[NTLK] [Slightly OT] Eight Biggest Tech Flops Ever

From: Eric Schneck (eschneck_at_mindspring.com)
Date: Mon Jan 05 2004 - 03:30:24 PST


Mentions some of the Newton's early competitors:

 Go: No, not the Internet site, though that also failed. This Go was the
hottest thing going in 1992, when it hoped to create the next step after
personal computers and Windows. The company spent millions to develop a
completely new operating system called Penpoint, based on handwriting, not
keyboards. Unfortunately the software was buggy, the computers lacked the
horsepower to translate handwriting to characters, and the devices were way
overpriced. The tremendous failure of pen computing was shared by
contemporaries like Momenta - who burned through 40 million bucks in 1992
while building a mostly useless $5,000 portable computer, and EO - a
pen-based phone sold by AT&T and heavier than many notebooks today. It's
worth noting that Microsoft's Pen Computing for Windows did no better,
though Microsoft is still around to take another shot at this field. More on
that later.

Magic Cap: I went to the launch of this early, cutesy yet cumbersome PDA; I
remember feeling like it was Brezhnev addressing the politburo. Corporate
agents strategically planted about the room led the crowd in rousing
applause after every third sentence. I swear at one point they started doing
the wave. General Magic, founded by refugees from Apple, failed with its
first products, but with backers like AT&T and Sony, it had enough investor
money to eventually get a product out the door. Only it wasn't a PDA but a
pseudo-friendly, agent-based voice mail system. That, too, ended up on the
scrap-heap of history - a neat sounding product that, in the end, was much
too buggy to be useful. Consultant Richard Dougherty's reconstructed diary
presents a fascinating look at how the company blew it.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1739&e=6&u=/ttzd/115253

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