Internet Business Daily

There have been so many advances in the past 20 years with technology, we sometimes forget the fallen soldiers who took one for the team in order to move technology forward. Without these flops, well the only thing I can think of is we would have never been able to look back and laugh at how ridiculous these ideas are. So here are, in my opinion, the worst tech flops of all time.

1. Minidisc - It’s hard for me to say anything bad about the minidisc because I owned one. For about 10 mintues I actually believed that the minidisc was the future of portable music. I actually said the those exact words as my reason for spending $500 for the future. By the time I had finished paying for the minidisc, it was old news. CD burning had just become popular and everyone pulled out of the minidisc race before it even started. The minidisc allowed you to record and erase digitally on to a very small and durable tape-disc thing (whatever it’s called). The MiniDisc was targeted as a replacement for analogue cassette tapes but did not take with the public. There are still a bunch of you who are loyal to the minidisc so ill let you in on a secret: the minidisc is dead! Please get an iPod.

2. Zip Disc - This started out as a genius product. All of a sudden we went from having a little over 1mb on a disc to having 100. There was one major problem with this, it required everyone to have the same proprietary hardware, that no one had up till that point. These discs also had the potential to store massive amounts of data, but again the only way to do that was with proprietary hardware for each data storage size. The main killer of the Zip Drive was, once again CD’s. CD’s were so cheap and easy to use, along with durable, that it just made sense for everyone to use them. The best part about CD burning was that everyone had CD players already. Basically all Zip Drives are good for now is a paper weight.

3. Blu-Ray* - Notice the star next to this one, since it hasn’t yet flopped. In my opinion, it is just a flop waiting to happen. Does Sony really think the public is ready for Blue Ray? Not only are they releasing it too early, but it will be competing against many other (cheaper) technologies. Especially with the popularity of the iPod and other harddrive based storage devices, we are trying to move away from discs that can be scratched or lost. Sure video games are still produced on CD’s and Blue Ray provides enormous density opportunity, but how far off are we from downloading games straight to your consoles’ harddrive? This is just a flop waiting to happen.

4. Paper Clip (Office Assistant) - Oh boy this was a horrible idea! Here’s what the Microsoft geniuses were thinking: let’s have this little annoying cartoon paper clip tell me how to write documents. Let’s also have him animated so people can get distracted every 5 seconds. I’m still not quite sure why this idea didn’t pan out. The best part about this paper clip was you could turn him off.

5. Windows ME - Yet another bad Microsoft product. Notice how Microsoft’s bad ideas occupy 3 places on this list? That was not by accident. It took many minds to come up with that many bad products. Windows ME was supposed to be a “home edition” of Windows 2000 (probably the best Microsoft operating system there is). For some reason, it was just implemented horribly. It crashed all the time, required multiple reinstalls, which barely worked and was overall just a headache to use. Why would anyone want a stripped down version of a great product that barely worked?

6. Microsoft Bob - This really should have been at the top of the list if it was actually in order of how big of a flop these items were. Designed to be “user-friendly,” Bob was just plain weird. Although it was still very early in the OS race and Microsoft was atleast trying something, it was just a horrible idea to start with. The format was supposed to resemble a video game of sorts, which just took away from its’ functionality. The cherry on the top of this disaster pie was obviously the poor choice of names. Personally I would never buy a product named Bob, no matter what it did.

7. Laser Disc - Basically an oversized, overpriced version of the DVD. The laser disc was the first commercial optical disc drive and was mainly used to play movies. It had good quality, good sound, but was too expensive. We were just not ready for this type of technology at the time. This is another good example of a media storage device that the public was just not ready for.