Wasn’t there a hubbub about the Segway?
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Huge.
Only a few people saw it, mostly CEOs and billionaires. They said it could revolutionize cities, which is technically true, as part of a larger transportation shift. But the rest of the public just heard 'this will revolutionize the world'. And they didn't do any focus groups or beta testing or anything outside of their own company, so they didn't have anyone telling them 'I'm not gonna pay $5k for a fucking scooter'.
And then they launched, and people started telling them 'I'm not gonna pay $5k for a fucking scooter'. And then powered skateboards became the Next Big Thing, and then some Chinese companies realized nobody wants to learn to skate just to get around so they put a battery and a motor on a Razor scooter and suddenly Ninebot blew the fuck up.
Then Dean Kamen (inventor of Segway) got killed riding one, and Ninebot bought what was left of Segway.
fwiw looks like Dean Kamen is still alive; it was another owner - the one who bought the company from Kamen - died in the accident. someone named Jimi Heselden apparently.
Oh man, I remember the hype over Segway. "It'll change the world!" Along with the secrecy, like it was nuclear fusion or something.
Ninebot really showed them in the end, by making something nearly as good for like 1/8th the price.
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MiniDisc. When the format was first released in the 90s people claimed it was going to replace CDs, but then hardly anyone bought them and they pretty much disappeared after a few years
MiniDisc. When the format was first released in the 90s people claimed it was going to replace CDs, but then hardly anyone bought them and they pretty much disappeared after a few years
MD players were never hugely popular, but I used the crap out of mine. When I was a in the Navy I had a MD player and it could hold something like, 100 ish songs per MD? It was clutch for going underway. This was like a revolutionary amount of size for its compactness, but more importantly, the durability of the disks. No worries about scratching, you could just throw them in with the rest of your crap. I used mine endlessly and it was also a cool color scheme (like white with orange accents. sony I think).
They were pretty popular in Japan
Interesting, oh well, sony made them didn't they, I am guessing it was certainly more popular there because of that?
I remember seeing them for sale at Best Buy when I was in highschool and my friends and I all wanted to try it out, but no one could afford the player, and no one's parents would buy it for them since we all already had CD players and a bunch of CDs lol
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I bought one and used it like an mp3 player. They immediately stopped selling more disks so I just kept reusing the one I had. Still have it and it works to this day. Not much point in using it though when you can just stream from your phone.
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Wow that is interesting. If I am understanding this right, was minidisc called that way because it was smaller than a traditional CD? Or what is just a different format? What really was it's benefits back then over conventional CDs?
Imagine you can make cuts anywhere in your CD tracks and move the segments around. You can also name each segment so they don’t just have to be 00-99+.
I had a great time recording radio shows, cutting out the DJ and entering all the song titles. The LCD display would show the song / artist title while playing which was big back then :)
It was more like a floppy disc from a computer. It was a small writable disc inside a cartridge housing. It sounded just as good if not better than a CD with the added bonus that it couldn't get scratched up, and wouldn't skip like a CD if the player moved around.
And it was much much smaller than a CD. The player was akin to a smaller version of a Walkman.
It was a small cd, but encased like a floppy.
I think 1.5 of them was the same as an iPod of the time, because it stored the songs as data not audio on the disk.
So if you never changed the disc, it was 75% the storage of an iPod. And I want to say a 3-5 pack was only $20.
They just never took off, but they were awesome back in the day.
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The Metaverse, I guess? It's funny how living in a virtual world has been this hyped-up concept for decades and it finally comes out and it's just kind of...lame for lack of a better word. Maybe it's too early to tell, but it feels like the Web 3.0 Metaverse push hasn't lived up to the hype.
Aside from that, I'd say the Xbox Kinect. Maybe it's just me, but I remember that when the Kinect came out there was a lot of hype about how it was going to revolutionize how people played games. But I don't think we ever really got a Kinect game that lived up to that hype. To be fair, I remember a lot of articles of people doing interesting things with Kinect it's just that none of them really had anything to do with gaming.
Did actually think they would pull something off? It was all 100% advertising hype for a knock off VR Chat.
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Google Glass.
Which is crazy because it’s the closest to an actually good AR headset we’ve seen.
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Touchscreen interfaces on work/desktop computers. Twice even! Once in the 90s when touchscreen hardware became cheaper to make, then again around 2010 with Windows 8 and Steve Sinofsky pushing the "everything has a touchscreen interface" approach that bombed horribly.
If fucking windows actually worked half ass with a touch screen, then this would have worked, but windows 8 felt horrible to use and windows in general was just frustrating to use on a touch screen for years after 8's release.
Windows 8's UI actually worked really well on a touchscreen, see 10's nerfed version of how it's backwards in many ways.
Thing is, the programs for Windows generally didn't make the switch, and why'd they? The market was still in mouse-cursor mode, and having a UI for touchscreens would probably have even more users up in revolt. So it ended as this jarring mess that MS couldn't really resolve.
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Google Wave
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The Commodore Amiga was superior to Mac and PC when it came out but unfortunately for the engineers, the business was run by cretins
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Dvorak keyboard layout, maybe
I wouldn't call the Amiga a flop, it just didn't survive. It was reasonably successful for a while.
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Back in the Windows 8 days, Microsoft tried to push Universal Windows Platform (UWP), a new application format that could run on any devices running Windows 8: desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets and even Xbox without any modification while being much more secure by default.
It failed for a multitude of reasons:
- It was a big break from the previous application model. You had to rewrite everything.
- To improve security, it enforced many limitation that legacy apps did not have.
- While it was the only way to create and distribute apps for Windows Phone and Windows RT (a Windows 8 variant for low-powered laptops) their low market share did not incentivize developers to migrate to or create UWP apps.
- It was strongly tied to the divisive Metro UI of Windows 8. People already hated interacting with this part of Windows 8, they had no desire to install apps that would force them into this UI.
UWP still lives on in Windows 10 and 11 as well as in Xbox One and Series: many system apps are now UWPs, as well as all Xbox games and apps, some cross-devices games from Microsoft Studios and some apps in the Windows Store.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I hate using "apps" on my desktop machine. They're always designed to be friendly for touch interface and smaller screen size, and are terrible to use on my 30" monitor with a 1/8" cursor. I just want my menu bar, toolbar on the left, and status on the bottom, please and thank you.
I hate using most apps on my phone. It's not that I'm a curmudgeon. I'm a developer, and I don't see any good reason for so many damned apps when a browser works just fine.
You'll always get asked about apps whenever a new service or whatever is launched. Even here, there're people asking for a Lemmy/Kbin app.
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Nah, you're not. It simply is not possible to have a single UI that works just as well on both a touch-driven 5-inch interface and a pointer-driven 20-inch interface. Different input methods require different UIs. But publishers are lazy so they try to pretend you can.
Nuclear for sure. Reading old science fiction from the '50s is pretty eye opening on what promise it appeared to hold.
In my lifetime, the Genome project. I'm sure a lot of good has come of it, and will continue to do so, but when they first decided to try to decode the human genome, the promise in the air was eradication of so many diseases, increased health and longevity to humanity, etc.
The Internet for sure. It went from something that would allow the entire world to access knowledge, be better informed, make the future a real meritocracy. Instead, we ended up with magats, vaccine-effectiveness deniers, and aggressive stupidity.
The human genome project has been very successful at progressing genetic medicine.
I am willing to accept the absolute worst of humanity on the internet, because we can also have so many amazing things that weren't previously possible.
Accessibility of information to the masses is incredibly important. Isolated populations can learn about the bigger world, get help, and share their experiences. Friends and families can stay connected. People can work together from anywhere, and create value as a team in ways that weren't previously possible. When I was a kid it was just a dream, and now we are living it.
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Carbon Nanotubes. They are notoriously difficult to work with.
Not considering vaporware or failed products (e.g. Eolo car):
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The Esperanto language. (Yes, I'm old)
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NFTs.
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Blockchain. Yes, it has its use, but it's not the pervasive, all-use game changer it was claimed to be.
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Sony Betamax. Pity because it was better than VHS.
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New Coke. Nuff said.
What did Beta do better than VHS? It's a load of hype from Sony that Beta was better - magnetic tape was magnetic tape and compare the picture side by side (which most homes couldn't because beta machines cost 2x as much as VHS). There is no difference except buyer's denial they paid more for the less runtime (Beta has an hour long format while VHS was 2 hours).
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Intel Itanium was going to take us into 64 bit computing, starting at the high end and working its way down to home pc's.
and then AMD walked in with x86_64 like "what up i got a fat cock and it's backward compatible with all your old code" just 2 years later.
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The one flop that sticks in my mind the most was "IT". "IT" was going to revolutionize the world, nothing would be different, it would make each person richer than Bill Gates, and so on.
"IT" was the Segway. It was a two-wheeled vehicle that could go a max speed of 12 MPH/19 KPH for a distance of 25 miles/40 km and it cost Twelve Thousand Dollars. Know what else balances on two wheels and goes 12mph? A bicycle. And I can pick that up for a few hundred bucks depending on what I want. At the time, you could buy a very nice motorcycle for $12,000 and it would go much farther than 25 miles and considerably faster than 12 mph.
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Google Plus
Google+
Was supposed to kill Facebook, lol. Now it's just one more on the long list of ideas Google entirely gave up on.
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In the 1990s VR was right around the corner, but we didn't have processors, network, it displays we needed to make it happen. Thirty years on, we have the hardware we need, but it remains a niche/enthusiast technology. Motion sickness remains an issue.
Maybe that'll change with Apple's foray into AR.
We’re now running into the soft problems of VR. Things like the weight of the device, the hazards and downsides being disconnected from the real world, the lack of large indoor spaces, etc. are showing the weaknesses in the model of VR we envisioned.
Also, VR platforms are really tightly controlled. PCs got big because you didn’t need to use Dell or Gateway’s App Store to do things. Jail breaking is a thing but not for most people.
Until VR stops feeling like a brick strapped to your face and has true AR capability I don’t think it will get big. And it definitely won’t get big with a bunch of closed ecosystems.
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