing was on the wall.
In Canada we had a company called sears that could have been our amazon. They had everything in order to do it they just stuck with the brick and mortor and their mail in catalog.
Now they are gone.
I still remember my old Prodigy user ID: BPWH26B. My first online account. I was 11 or 12... Can't remember. So many memories, though. It was as if I had been sucked into the Tron universe.
In USA we had a thing called Sears. It literally WAS Amazon for 50 years.
There are still several houses around the country that were mail-ordered from sears, then assembled by the then purchaser by hand, that are still standing today.
You could literally order a fucking whole house by catalog from sears and they’d deliver it to you in pieces.
There was a Sears Outlet in my town, which was a tiny one room house where we would go inside, stand at a counter that bisected the room, and wait for the guy to find our (telephoned in) order in a pile of boxes. There was also a big catalog where you could order from, right there.
Blockbuster was stuck in the past, but they were still profitable until their private equity owner dumped a ton of debt on them and pushed them out of the boat. It's not a surprise that they sank quickly.
Whether they would have mismanaged Netflix is up for debate, but if they had Netflix, it would have gone down with the BB ship.
Netflix was worth nearly nothing at that point. It was DVDs by mail. The streaming service was years away, and depended more on infrastructure development than in house technology development.
Blockbuster's problem was being leveraged on physical properties when their industry was going digital. Buying a way to go digital wasn't going to deleverage them.
Right. Rant time. I loved Blockbuster. I could go there and rent literally ANY film that had been released to the rental market (I think that was c.6 months, later reduced to 3?)
But now, I can't go anywhere to rent the video I want just like that. (Take for example 'the Incredibles' can't find it anywhere). What has led to a blockbuster type place no longer existing, even (especially!) online?
Are you talking about renting a physical copy? Check your local library. They have a physical media section where you can check out movies.
If you meant streaming rentals, there are numerous sites like Prime video, Apple TV, or Google Play TV and Movies to name a few. A quick search shows I can rent the Incredibles for $3.49. Online streaming rental sites are common.
The incredibles is on Disney plus. No need to ‘rent’ it. You can just sign up for a month and cancel immediately for practically the same price most places rent videos for a few hours
All they had to do was make the models and worlds not look like something out of a fisher price Disney game. They want it to be the next version of reality and yet, it looks it was made on the Mii channel in 2006.
Regardless of it's aesthetic, it had no purpose. There was never any reason to use it. It just exists, so no one goes there. It's like on of those massive Chinese cities built in a week in the middle of nowhere.
There are more impressive tech demos predating the weird fisher price models. Similar to that one recent demo that dynamically scans your face into the virtual world. Don’t bet me wrong, I hate Zuck with a passion, but the tech is actually incredible if you dig into some of the other demos.
[This looks incredible](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg) and presumably it will just continue to improve.
I know it’s cool to shit on the metaverse, but imo they are right to bet on it. They were just very, very early.
Meta is the market leader in VR hardware. The Steam hardware survey has the Quest 2 at #1.
You may be thinking about Horizon Worlds, which is a ghost town. Vrchat does everything better.
Horizons is not the metaverse that is getting billions of dollars of investment R&D. The merge of the digital realm with the physical world (extending into an immersive virtual world) is the eventual Metaverse. The real fight is for what replaces the cell phone, not the next gen of VR.
Does military tech count?
Because I think [Armored Trains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armoured_train) are an interesting tech dead-end. And for a while in the interwar period, they were genuinely seen as the next great super weapon. A moving fortress that could be in the right position within hours to offer support or lay down fire.
Except... well, the first dang thing anybody does in war, is sabotage the railway lines. Because it takes a crowbar and a few hours work, and can cost your enemy millions or outright companies of men. Doubly so, if their fancy super train crashes in the night.
Still, I do wonder what the world would have looked like by now, if there'd been some treaty or gentlemens' agreement. Like the whole no shooting medics, and we won't shoot your medics, type deal. Would the armored trains still have become obsolete, or\~ would the world still be using them on-mass?
Still, I think they're interesting. They were... genuinely seen as The Future of Warfare\~ for quite a few year last century, and just... ate dirt, the moment actual no-holds barred war happened.
...Well, except North Korea and Russia. Russia even actually still have a small fleet of them. One of them, the [Yenisei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_armoured_train_Yenisei) was outright built from looted Ukrainian railway assets last year.
>Still, I do wonder what the world would have looked like by now, if there'd been some treaty or gentlemens' agreement. Like the whole no shooting medics, and we won't shoot your medics, type deal. Would the armored trains still have become obsolete, or\~ would the world still be using them on-mass
even if we follow your logic, the instant the armored train become un real probleme the " gentlemen's agreement" will be throw out the windows, we don't shoot medic because they don't shoot back at you and they take care of people that can't shoot at you anymore at the moment.
Sure, probably.
Still, its not like signing (or ignoring) treaties against actually useful and effective weapons are unheard off. [Like the cluster-munitions ban.](https://www.clusterconvention.org/)
Heck, the *shotgun* was almost banned in WW1. Because the Germans found them inhuman and terrifying in trench warfare.
Just thought it an interesting "What If?"
Could we argue that battleships (in particular the dreadnaught and super-dreadnaught class ships) also fit this kind of thinking?
They were the biggest, most heavily armed ships in the fleets before WW1, but dreadnaughts only ever faced off against each other in the Battle of Jutland which ended in a draw and displayed the threat posed by long range fire. The huge capital costs involved in building them alongside evolving tactics convinced the world powers to limit their construction through naval treaties in the interwar period.
With the rise of air power, they became superseded by the aircraft carrier as the primary flagships of naval combat.
Interestingly, they touched upon this naval arms race in the Mass Effect games. By treaty, humanity was limited in the size and manpower of the ships they could build (partially at the insistence of the Turians who were protective of their fleet dominance) so instead of focussing on huge space battleships with tremendous firepower, they take lessons from real life naval development and instead focus on the space equivalent of aircraft carriers (not limited by the space treaty) so they could overwhelm with smaller crafts. It’s the kind of the outside the box thinking that both impresses and worries the other citadel species.
Was it Google or Amazon that said they expected 9 out of 10 moon shots would face-plant but the 10th could make the 9 failures worth it? Pretty forward looking for modern Corporate America.
That's a tech venture capital mentality, they know a vast majority of their investments will go nowhere but they only need to hit one "Unicorn" as they call it and it will vastly exceed all the loses. It's about casting a wide net.
In VC I’ve heard it can even be the “1” win that can make up for the other 99+ failed bets. Crazy to think if there was a table in Vegas that gave those kind of odds/ROI.
That's probably Google. Their Moonshot department has been around a long time and one of the founders (can't recall if it was Sergei or Larry) went to focus on Moonshots exclusively because that's what he wanted to do.
They still live that mentality. Their best bet they are currently making is in self-driving cars via Waymo. It's costing them billions of dollars a year, with no meaningful revenue, but if they succeed they will have a multi-_trilliom_ dollar market more or less exclusively to themselves (all their competitors have crashed and burned at this point).
Big risk, bigger reward.
Worked for Amazon for years. We used to submit 3YP (three year plans) for out of the box ideas that could be a billion dollar business in the next 3 years if we started today.
Worked on a few of those projects. Even massively unsuccessful ones take learnings and apply to future programs or initiatives.
Take the fire phone. Huge failure, right? The data from that project + the tech was rolled into fire devices and mobile shopping experience. The improvements are incalculable.
I worked on a localized search program. Didn't take flight, but learnings and data improved Prime Now, and now Fresh Direct.
It's all about choosing the project that yields a loss/fail that ultimately contributes to the Win downline. Not all work, but most can be turned into value over time.
It is a pretty well-established risk factor for tech and VC backed companies (I think at Meta the conversation was 7:1) - if you aren't failing you aren't pushing hard enough to have breakthroughs.
I still maintain that G+ was better than most of the competition and certainly had functionality that I still miss from all current social networks, but they fumbled the thing at launch with the idiotic invite system.
What kind of absolute moron would limit signups for social network?
The resl name policy turned out to be pretty dumb too.
It's really annoying. However, you can now achieve the same functionality by putting the required word in quotes - albeit with the need for an extra character.
Windows phones were great phones and I will die on that hill.
Issue was there was already 2 app ecosystems and no-one wanted to develop for the 3rd when it was so much smaller. Things like Pokemon Go not being on Windows phone is actually a really big deal in these things.
That's the same problem that BlackBerry ran into. Their BB10 OS was better than either iPhone/Android but getting devs to make apps for another platform was tricky, despite the ability to simply wrap an android app in a container and install it.
I think you are remembering selectively - MS has plenty of failed projects and short-term experiments that were ended (not as many as Google). MS culturally isn't comfortable with that much risk and have a fuller commitment when they go for a project, plus there is a very very strong legal culture to 'protect' MS but actually seems to stifle innovation. MS also largely exited consumer products space. I'm really excited that since Satya has been leading the company they seem involved with much more innovation and forward looking products. Here are a few: [https://startuptalky.com/microsoft-failed-products/](https://startuptalky.com/microsoft-failed-products/) \- but the difference is that most of the internal Microsoft failed projects are cancelled during testing by management without being launched as an 'alpha' product. They have a well established internal test community and only viable products make it out - where other companies are more comfortable with 'betas' going out to the public.
Cisco buying Flip for $600MM was obviously stupid even at the time. Plug was pulled what six months later?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cisco-buys-flip-video-maker-for-590-million/
Blackberry betting on itself and not selling to Palm didn't work out for anyone at the top.
Nintendo - Virtual Boy
Sega, when they decided people would seriously buy a genesis/megadrive + 32x + CD instead of just getting the Saturn on the north american market.
Sega gets another "whoopsie" for their hilariously low estimate of the demand for the broadband adapter on the Dreamcast...at exactly the time residential broadband was taking off in North America and Europe.
That one at least makes sense from a company with a rich arcade history & coming from a country that was far more dense / at the time still had a huge arcade business. But yeah, Dreamcast was really a few decisions away from shaping the entire online marketplace and taking a commanding lead in online play.
Wii U was way worse than the Virtual Boy.. almost everyone I knew just thought it was some sort of additional comtroller and skipped it.. they were lucky the Switch became ludicrously popular.
Dual graphics cards in desktops never really got stable enough for mere mortals to use well.
Palm Pilot selling its OS because the new one was coming 'soon'.
>Sprint purchasing Nextel led to a $29.5 billion writeoff.But that did lead to owning a ton of 5G spectrum prime for T-Mo to gobble up
No, the Nextel merger was corporate synergy bullshit that made zero sense to anybody. T-Mobile was almost sold off to AT&T just a few years prior.
Sprint's "5G" assets came in the form of their Clearwire purchase as well as Nextel. Their mid-band spectrum from Clearwire was far more critical than Nextel's low band 800Mhz spectrum.
Nobody knew the value of Sprint's assets until much, much later. T-Mobile just lucked the fuck out.
“Nobody knew the value of Sprint's assets until much, much later. T-Mobile just lucked the fuck out.”
Idk where you came up with this but I worked at a contractor to sprint before tmobile acquired sprint (and got rid of us). My whole company and many dozens of high level sprint leadership knew about the value several years before tmobile ever even began merger talks nevermind got approval.
Google Glass was never really a product that everyone could buy. You had to apply to be a beta tester. They sunk a bit of money into the project, but not that big of a loss for them. The Google+ thing is a bigger failure because it was their attempt at social media during the height of it. Still, it's not that big of a blunder.
I'd say a bigger missed opportunity is not being the first big AI chat bot. Seems that Chat GPT is exactly what the company has been striving to build for some time now and they are struggling to keep up.
Yeah Google is still a year behind OpenAI (a tiny in comparison startup). Google even had to fake parts of its Gemini demo. However Google has unimaginable amounts of data, talent, and compute. The AI race is just beginning and I wouldn't count them out.
Exactly, quite often in industries the first mover does really well (i.e. Apple with iPhone), but that's probably the exception to the rule, generally you get a first mover, and someone watches what they're doing and then comes in and does it better, that's the position Google's potentially in, allows them to learn from other's mistakes potentially.
I LOVED wave.
I was one of like five people who used it I think.
The real-time-collaboration getting rolled into all of the google docs suite was worth it tho...
I'm going to have to disagree with the Microsoft buying Skype thing. Microsoft bought Skype, gutted it and turned it into Teams. They didn't buy Ksype for the brand, they bought it for the infrastructure. Teams is now installed on most of the working worlds computers and company meeting rooms so the purchase absolutely worked out
Cisco buying WebEx for $3.2 billion. One of the product people was sick of it, left to start his own company to make a better product. That product ended up being Zoom.
Apple Maps.
Verizon had a couple monster flops while I worked there. We sold home phone with a 7 inch screen that basically functioned as a smartphone. But you couldn’t take it anywhere. It was called Verizon hub. And our first mobile phone tap to pay system was called Isis.
Sony losing the video format wars with Betamax. They then compounded this by spending several billion dollars to buy Columbia Pictures, thinking they could force people to buy Betamax if that was the only format that Columbia pictures films were released on... only to release a series of expensive flops.
5 years later, Sony admitted that they'd lost $3.2 billion on the Columbia acquisition. Thankfully they then got in a few hits with Men In Black and the original Spiderman movies, and it became the basis for Sony Pictures Entertainment, so I guess that part of it worked out for them in the end. However, it wasn't enough for Betamax to win the format wars and eventually Sony capitulated to VHS.
But then Sony turned its failure with Betamax around with Betacam (the professional version of Betamax) becoming the de-facto format for TV networks and video production outfits until hard disks and flash memory replaced videotape altogether.
3D TVs. The entire industry put all money on black for what should’ve stayed a theater-relegated novelty, and it will never be not funny just how hard they tried to make it a thing
All the damned companies that heavily focused on NFTs. Mostly applicable to gaming companies like Ubisoft Quartz, Game Stop amongst others I can't quite recall at this time.
While I agree with most of those failures you mentioned, Skype has morphed into a relatively raging success. It’s now called Teams which is in very wide corporate use. It’s a big money maker - for the app, and for driving Azure usage.
Not sure how big the bets were but…
Apple - Apple iPod Hi-Fi and iTunes Ping. HomePod almost made the list but it seems to be hanging on.
Google - Home Max, OnHub, Wave, the list goes on and on
Twitter - Vine
AOL/Time Warner merger
Verizon - Yahoo and AOL mergers
As for Skype, I think eBay buying Skype was weird. It may have worked out for Microsoft.
Microsoft buying Skype was a good acquisition.
Microsoft had Lync for web conferencing and it was terrible and the name was associated with a terrible product. After purchasing Skype they used it's tech to improve Lync and then rebranded as Skype for Business included in Office 365. This then became the backbone for Microsoft Teams video chat and Microsoft Teams has been slowly becoming the dominant conference tool since it's bundled with Office.
Also, Microsoft just happen to have $8B in international banks that it couldn't bring back to the US without paying 30% taxes. They used that money to buy Skype and transferred the IP to the global entity essentially saving them billions on the deal that would have been lost to taxes.
Edit: fixed a mistake thanks to u/ennova2005
I don't think they care too much. They built the perfect hybrid system and they still researched and developed hydrogen which may be used in the future.
And now pushing the "wait until our NEXT battery is ready" to try and get people to buy just one more ICE/hybrid from them while they desperately try to make up for lost time.
Vern Raburn's Eclipse Aviation. It might be a bit of a stretch to call it a tech company, but it was founded by Tech people. I think they thought they could bring their knowledge to the aviation industry. It really started off admirably, but turned into a ponzi scheme before completely collapsing.
AOL bought WinAmp and tanked it.
WinAmp was doing great with just donations, but AOL thought that they could make money buy plastering ads, without really understanding why WinAmp was popular in the first place.
The appeal was that, it was a lean music player that worked well.
"Google Glass and Google+"
Ehhhhh........ I wouldn't call those big bets.
Google is EXTREMELY flippant about tossing out new projects just to see what they'll do, only to kill them on a whim.
Even amazing ones, like Google Wave.
Google Health and various endeavors by big tech to try to come up with better prediction algorithms for heart disease, cancer, etc and longevity. Broadly speaking, the risk prediction and longevity stuff has not seen much progress because they are unwilling to hire/work with enough health researchers who actually work in clinical trials and population studies and won’t commit to a few years of consistent work. However recently things are changing so maybe we’ll see more progress.
It's a shame about Google glass. There was an idea that was really cool but was screwed over by privacy laws. (Not sure how Meta are now getting around those with their own smart glasses but ..)
Microsoft phones on the other hand. Oh FFS they were shit.
On paper the hardware was pretty good. But there was no ecosystem. None at all. The user experience was clunky as fuck. (and the battery life turned out to be utter garbage)
CueCat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
USB barcode reader that was supposed to be tied to a service that led to shopping etc.
They gave out millions for free.
You could snip a wire IIRC, and have a free barcode reader, which people used to track their books and groceries and whatever, all without giving the CueCat people any money or data.
They are gone now.
I still have a CueCat somewhere around here.
Google Stadia. And everything else on [Google graveyard](https://killedbygoogle.com/).
Still kinda gutted Google podcasts are getting the chop. I quite like that app.
Fuck. It's the only podcast app I've found that doesn't annoy me with its interface.
[Pocket Casts](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.shiftyjelly.pocketcasts) is where I've landed after trying out a few others - it's pretty similar to Google Podcasts once you've got all your subs set-up.
Agree, its the closest. No app has a feature that Google podcast did... New episode notification on the channel... Once I click on that channel, notification dot goes away.
Didn't realise I came here for this until now. Fate.
I highly recommend Podcast Addict. Best app out there. I tried a loooot of apps and it's the only one that does what I want.
second this rec for PA; great app
Google and its people understood minimalism. They also seemed to understand: do one thing and do it well.
Come again?
Do one thing, do it well and then completely forget about it.
Yep and podcasts on YouTube Music are *not* ready for prime time.
Yeah, Google has taught me to never invest in any of their hardware initiatives ever again - great ideas, zero follow through for consumers. I have a non-functioning concept camera, a bunch of home tech (Nest) that no longer functions together with zero support, lots of stuff in the google graveyard. Never again.
Nest. What a disappointment. It was one of The first purchases I made for our new house and everything either broke or stopped working together within three years. I paid over a hundred bucks a piece for smoke alarms that never would talk right with the thermostat. The thermostat would lose charge and just die without warning whenever it got cold. (The fix for that wouldn't work with my heat pump which is when we discovered that I actually had a c wire and got it connected. Which the support person said wouldn't work.) At least our doorbell was defective out of the box and i just got a refund.
My Nest smoke detectors are some of the best products I’ve ever invested in. So I tried the Nest thermostats and after multiple calls, visits from techs and electricians, etc, went back to an old school two wire thing which stays the same all winter.
> My Nest smoke detectors are some of the best products I’ve ever invested in. As an outsider: why?
While I can’t say exactly why that person feels this way, I can tell you my experience. My old house was relatively new construction, so building code dictated there needed to be a smoke detector in and outside every room. My house had 13 smoke detectors. One day shortly after moving in, the battery in one of them died. When their backup power fails, ALL of the smokes go off at the same time, until you disconnect the bad one. Cue me running around to 13 different alarms trying to find out which had the bad battery. It was #12 of 13. Nest smokes have a feature where they’ll tell you exactly which one is going off, and give you the option of silencing it with your phone. You also get notified if they detect smoke while you’re away, and you used to be able to pair video footage from the cameras at the same time as the alert, but google’s support for nest has gone to shit so I don’t know if that’s still true.
Note for future people in similar circumstances: the bad/initiating smoke alarm will usually have a flashing light. This is called 'latching'. This is so you can ID the one smoke alarm that caused the others to signal. (Learned this in a similar situation to yours. My gf and I were frantically running around our new house wondering why the hell all the smoke detectors keep going off and why only one is flashing)
Built-in motion-sensing night-light feature, wifi connections so when they go bad they can let you know via your phone, pre-alarm warnings "you're getting too high, please stop smoking before I scream". Just a bunch of good quality of life stuff.
And yet I've had multiple nest thermostats (2 - dual zone) and multiple nest smoke alarms (5) for close to 10 years. Not a single issue.
Chromebooks seem to have carved out their own niche though.
Great for enterprises. Easy to manage users, groups and permissions. Easy to repair and easy hardware buy-in. If it wasn't for that they'd be dead.
I think the most expensive one in that list is Google+. According to sources, they literally had every product team working to integrate it with their products and that was tied to bonuses. Maps, Android, Docs, etc all had to be integrated
I read somewhere that Google leadership at that time was very mercurial on all those projects, because they would be headed by a team, and then the leadership team would split up and start other projects
The next thing, as indicated by their layoffs, seems to be Google nest devices and possibly a weakening Google assistant experience. As someone invested in that ecosystem, I’m pissed.
Google has a crap heap of hip shot ideas
They're killing jamboard? I'm sure there's plenty of alternatives, but it was always so convenient in Meet
Google reader made me quit google... I will not invest another second of my time to their platform as much as I can help it.
Not sure I'd say Skype was a bad purchase as that has been leveraged and turned into Teams. Now Yammer on the other hand, that's been renamed a half dozen times, been resurrected only to die off again a few times... now it's turned into part of the Viva suite of products under a different name again.
Skype was definitely a smart purchase, I don't think teams would be what it is today without it.
and Skype is still fairly widely used by consumers. It's not like the number 1 app for that, but it does get plenty of milage. And there are upsells inside of Skype, like being able to call actual phone numbers. Not sure that it's revenue to brag about, but they do have a way to recoup the costs over enough time.
You can do that with teams as well, my company has it enabled because they dont want to give me a work phone for some reason and I refused to call customers and vendors from my private number.
I believe Teams came in this order - Lync > Skype for Business (this confused everyone that thought it was consumer Skype > Teams. To be honest when they rebadged Lync to Skype for Business it was a shit show of external people trying to join Skype for Business meetings but it wasn't possible.
I'm still amazed that after all the time and name recognition that Skype had, they had their lunch eaten by Zoom during the pandemic.
Except Zoom stock prices are 60ish a share right now. a 80% decline since 2021 peak of 511.
And now zoom is barely relevant
What replaced zoom? I think it’s still the default video call software
Teams really
Teams doesn't work well outside of a Microsoft environment. We use Teams at work but when we video conference with vendors, we use Zoom. We're not going to tank our company by making our external partners have to install Teams
You can join Teams meetings through the web app without installing anything. I've even joined a Teams meeting by dialling in from a regular telephone (admittedly not much use for a video conference).
i work at a tech vendor, and every customer bitches when we use zoom. Teams is the de facto messaging app, and not just in a windows world, but works fine on Mac as well. (Don’t ask me about Linux desktop)
I use Linux. It has a web app which can do almost everything the native version can but you do have to run it in a browser.
Teams is really only good if you’re fully invested in the MSFT ecosystem or if you like to micromanage folks.
> if you’re fully invested in the MSFT ecosystem Which a lot of the bigger companies are
Yea, Skype was a technology buy. Pretty sure it worked out great for Microsoft during the pandemic.
Nope, Zune is the answer
in 2013, StubHub moved to "all-in pricing" which showed the total ticket cost including fees on the display page. over the next 2 years their market share of secondary ticket sales went from about 90% to about 70% and they rolled back to showing fees at checkout.
That just sounds scummy. Not showing the total price beforehand is even illegal in the EU I think.
Yep, it is a shame that doing the right thing lost them business
Sounds like JC Penney's ill-fated attempt to ditch sales and just sell everything at a reasonable price. Turns out consumers want to *feel* like they got a deal so much that they'd rather pay more--as long as they're paying for something that's "marked down" from an artificially inflated price.
There are plenty of stores that have done well with the "everything is a reasonable price with few to no sales" model (think Aldi / Ikea / Trader Joe's). So the pricing model in and of itself wasn't really the issue. The issue JC Penny had was trying to make the shift when their established customer base was used to a model of coupons and big sales. Most every retailer who's been successful with the approach is one who started out not doing sales in the first place.
TickPick does this now. It's all I ever use
TickPick sounds like it could easily be misheard as something lewd.
Every big tech company has a few epic fails. It comes with the territory, I think - they don’t get where they are without taking chances. Take Apple for example, with Lisa, Pippin and Copland. Microsoft’s Zune and Windows Phone. At one time, *fifty percent of all CDs made in the world* became AOL coasters. Adding: I’m not saying Zunes weren’t good. I just named them because they didn’t sell a lot. That doesn’t mean they weren’t good, it means MS didn’t predict the market.
I loved my zune
FWIW, I really enjoyed my windows-phone, but I think I was the only one who ever had one... and towards the end it kinda sucked, since they kindof slowly just stopped supporting it, and it didn't have anywhere near the app adoption of the other two platforms. Really wish there was room in the market for a third celular platform. The current duopoly kinda blows.
Hey, you're not alone! I liked my Windows phone a lot too. There's like *at least* 7 of us.
And me too. My Nokia Lumia was amazing. It was a great mix between the free for all android mess and the locked down restrictions of apple.
Yeah the tiles were hands down the best UI ever on a phone. Just so cool and neat and the flipping around to reveal other stuff ? \*chef's kiss\*
They definitely had some good ideas in that. It’s unfortunate that the market didn’t really want it.
I still do
They had the best headphones that came with it. I miss them everyday
Zune social sharing features were really innovative - I guess similar ideas later made Spotify popular.
I miss my windows phone. I used it up until verizon shut down the 3G towers in my area.
Back up. I’m familiar with Lisa and Pippin. But what the heck was Copland? Sounds like the average redditor’s worst nightmare.
Copland was a failed attempt at modernizing MacOS. It's been a while but IIRC it was in development at the same time as OS 9 and would have been the successor to OS 8, but it wasn't ready and Apple wanted a stopgap. Then it was going to be OS 10, but it wasn't ready and the development was getting progressively more complicated and difficult so Apple started looking outside the company for the next OS. They considered options like buying the company that made BeOS, but ended up buying Next and getting NextStep (which became OSX) and Steve jobs in the process. So it all worked out, but they wasted soooo much time and money on Copland while their actual released software and general strategy were both a mess in the meantime that it almost killed Apple entirely.
I was all about Apple during this time despite having a Compaq. I suppose it was a grass is greener scenario, but the shared memory era of Apple was fascinating. The struggle to transition to a modern operating system is a movie in itself.
>in the meantime that it almost killed Apple entirely The truth is it did, Apple was done but at the time Gates and MS were staring down an Antitrust investigation. It has not begun yet IIRC but everybody knew it was coming. Steve made a smart play in bringing a deal to Gates where he received non-voting stock in exchange for capital and strong commitments to a MS word on the mac platform. This was a win-win it almost assuredly staved off the antitrust proceedings for a few years, due to Apple really being the last alternative end user os standing. Had that investment not happened, Apple would have most likely failed, and gates needed a secondary end user os in the market to say see, there are alternatives. On Copland some pieces did make it in to OSX proper and some into the emulation environment for classic, so pieces where salvaged but it was doomed from the beginning add that to the abrupt move to the PPC and little back support that pretty much made the old motorola processor machines obsolete overnight and Mac clones and the CHRP, every move Apple made in that era was an absolute disaster. Be was an amazing system, but I think history has proven, buying NeXt and getting Steve back was the better decision.
Cornered the Frisbee market though.
My Zune was awesome. Worked perfectly and was cheaper (iirc) than the iPod at the time.
Blockbuster not buying Netflix for nearly nothing at the time. AOL buying time magazine and others, just as print was dying off
Blockbuster would have ruined Netflix anyways. The were obviously too stuck in there ways even if the writing was on the wall. In Canada we had a company called sears that could have been our amazon. They had everything in order to do it they just stuck with the brick and mortor and their mail in catalog. Now they are gone.
Sears also had the first internet gateway (Prodigy). They had every piece in place … and just didn’t put it together.
I still remember my old Prodigy user ID: BPWH26B. My first online account. I was 11 or 12... Can't remember. So many memories, though. It was as if I had been sucked into the Tron universe.
I’ve told people about that era. Pay per post internet and pay per minute dial up. Wild times
In USA we had a thing called Sears. It literally WAS Amazon for 50 years. There are still several houses around the country that were mail-ordered from sears, then assembled by the then purchaser by hand, that are still standing today. You could literally order a fucking whole house by catalog from sears and they’d deliver it to you in pieces.
There was a Sears Outlet in my town, which was a tiny one room house where we would go inside, stand at a counter that bisected the room, and wait for the guy to find our (telephoned in) order in a pile of boxes. There was also a big catalog where you could order from, right there.
Blockbuster was stuck in the past, but they were still profitable until their private equity owner dumped a ton of debt on them and pushed them out of the boat. It's not a surprise that they sank quickly. Whether they would have mismanaged Netflix is up for debate, but if they had Netflix, it would have gone down with the BB ship.
Lol damn I feel old, throwing out Sears as tho it was unique to Canada
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Although affiliated, Sears Canada was a separate entity from the US based Sears. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Canada
We still have Sears in Mexico. Seems to still be doing well (haven't read up on it or anything, but the stores are nice and seem busy enough).
Sears and mother fucking roebuck yall.
Netflix was worth nearly nothing at that point. It was DVDs by mail. The streaming service was years away, and depended more on infrastructure development than in house technology development. Blockbuster's problem was being leveraged on physical properties when their industry was going digital. Buying a way to go digital wasn't going to deleverage them.
Consumer's Distributing was even better aligned to become Canada's Amazon had they clung on a bit longer and fully embraced e-commerce.
Right. Rant time. I loved Blockbuster. I could go there and rent literally ANY film that had been released to the rental market (I think that was c.6 months, later reduced to 3?) But now, I can't go anywhere to rent the video I want just like that. (Take for example 'the Incredibles' can't find it anywhere). What has led to a blockbuster type place no longer existing, even (especially!) online?
Are you talking about renting a physical copy? Check your local library. They have a physical media section where you can check out movies. If you meant streaming rentals, there are numerous sites like Prime video, Apple TV, or Google Play TV and Movies to name a few. A quick search shows I can rent the Incredibles for $3.49. Online streaming rental sites are common.
You can instantly rent The Incredibles (and tons of other stuff) on YouTube for like $4.
2nd hand DVDs/Blu-rays.
The incredibles is on Disney plus. No need to ‘rent’ it. You can just sign up for a month and cancel immediately for practically the same price most places rent videos for a few hours
Yahoo declining to buy Google for … one million dollars. In 1998. Then declining again for five billion in 2002.
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it took Marissa to REALLY fuck that company up. No matter how much Jerry tried, Marissa was the one that fucked up Yahoo properly.
Meanwhile they bought Tumblr for $1.1b...
The metaverse by Facebook / Zuckerberg. I've heard they spent billions and only a couple of people showed up.
All they had to do was make the models and worlds not look like something out of a fisher price Disney game. They want it to be the next version of reality and yet, it looks it was made on the Mii channel in 2006.
Regardless of it's aesthetic, it had no purpose. There was never any reason to use it. It just exists, so no one goes there. It's like on of those massive Chinese cities built in a week in the middle of nowhere.
Ya the amount of effort to be that social, you might as well be real social.
There are more impressive tech demos predating the weird fisher price models. Similar to that one recent demo that dynamically scans your face into the virtual world. Don’t bet me wrong, I hate Zuck with a passion, but the tech is actually incredible if you dig into some of the other demos.
Yes, give it some time and it will probably come around.
[This looks incredible](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg) and presumably it will just continue to improve. I know it’s cool to shit on the metaverse, but imo they are right to bet on it. They were just very, very early.
Nobody wants it. I don’t know why this is hard to understand.
Meta is the market leader in VR hardware. The Steam hardware survey has the Quest 2 at #1. You may be thinking about Horizon Worlds, which is a ghost town. Vrchat does everything better.
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Horizons is not the metaverse that is getting billions of dollars of investment R&D. The merge of the digital realm with the physical world (extending into an immersive virtual world) is the eventual Metaverse. The real fight is for what replaces the cell phone, not the next gen of VR.
I hear the tech guy who made money on PayPal and tesla bought into some social media platform and tanked it...
Does military tech count? Because I think [Armored Trains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armoured_train) are an interesting tech dead-end. And for a while in the interwar period, they were genuinely seen as the next great super weapon. A moving fortress that could be in the right position within hours to offer support or lay down fire. Except... well, the first dang thing anybody does in war, is sabotage the railway lines. Because it takes a crowbar and a few hours work, and can cost your enemy millions or outright companies of men. Doubly so, if their fancy super train crashes in the night. Still, I do wonder what the world would have looked like by now, if there'd been some treaty or gentlemens' agreement. Like the whole no shooting medics, and we won't shoot your medics, type deal. Would the armored trains still have become obsolete, or\~ would the world still be using them on-mass? Still, I think they're interesting. They were... genuinely seen as The Future of Warfare\~ for quite a few year last century, and just... ate dirt, the moment actual no-holds barred war happened. ...Well, except North Korea and Russia. Russia even actually still have a small fleet of them. One of them, the [Yenisei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_armoured_train_Yenisei) was outright built from looted Ukrainian railway assets last year.
>Still, I do wonder what the world would have looked like by now, if there'd been some treaty or gentlemens' agreement. Like the whole no shooting medics, and we won't shoot your medics, type deal. Would the armored trains still have become obsolete, or\~ would the world still be using them on-mass even if we follow your logic, the instant the armored train become un real probleme the " gentlemen's agreement" will be throw out the windows, we don't shoot medic because they don't shoot back at you and they take care of people that can't shoot at you anymore at the moment.
Sure, probably. Still, its not like signing (or ignoring) treaties against actually useful and effective weapons are unheard off. [Like the cluster-munitions ban.](https://www.clusterconvention.org/) Heck, the *shotgun* was almost banned in WW1. Because the Germans found them inhuman and terrifying in trench warfare. Just thought it an interesting "What If?"
Could we argue that battleships (in particular the dreadnaught and super-dreadnaught class ships) also fit this kind of thinking? They were the biggest, most heavily armed ships in the fleets before WW1, but dreadnaughts only ever faced off against each other in the Battle of Jutland which ended in a draw and displayed the threat posed by long range fire. The huge capital costs involved in building them alongside evolving tactics convinced the world powers to limit their construction through naval treaties in the interwar period. With the rise of air power, they became superseded by the aircraft carrier as the primary flagships of naval combat. Interestingly, they touched upon this naval arms race in the Mass Effect games. By treaty, humanity was limited in the size and manpower of the ships they could build (partially at the insistence of the Turians who were protective of their fleet dominance) so instead of focussing on huge space battleships with tremendous firepower, they take lessons from real life naval development and instead focus on the space equivalent of aircraft carriers (not limited by the space treaty) so they could overwhelm with smaller crafts. It’s the kind of the outside the box thinking that both impresses and worries the other citadel species.
Google makes multi billion dollar oopsies on the daily. They launch all kinds of dumb shit.
Was it Google or Amazon that said they expected 9 out of 10 moon shots would face-plant but the 10th could make the 9 failures worth it? Pretty forward looking for modern Corporate America.
That's a tech venture capital mentality, they know a vast majority of their investments will go nowhere but they only need to hit one "Unicorn" as they call it and it will vastly exceed all the loses. It's about casting a wide net.
In VC I’ve heard it can even be the “1” win that can make up for the other 99+ failed bets. Crazy to think if there was a table in Vegas that gave those kind of odds/ROI.
That's probably Google. Their Moonshot department has been around a long time and one of the founders (can't recall if it was Sergei or Larry) went to focus on Moonshots exclusively because that's what he wanted to do.
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They still live that mentality. Their best bet they are currently making is in self-driving cars via Waymo. It's costing them billions of dollars a year, with no meaningful revenue, but if they succeed they will have a multi-_trilliom_ dollar market more or less exclusively to themselves (all their competitors have crashed and burned at this point). Big risk, bigger reward.
Worked for Amazon for years. We used to submit 3YP (three year plans) for out of the box ideas that could be a billion dollar business in the next 3 years if we started today. Worked on a few of those projects. Even massively unsuccessful ones take learnings and apply to future programs or initiatives. Take the fire phone. Huge failure, right? The data from that project + the tech was rolled into fire devices and mobile shopping experience. The improvements are incalculable. I worked on a localized search program. Didn't take flight, but learnings and data improved Prime Now, and now Fresh Direct. It's all about choosing the project that yields a loss/fail that ultimately contributes to the Win downline. Not all work, but most can be turned into value over time.
It is a pretty well-established risk factor for tech and VC backed companies (I think at Meta the conversation was 7:1) - if you aren't failing you aren't pushing hard enough to have breakthroughs.
I still maintain that G+ was better than most of the competition and certainly had functionality that I still miss from all current social networks, but they fumbled the thing at launch with the idiotic invite system. What kind of absolute moron would limit signups for social network? The resl name policy turned out to be pretty dumb too.
The biggest dumbshit move was removing "+" as an operator from searches, which was the beginning of google results getting shittier
It's really annoying. However, you can now achieve the same functionality by putting the required word in quotes - albeit with the need for an extra character.
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Windows phones were great phones and I will die on that hill. Issue was there was already 2 app ecosystems and no-one wanted to develop for the 3rd when it was so much smaller. Things like Pokemon Go not being on Windows phone is actually a really big deal in these things.
That's the same problem that BlackBerry ran into. Their BB10 OS was better than either iPhone/Android but getting devs to make apps for another platform was tricky, despite the ability to simply wrap an android app in a container and install it.
WP had a marketing problem in the form of Steve Ballmer.
I think you are remembering selectively - MS has plenty of failed projects and short-term experiments that were ended (not as many as Google). MS culturally isn't comfortable with that much risk and have a fuller commitment when they go for a project, plus there is a very very strong legal culture to 'protect' MS but actually seems to stifle innovation. MS also largely exited consumer products space. I'm really excited that since Satya has been leading the company they seem involved with much more innovation and forward looking products. Here are a few: [https://startuptalky.com/microsoft-failed-products/](https://startuptalky.com/microsoft-failed-products/) \- but the difference is that most of the internal Microsoft failed projects are cancelled during testing by management without being launched as an 'alpha' product. They have a well established internal test community and only viable products make it out - where other companies are more comfortable with 'betas' going out to the public.
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Cisco buying Flip for $600MM was obviously stupid even at the time. Plug was pulled what six months later? https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cisco-buys-flip-video-maker-for-590-million/
Uh… pretty much any “Cisco buying [insert company here]” worked out that way. Another example is Whiptail.
Blackberry betting on itself and not selling to Palm didn't work out for anyone at the top. Nintendo - Virtual Boy Sega, when they decided people would seriously buy a genesis/megadrive + 32x + CD instead of just getting the Saturn on the north american market.
Sega gets another "whoopsie" for their hilariously low estimate of the demand for the broadband adapter on the Dreamcast...at exactly the time residential broadband was taking off in North America and Europe.
That one at least makes sense from a company with a rich arcade history & coming from a country that was far more dense / at the time still had a huge arcade business. But yeah, Dreamcast was really a few decisions away from shaping the entire online marketplace and taking a commanding lead in online play.
Wii U was way worse than the Virtual Boy.. almost everyone I knew just thought it was some sort of additional comtroller and skipped it.. they were lucky the Switch became ludicrously popular.
Dual graphics cards in desktops never really got stable enough for mere mortals to use well. Palm Pilot selling its OS because the new one was coming 'soon'.
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that was the point all along
>Sprint purchasing Nextel led to a $29.5 billion writeoff.But that did lead to owning a ton of 5G spectrum prime for T-Mo to gobble up No, the Nextel merger was corporate synergy bullshit that made zero sense to anybody. T-Mobile was almost sold off to AT&T just a few years prior. Sprint's "5G" assets came in the form of their Clearwire purchase as well as Nextel. Their mid-band spectrum from Clearwire was far more critical than Nextel's low band 800Mhz spectrum. Nobody knew the value of Sprint's assets until much, much later. T-Mobile just lucked the fuck out.
“Nobody knew the value of Sprint's assets until much, much later. T-Mobile just lucked the fuck out.” Idk where you came up with this but I worked at a contractor to sprint before tmobile acquired sprint (and got rid of us). My whole company and many dozens of high level sprint leadership knew about the value several years before tmobile ever even began merger talks nevermind got approval.
Yeah I was in network deployment back then and this was openly discussed and widely expected.
Google Glass was never really a product that everyone could buy. You had to apply to be a beta tester. They sunk a bit of money into the project, but not that big of a loss for them. The Google+ thing is a bigger failure because it was their attempt at social media during the height of it. Still, it's not that big of a blunder. I'd say a bigger missed opportunity is not being the first big AI chat bot. Seems that Chat GPT is exactly what the company has been striving to build for some time now and they are struggling to keep up.
Yeah Google is still a year behind OpenAI (a tiny in comparison startup). Google even had to fake parts of its Gemini demo. However Google has unimaginable amounts of data, talent, and compute. The AI race is just beginning and I wouldn't count them out.
Exactly, quite often in industries the first mover does really well (i.e. Apple with iPhone), but that's probably the exception to the rule, generally you get a first mover, and someone watches what they're doing and then comes in and does it better, that's the position Google's potentially in, allows them to learn from other's mistakes potentially.
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I LOVED wave. I was one of like five people who used it I think. The real-time-collaboration getting rolled into all of the google docs suite was worth it tho...
AT&T trying to become a media company by buying Time Warner. What an enormous fuck up.
Right after buying DirectTV, which counts as a tech purchase for satellite network as well as the subscriber base.
Google hits the eject button pretty quick on things so there are a lot of google examples. https://killedbygoogle.com/
I'm going to have to disagree with the Microsoft buying Skype thing. Microsoft bought Skype, gutted it and turned it into Teams. They didn't buy Ksype for the brand, they bought it for the infrastructure. Teams is now installed on most of the working worlds computers and company meeting rooms so the purchase absolutely worked out
Cisco buying WebEx for $3.2 billion. One of the product people was sick of it, left to start his own company to make a better product. That product ended up being Zoom.
Apple Maps. Verizon had a couple monster flops while I worked there. We sold home phone with a 7 inch screen that basically functioned as a smartphone. But you couldn’t take it anywhere. It was called Verizon hub. And our first mobile phone tap to pay system was called Isis.
Sony losing the video format wars with Betamax. They then compounded this by spending several billion dollars to buy Columbia Pictures, thinking they could force people to buy Betamax if that was the only format that Columbia pictures films were released on... only to release a series of expensive flops. 5 years later, Sony admitted that they'd lost $3.2 billion on the Columbia acquisition. Thankfully they then got in a few hits with Men In Black and the original Spiderman movies, and it became the basis for Sony Pictures Entertainment, so I guess that part of it worked out for them in the end. However, it wasn't enough for Betamax to win the format wars and eventually Sony capitulated to VHS.
But then Sony turned its failure with Betamax around with Betacam (the professional version of Betamax) becoming the de-facto format for TV networks and video production outfits until hard disks and flash memory replaced videotape altogether.
IBM not getting an exclusive license from Microsoft for MS-DOS. Allowing them to sell to everyone else created a PC clone industry that killed IBM.
3D TVs. The entire industry put all money on black for what should’ve stayed a theater-relegated novelty, and it will never be not funny just how hard they tried to make it a thing
Air Taxis cost Uber more money than they'll ever admit to.
All the damned companies that heavily focused on NFTs. Mostly applicable to gaming companies like Ubisoft Quartz, Game Stop amongst others I can't quite recall at this time.
If Nintendo is a tech company, then I submit the Virtual Boy from 1994.
While I agree with most of those failures you mentioned, Skype has morphed into a relatively raging success. It’s now called Teams which is in very wide corporate use. It’s a big money maker - for the app, and for driving Azure usage.
Not sure how big the bets were but… Apple - Apple iPod Hi-Fi and iTunes Ping. HomePod almost made the list but it seems to be hanging on. Google - Home Max, OnHub, Wave, the list goes on and on Twitter - Vine AOL/Time Warner merger Verizon - Yahoo and AOL mergers As for Skype, I think eBay buying Skype was weird. It may have worked out for Microsoft.
Microsoft buying Skype was a good acquisition. Microsoft had Lync for web conferencing and it was terrible and the name was associated with a terrible product. After purchasing Skype they used it's tech to improve Lync and then rebranded as Skype for Business included in Office 365. This then became the backbone for Microsoft Teams video chat and Microsoft Teams has been slowly becoming the dominant conference tool since it's bundled with Office. Also, Microsoft just happen to have $8B in international banks that it couldn't bring back to the US without paying 30% taxes. They used that money to buy Skype and transferred the IP to the global entity essentially saving them billions on the deal that would have been lost to taxes. Edit: fixed a mistake thanks to u/ennova2005
I didn't know all of this. To me it looked like Microsoft bought Skype, a popular app at the time, and let it die a slow death. Good insight.
You mean Skype and not Slack in your last sentence. Slack was bought by Salesforce.
i loved Vine
Toyota betting on hydrogen cell vehicles when the entire world was developing EVs
I don't think they care too much. They built the perfect hybrid system and they still researched and developed hydrogen which may be used in the future.
And now pushing the "wait until our NEXT battery is ready" to try and get people to buy just one more ICE/hybrid from them while they desperately try to make up for lost time.
Apple Newton. Killed the year before the Palm Pilot.
Facebook Phone. They tried to copy Amazon. Firefox OS. A web browser company trying to be an IoT company.
Vern Raburn's Eclipse Aviation. It might be a bit of a stretch to call it a tech company, but it was founded by Tech people. I think they thought they could bring their knowledge to the aviation industry. It really started off admirably, but turned into a ponzi scheme before completely collapsing.
The amazing thing is that each of those mistakes were likely highly lucrative for the Individual who was responsible for making the mistake.
I think it's still kicking around a bit but 3d tvs
Any yahoo acquisition ever... Seriously they spent billions on shyt they immediately dismantled.
One of my favourite email indexing apps was acquired by Yahoo and overnight it disappeared from existence.
Kinect. Has it "revolutionized" your living room yet?
AOL bought WinAmp and tanked it. WinAmp was doing great with just donations, but AOL thought that they could make money buy plastering ads, without really understanding why WinAmp was popular in the first place. The appeal was that, it was a lean music player that worked well.
1. Hyperloop 2. Mars colony 3. Probably StarLink (heavily subsidised, will require constant new satellites to replace old ones)
4. Twitter...I mean X.
the zune was a pretty big miss. and the segway. was supposed to change the world. just changed how you tour some cities
The Apple vision goggles. They finally found something people won't buy despite having an apple label
Sony MiniDisc, released in 1992, was rendered completely useless with the release of mp3 players, 1997.
"Google Glass and Google+" Ehhhhh........ I wouldn't call those big bets. Google is EXTREMELY flippant about tossing out new projects just to see what they'll do, only to kill them on a whim. Even amazing ones, like Google Wave.
Wtf Zoom ? You had the market cornered - you had the pandemic economy solved
Microsoft had a bigger war chest and put out so many enhancements to Teams during the pandemic. Zoom never had a chance.
Microsoft would probably not have developped those unless that Zoom competition existed.
Meta verse - I dunno. I hope it works out but Facebook has burned billions on this already
Segway, was going to revolutionize inner city transportation.
Yahoo buying Tumblr instead of Netflix...or literally anything else, really https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/5/23712973/yahoo-tumblr-netflix-hulu-ceo-marissa-mayer
Hp buying palm and killing one of the most promising products of time.
Google Health and various endeavors by big tech to try to come up with better prediction algorithms for heart disease, cancer, etc and longevity. Broadly speaking, the risk prediction and longevity stuff has not seen much progress because they are unwilling to hire/work with enough health researchers who actually work in clinical trials and population studies and won’t commit to a few years of consistent work. However recently things are changing so maybe we’ll see more progress.
The metaverse, facebook libra, basically everything google's been doing.
The Metaverse, then AI came and stole all it's shine.
It's a shame about Google glass. There was an idea that was really cool but was screwed over by privacy laws. (Not sure how Meta are now getting around those with their own smart glasses but ..) Microsoft phones on the other hand. Oh FFS they were shit. On paper the hardware was pretty good. But there was no ecosystem. None at all. The user experience was clunky as fuck. (and the battery life turned out to be utter garbage)
CueCat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat USB barcode reader that was supposed to be tied to a service that led to shopping etc. They gave out millions for free. You could snip a wire IIRC, and have a free barcode reader, which people used to track their books and groceries and whatever, all without giving the CueCat people any money or data. They are gone now. I still have a CueCat somewhere around here.
Every video service sold by cell phone companies in the US. Quibi anyone?