The Best Examples of Failed Technology

Technology is a wonderful thing. Like opposable thumbs and language, it separates us from the animals. It’s also often way more fun than opposable thumbs and language. With technology, we have advanced far beyond the hunter/gatherer tribes we started off as, exploring vast oceans and empty space. But not all technology is great. Some of it…well, some of it just plain sucks. Here’s a list of technological advancements we could’ve done without. Some of them were simply before their time, but most of them were terrible in one way or the other.

1. The Power Glove

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If you have geekish tendencies, like me, you know about the Power Glove from the 1980’s movie The Wizard. The movie was about a that kid from the Wonder Years and a red head trying to get a troubled child to some Nintendo contest. Their nemesis, Lucas, possessed the Power Glove, which made him the Terminator of 8-byte consoles. In reality, the Power Glove didn’t so much give you super powers as it gave you a broken TV after you started throwing the useless gadget around the room. A lot of people are hard on the glove. The problem was the thing didn’t work. It had the response time of hundred year old, and that was when it actually decided to obey your commands. Mix in the fact that most Nintendo games from that era were already impossibly hard with a functioning controller and that the only two games ever made specifically for the glove were awful, it’s easy to see why it was so hated. To be fair, it was the inspiration for the Wii, so it did do something right…eventually.

2. The Newton

Like the Power Glove, we could look back to the Newton as the prototype for something great. Unfortunately, the point of a prototype is to work out the many kinks, and people paid good money to become the unwilling testers. Again, the thing just didn’t work. One of the key points in Newton’s advertising was the handwriting recognition software. Imagine, a world where you never needed paper again! Need to write yourself a note? Make a list? Need a day planner? Luckily you have your Newton. But, as you’ll probably remember from the hilarious parody on the Simpsons, it wasn’t so much handwriting recognition as handwriting guessing. Also, it had the vocabulary of a particularly slow first grader. It didn’t even recognize the world “freckles.” Sure, you could manually add any word you wanted to and after a couple of months the Newton would eventually get used to your handwriting, but this thing ate through batteries. In the end the Newton was a non-functioning money pit, and Stephen Jobs took it out to pasture.

3. The Dreamcast

I remember opening up my Dreamcast on Christmas and being so excited. I remember renting games and trying to find one to get really excited about. And I remember next Christmas opening up my Playstation 2 and thanking God I could finally get rid of my Dreamcast. The failure of the Dreamcast is less clear cut than the Power Glove or the Newton. It certainly worked. In fact, when it first came out, it had fantastic graphics. So what went wrong? Well, that’s complicated. You could point to poor advertising, loss of faith in the Sega brand, shipping errors, or the arrival of the cheaper Playstation 2. The simplest answer might be the stars simply aligned and decided the Dreamcast wasn’t meant to be. What made me give up on it? The terrible games. Try to remember a Dreamcast game that really wowed you. Can’t? Yeah…neither can I.

4. E-Books

Alright, this one might be a little controversial. I’m sure some people are going to say “oh, the E-Book is becoming popular. They’re becoming cheaper and more accessible. My friend’s cousin has one, and the other day I saw someone with one on the bus.” Listen, the E-Book has been around for ten years. It’s not happening. Stop trying to make it a thing. I love books, so I’m probably completely biased, but I also don’t think I’m wrong. There should be some advantage to new technology. If it’s just flashy and new for the sake of being flashy and new, what’s the point? Sure, on the E-Book you can store a great number of books at once, and download them directly to your console, saving you that gruelling trip to your local bookstore, but there are plenty off disadvantages. For starters, your standard paperback novel costs somewhere between eight to ten dollars. An E-Book costs hundreds, plus you’re still paying for the electronic versions of the books. It’ll be a long time before it starts paying for itself. Also, finding books to download for your specific console is a nightmare, since a great many haven’t been converted to the cyber world, and even if they have, they might not be compatible with your E-Book. I think paper wins every time.

5. Smart Appliances

It’s the dream fuelled by years of watching the Jetsons. Low on eggs? Your refrigerator knows and orders more from your local grocer. Your oven will automatically spit out a perfectly cooked roast when you walk through the door. It’s the dream of humanity: barely having to do anything at all. And businesses tried their best to make it happen. For a while there it looked like our lives were going to be made so much easier. And then…nothing. The sales tanked, the dream died, and there’s no plans to resurrect it. What happened? Well, there’s the insane cost, for starters. Ever buy a fridge? Ever buy a computer? Do you think they would be cheaper if you mixed them together? And the logistics of the smart appliances were never really thought through. Alright, your fridge orders you eggs. Lets say your grocery store is set up to take orders like this. How do they get to your house? Does the store deliver them? Maybe, but only for a price, which will probably be far more than the price of what your fridge bought. Or they can use the post office. Who doesn’t mind waiting three to six business days for food that will have gone bad? It might’ve been all of these things that ended the smart appliances, but I like to think people as a whole decided that they could get off their butts and buy their own damn eggs.

6. Speech Recognition Software

Maybe I’m being too hasty with this one. It’s possible that speech recognition could have a big breakthrough and become common place. And the software is being used in a limited capacity in some areas of life, but…I’m still calling it a failure, mostly because of the insanely high expectations that were attached to it. Bill Gates once said speech recognition software would be the main form of input for businesses and normal people alike. Do you think I’m writing this article by talking out loud in my living room? When was the last time you used speech recognition software? Probably you were forced to use it when you called a business and got an automated response, which redirected you everywhere except where you actually wanted to go. The accuracy simply isn’t that great and it has trouble recognizing the different meanings of words that are pronounced the same, like “there” “their” or “they’re.” Plus, working in an office sucks enough without everyone talking constantly.

7. Virtual Reality

This time I feel confident that I’m not being too hasty. Do you see that ball up there? That, and strapping TVs to a person’s head, is pretty as much as close as we’ve gotten to virtual reality. Isn’t that just a little sad? Sure…it could happen. Eventually we could all live in a dream world completely separated from our own and we could set up colonies on mars, but if it happens, it won’t be for a very long time. The fact is that technology has a long way to go before it’s even plausible. Most of use don’t want an over-sized hamster ball in our living room. Instead, we would want to people able to sit perfectly still in this world while moving in the other one. That means a virtual reality platform would have to be able to scan our brains to be able to translate our most minute movements in the game. We can’t even figure out how to get a machine to recognize our voice accurately. But I’m sure out great, great grandchildren will have loads of fun in the World of Warcraft virtual world.

8. Zune

Haha…Zune. I think I’ve only known one person who has ever owned a Zune, and they only got it because they’re parents thought it was the same as an iPod. It’s really not. Microsoft promised that the Zune would be the iPod killer, which they intended to do by making false promises and overlooking what made the iPod popular in the first place. For starters, a Zune is clunky and ugly. When they were first released you could only buy them in brown (sexy!) and they were pretty big. That wouldn’t have been such a problem if, say, you could play a bunch of movies or shows on your Zune, but everything had to be formatted to Windows Media. What the hell is formatted to Windows Media? Like everyone else on the planet, I watch everything either on Divx or Megavideo. Also, Microsoft pissed a lot of people off when they said you could import your entire iTunes collection to Zune. That turned out to be as true as Santa Clause.

What was the most useless piece of technology you ever bought?