[Closed] name me some memorable product failures....

Kit - Member
Concorde (sadly )

More a victim of more moderm times surely?! i.e. increased pollution awareness and fuel costs. Certainly not a failure in itself.

Rolls Royce didn't sell many "Silver Mist" cars in Germany. Because mist is german for poo.

The Ford Pinto didn't sell well in Spanish countries because Pinto means something rude there. Just as the Vauxhall/Opel "Nova" means "doesn't go" in Spanish.

DAT

Actually DAT was extensively used as a backup media in small servers for quite a while. A good example of something being relatively successful in ca different market.

BSB HD broadcasting and the "squariel". the government laid out some rules for satlite broadcasting, Murdoch said fekkit, ignored them and got his satellite up first. The BSB satellite, like betamax, was a better technology delivering higer definition picures than the Sky satellite, but being second to market failed.

Rabbit "mobile" phones

Freeview before it was called Freeview

the trade union movement, particularly Unison

Laker airlines.
One of the newer Marin FS Platforms failed CEN testing i think and was quietly dropped earlier this year.

I still have a minidisc headunit in my car, I love it.

Biopace chainrings - great idea, just implemented it 100% wrong.

the firestone tires quote is also slightly incorrect.
It was an inflation pressure issue & nowt to do with the exhaust pipe.

Ford chose to lower the inflation pressure to improve comfort without adequate confirmation testing & this led to some tyre failures....

DeLorean

>More a victim of more moderm times surely?! i.e. increased pollution awareness and fuel costs.

The burning fireball seen passing low over the Paris skyline eventually crashing killing all occupants didn't help either 😉

Dat, minidisc and betamax were great products, minidisc and dat are still widely used

betamax was a better format than vhs and the beta format is still widely in use

all three of those products failed in the consumer market because of who they were manufactured by not because of what they were but were successful in the professional market.

The same goes for HDDVD, better than blu-ray but not manufactured by a company that owns the rights to a frightening amount of the entertainment industry's intellectual property.

new coke is the best example i reckon, along with anything ever made by amstrad ever and pretty much anything made by rover after 1985

[i]Biopace chainrings - great idea, just implemented it 100% wrong. [/i]

That's the point, it WASN'T! It's become this huge urban myth amongst cyclists that Shimano screwed it all up, wrong orientation, blah blah but see the proper explanation of it here:

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/biopace.html

It's got a Wikipedia entry too which says exactly the same. Sheldon's website explains why it fell out of favour.

More a victim of more moderm times surely?! i.e. increased pollution awareness and fuel costs. Certainly not a failure in itself.

Er, no, the design flaw whereby debris from a tyre blowout could catastrophically rupture the fuel tanks in the wings. After the Paris accident, they could not guarantee that even with reinforced tanks that it wouldn't happen again and so grounded the fleet. That was my understanding, anyway...

allthepies - Member
>More a victim of more moderm times surely?! i.e. increased pollution awareness and fuel costs.

The burning fireball seen passing low over the Paris skyline eventually crashing killing all occupants didn't help either

The last ford scorpio

Hainey +1

Cannondale... .Specifically the Raven bottom bracket that would 'drop out'

Cannondale response was to put a kilo of glue in to hold it in... Brilliant.

Re: the biopace chainrings.

What is the difference between them and the Rotor oval rings that are still available? I know a couple of people who use them...

Mondex
Green Shield Stamps
"Buy British"
Sega
MSX

Pete Doherty.

jond - Member

Does the question need a little clarification ?

ie was the product poorly designed/manufactured or was is a 'poor product' in terms of sales (which is quite a few of the above) - the two are somewhat different (betamax being one example).

sorry, yes poorly designed manufactured, e.g. Mercedes A-Class tipping over in the corners.

thanks for the myriad of responses, but i think i might go with a more 'global warming' theme and ti it in with Copenhagen conference.

carry on!

VHS wasn't a success for who produced it was adopted by the porn industry and therefore was a huge success.

Bloody maalox pills. I have got half of the bow since this morning with no results whatsoever on my belly ache 🙁

smokeless cigarettes. all the testing was done with lighters. when it came to field trials after millions of pounds of investments, smokers using matches found that it smelt badly of farts!! 😀

sorry, yes poorly designed manufactured,

In that sense Betamax for instance is bad example as it was much the superior product in the showdown with VHS. However Beta, being better has had a long innings in the professional workplace.

So its an example of a good product but marketing fail, largely because Sony were too precious with licensing it to other manufacturers, so there were just more VHS machines to choose from, in the same way that PCs are a more successful platform than Macs if you measure success as universal adoption. IBM believed that it would be fine to allow other manufacturers to make IBM compatible machine on the basis that everyone would know that IBM made the original and best PCs, Apple didn't trust anyone else to make Macs that would work well enough (they allowed licencing for a brief period but quickly pulled the plug)

But if you look at the market now was it IBM or Apple that made the better decision. I doubt Apple are unhappy. Whos reading this on an IBM?

One guy (whos name I forget) was responsible for the both the idea of lead as a petrol additive and the adoption of CFC as a refrigeration gas and propellant. Neither being poor decisions within the close confines of workings of either process but massively problematic elsewhere

Tacoma Narrows bridge failure:

One guy (whos name I forget) was responsible for the both the idea of lead as a petrol additive and the adoption of CFC as a refrigeration gas and propellant. Neither being poor decisions within the close confines of workings of either process but massively problematic elsewhere

That's interesting, looks like it was this chap:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley

Betamax ... its an example of a good product but marketing fail, largely because Sony were too precious with licensing it to other manufacturers

I thought it was more that there was more software available on VHS than Betamax.

Sony learn't their lesson which is why they've bought up the rights to huge amounts of music and film.

Windows!
Any product that needs to be updated a week or so later after it's released must be a product failure..

[i]Windows!
Any product that needs to be updated a week or so later after it's released must be a product failure.. [/i]

I agree poor Bill Gates made no money at all from this epic failure.

Honda Asimo Robot

I thought it was more that there was more software available on VHS than Betamax.

That was symptomatic of their being fewer machines in circulation. Four manufacturers were originally licenced to make VHS machines while only Sony was making the Betamax. So in the shop 4 our of 5 of the machine for sale were VHS. By the same measure as a distributor 4 out of 5 of your customers have a VHS, so which platform are you going to invest in?

But like I say Betamax / Beta SP / Digibeta persisted as a production platform rather than consumer platform

Toyota Formula 1?

Maybe even better - the Petronas World Superbike that Carl Fogarty ran for a number of years.

On a mountainbiking note: will anyone dare mention the Hammerschmidt crank? (or am I being premature?)

Any product that needs to be updated a week or so later after it's released must be a product failure..

Epic failure used by 90% of the population?

Dyson Washing Machine
Apple G4 Cube

Northern Ireland

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.