TIME magazine Lists the Segway as "Top Ten worst Tech failures..."

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Greg Peshek

Not to try to be argumentative here, but as was pointed out earlier the common denominator here seems to be the overhyping of all these products. -Vista was supposed to be the next revolutionary operating system, when it was just a bloated XP.

-The Zune was going to beat out Apple and the iPod for the MP3 market.. it just ended up like most other non-brand name MP3 players.

-While Gateway does have a share of the computer market.. it's nowhere near the powers that Dell, HP (Compaq since they are one in the same), and Apple are in the market of personal computers.

-Youtube was great when it came out, there were unlimited personalities, now what I think separated it from 2006 as a great invention to now is the buyout by Google. It was expected that Google with its infinite resources would revamp YouTube and make it amazing. Instead it just became bloated with ads for buying music on Yahoo and has remained much the same since the two kids from UIUC coded it.

-Segway, same thing that was mentioned earlier, great expectations and hype and didn't necessarily live up to all of those things.

I'm not saying any of these are bad inventions, I'm just saying the general link between all of these is that they were expected to do great things and none of them have. None of these are complete failures, but flops from what they were expected to be.. yes.

-Greg

I think Greg is onto what the list really shows. A failure is not something that doesnt work, merely something that doesnt live up to expectations. Let us look at Vista, it was supposed to be revolutionary, it was supposed to make the computer a lean, mean, number crunching machine. Lets face it, the whole launch was bungled, 5 years in development, how many different editions? What were the system requirements? Is my computer Vista ready? Vista compatible? Will my peripherals work? Is Vista a good OS? I would say so. I would also consider it a failure, it was not that revolutionary, nor was it particularly lean, or fast. Baring that, it generated more negative press for Microsoft than it did positive press. Vista was not widely adopted and as such it is a failure, it should have revolutionized computing but it failed.

The Segway could have revolutionized personal transport but it failed. So I would chalk it up as a failure, not from an engineering perspective but instead from a cultural perspective.