MegaSack DRAW - 6pm Christmas Eve - LIVE on our YouTube Channel
Thalidomide
Anything made by Dyson.
[Eddie Izzard mode on] Rwanda doesn't work very well. The infrastructure's f*cked.
[i]Thalidomide [/i]
a product not without its many positives, of course.
The Shoe Fitting Flouroscope perhaps, a device used in shoeshops that gave a realtime xray image of your own feet to give a faux science sheen to selling childrens shoes, all with a bonus dose of radiation. Kiddy put their feet in the machine and had a scope they could see the live xray image, there was also a scope for mummy and one for the shop keeper too, so the three of them were standing in a circle getting irradiated. Fairly risky to customers, frequently fatal to shop keepers
10,000 were in circulation in the US, so a commercial success, but a model employed to promote the machine received such severe radiation burns she had to have her legs amputated
Salomon Pilot, snowboard step-in boot and binding system.
They spent a packet on R&D and marketing, back cover ads in mags over the world, full production run, then put the whole lot in the bin.
Edit: just trying to find some stuff on t'internet for you. Absolutely nothing! The big S have done a proper coverup job. Even the wikipedia "snowboarding" article with a few hundred words on step-in bindings, including a reference to the risks to big market players of bringing out a poorly performing step-in system has no reference to Salomon.
And they've used the "pilot" name for a model of ski now, to further muddy that waters.
Impressive stuff: didn't happen, Salomon doesn't make mistakes!
Or the sleeve for the 12" version of Blue Monday. The biggest selling 12" of all time, but the sleeve cost more to produce than the record sold for, so the more copies they sold the more money they lost.
[i]Or the sleeve for the 12" version of Blue Monday. The biggest selling 12" of all time, but the sleeve cost more to produce than the record sold for, so the more copies they sold the more money they lost[/i]
Which of course is a load of bollocks.
superstar brake pads?
swindon
Which of course is a load of bollocks
Looking into it its only partial bollocks - the die cut sleeve was only of the early copies, so they would have been the expensive ones, they dropped the die cutting pretty swiftly.
8track didn't fail,
Still used comercialy to record live events (well pre HD anyway) how else can you record all 8 cameras at a football game simoutaneously?
8track recorders were the wepon of choice for home studio recording untill powerfull enough PC's became cheep, anoyingly the little box of tricks required to plug into your laptop now cost more than an 8track recorder!
And I guess it's legacy is surround sound home cinema, although the dolby implementation is different, the speekers aren't defined chanels anymore, you can keep pluging in speekers to the box and it'll keep calculating what sound to output form that point in the room.
CERN's LHC large hadron collider
I'm an American so...
"New" Coke
The Edsel automobile
The Schwinn "Klunker 5" bicycle, modeled poorly after the first California off-road hybrids. Followed closely by the first Schwinn MTB attempt, the "King Sting."
Speaking of which, the "hybrid" bicycle.
George W. Bush
or the British version - Boris Johnstone; "I couldn't fail to disagree with you less"
Not exactly a 'product' ; 'legal' drug Mephedrone -
causes possible mild brain bleed
It causes your BRAIN to BLEED 😯 (and people will still buy it 🙄 )
8track didn't fail,Still used comercialy to record live events (well pre HD anyway) how else can you record all 8 cameras at a football game simoutaneously?
You're thinking of multitrack recording. 8 track cartridges appeared almost the same time as cassette tapes and an early means of listening to music on the move (they were developed by Lear Jet) and popularly fitted in cars. They were one continuous loop of tape inside a cartridge. Prior to 8 Track Cartidges and Cassette Tape tape had to be manually threaded into reel to reel machine, which was really difficult to do while driving a car and calling your mum on the phone.
Successful in their day but cassettes were cheaper, smaller and could be rewound. Similarly to Betamax and DVD HD there were too many competing platforms and the music publishers didn't want to support all three platforms (tape, 8 track and vinyl) so 8 track was edged out. They had a longer stint in the US than Europe, not that much shorter as a commercial format than cassettes. But somehow they became a byword for obsolescence.
Carbon fibre fan blades on Rolls-Royce aero engines around 1970. Great power to weight but not good with bird strikes or wet weather. Thankfully didn't make it into production.
Ratner jewellery.
Ratner jewellery
Almost all jewellery isn't worthy of the material its made from. Gerald Ratners error was in saying so.
Others are noted for 'doing a ratner' such as
Asked in an interview in 2001 to clarify the target market for the Topman clothing chain, the firm's brand director, David Shepherd, replied: "Hooligans or whatever."
He went on: "Very few of our customers have to wear suits for work. They'll be for his first interview or first court case."
The company later suggested that the word "hooligan" would not be seen as an insult among its customers.
But if Shepherd didn't wipe £500 million off topmans share value then he was right
Lymeswold Cheese.
Which IIRC failed because demand was so high that quality became compromised and demand subsequently fell away.
Why are hybrid bikes a failure?
Millennium Dome, nuff said.
Believe it or not, the Dome was the most popular pay-in attraction in the UK in 2000, it failed to reach a forecast 12m visitors, but even with concerted negative campaigns throughout the press it still outsold everything else in the UK.
Just remind me then, how much did we taxpayers spend on it then for it to become
most popular pay-in attraction in the UK in 2000
How did it rate in the popularity states from in 2001 onwards?
The O2 Millenium Dome is the second highest grossing live venue in the world after Madison Square Gardens, which it achieved in it's first year of operation. Hardly a failure.
VHS was successful in the UK because it was adopted by the TV rental companies, which pretty much supplied all the nation's tellies and video recorders. Betamax was much more successful in the States. There was an attempt by Sony to produce an alternative to the cassette, but slightly bigger, which failed, and someone tried to develop a hifi version of dictaphone microcassettes, using metal formula tapes. I remember seeing a recorder with both a standard cassette and microcassette, but that was a fail as well. Funnily enough, A Clockwork Orange featured a hifi using microcassettes.
I'm not surprised Cannondale get dragged up again, but the only major fail that I had ever heard of concerned one batch of frames with a 1" steerer, back around '89-90. Hardly something to keep on and on and on and on and on and on about. That was the very early days of oversize alloy frame development. Get over it.
XT, you might be correct about the O2 Arena, I was talking about the Millennium Dome
According to the UK National Audit Office,the total cost of The Dome at the liquidation of the New Millennium Experience Company in 2002 was £789 million, of which £628 million was covered by National Lottery grants and £189 million through sales of tickets etc.
The O2 Arena is a re-name of the big white tent we all payed for in east London.
Mercedes A class moose roll over?
Totally disagree, use to hammer mine around corners and stable as ****. 1 dick head jorno tipped one by driving like a c*nt.
Might be wrong but don't the main radio stations still use mini disc?
The O2 Arena is a re-name of the big white tent we all payed for in east London
[i]We[/i] only paid for the dome if we bought lottery tickets.
Marconi, iirc, bought a company that was a front for some US government agency, have a look on wiki
Mercedes A class moose roll over?Totally disagree, use to hammer mine around corners and stable as ****. 1 dick head jorno tipped one by driving like a c*nt.
This is why your car was stable as can be...
From Wikipedia, "The W168 became infamous in 1997 after flipping over during the traditional "moose test" performed by the Swedish automobile publication Teknikens Värld....
Mercedes initially denied the problem, but then took the surprising step of recalling all units sold to date (2,600) and suspending distribution until the problem was solved by adding electronic stability control and modifying the suspension."
Laservision anyone? - Invented by Philips it was like DVD except the disc was the size of a LP - (as in vinyl)
De Havilland Comet until they lost the rectangular windows and called it Nimrod.
I would say Concorde was a massive failure. Too thirsty and noisy. none ordered after the initial batch that were massively subsidised.
Technological success ( of sorts) but commercial failure
just reminded by the "sorry what grinder post"
..................the STW coffee forum
not even a stain in the bottom of google
Jordan/Katie Price....whatever it decides to call herself
New Labour
Anything with a bearing or a crank in it made by Race Face
Babylon Zoo
Tread stopping compound.
Nice Nico but Old git surrey will have dozed off by the time he gets to page 2 of this
Milton Keynes
Ionica
Cambridge based microwave phone company, valued at one billion. Didn't last long.
Tread stopping compound!! 😉 
(Sorry ❗ ) 😳
Whos reading this on an IBM?
Me.
Anything with a bearing or a crank in it made by Race Face
Not in my experience; my turbines have had a couple of bearing changes, but represent excellent value after many years. I'm a very happy customer.
Jordan/Katie Price....whatever it decides to call herself
I'd say she's been a resounding success.
People may not like her but she's made an obscene amount of money and been very successful at what she does. Not as daft as she comes across.
Someone mentioned Swindon as a failure, not much of a failure now as they have just been twinned with Disneyland Florida, there will be an exhibition about Swindon at the Epcot centre!!!!!
Original Austin Allegro estate, used to fold in half at the sills if the front wheels were lifted off the ground for towing.
Haven't read the whole post, but has anyone mentioned the Jaguar XJ-220?
Also, not a "failure" as such, but an incredibly inefficient way of doing things - Storage Heaters!
Heat rocks at night and then sit by them in the day. Straight out of the Roman times!
Jordan/Katie Price....whatever it decides to call herself
People seem to be confusing 'product failures' with personality failures.
hehehe..storage heaters, nice. Try to guess whether you'll need heating tomorrow or not.
[i] Jordan/Katie Price....whatever it decides to call herself
People seem to be confusing 'product failures' with personality failures. [/i]
that's a product failure, not a personality failure. She's an absolute failure as a human being. As a money-making machine, however, she's not doing badly.
Has no-one mentioned ISIS?
Long thread - have we mentioned the Hindenburg so far?
Can we include Communism on the list?
🙂
communism? Given the present state of the world economy, I think we can add capitalism to that*
*except of course for the approx 5000 people per large developed economy
