Every day we watch advertisements for products claiming to be the next big thing. In truth, most of them won't come remotely close to "revolutionizing their industries," and will fall by the wayside like every product on this list. From Google Glasses to the Windows Phone, here are 20 hyped up products that totally failed.
How often do you see someone zipping around on a Segway? The answer is definitely not as frequently as you probably did ten years ago. Whether it's their founder's self inflicted death, their odd look, or the ease with which electric scooters have taken over the same market, The Segway just never made it as mainstream as some might have thought it would. I guess nobody wants to look like the Mall Cop on their way to work.
See that, and 19 other "next big things" that never really made it mainstream.
2
Minidiscs, which were late 90s/early 2000s.
3
Quibi. I think their big mistake was not releasing a TV app at launch, it was only mobile.
4
Airship moorings at the Empire State Building.
5
HD DVD. BluRay won over. Then streaming killed it all.
6
Microsoft Surface, (not the tablet), was supposed to be some wave of the future type of concept, imagine Minority Report. Alas, I don't think it ever left the concept stage.
7
Google Glasses. I would still love something like that or a scouter that allowed me to have Google maps like a minimap HUD.
8
3D movies. Over and over again it appears then vanishes because it’s always been a bit bad.
9
Those stupid NFT pictures that were great for money laundering. A stupid jpeg worth $20K is now $5.
10
Ngage, a phone and a videogame system! Too bad you had to remove the battery whenever you wanted to change games.
12
Windows Phones. My very first smartphone that promised a functioning App Store was “coming out soon,“ then promptly died.
13
What I would LIKE to see go away is putting every single car button/ function into a touchscreen. It seems manufacturers are starting to agree.
14
The Metaverse. Such an obvious scam. Facebook went deep on meta verse and even renamed their company, nobody asked for it, everyone thought it was useless, and all the tech people suddenly went, "never mind forget it, we're doing AI everything now!"
15
Digital Audio Tapes (DATs). They were tiny tape cassettes that reported to have better sound quality than CDs. They came out just after CDs became huge around 1987. People were speculating that it was a waste of money buying CDs because DATs were going to be the next big thing -- this chatter lasted well into the early '90s. By about 1994, it became clear that no one was interested in DATs.
16
Olestra, the fat substitute. It was supposed to be revolutionary, and they came out with “Wow!” Doritos and Lays chips. But then everyone started having GI issues and the chips disappeared.
18
Microsoft Zune. I stand by the statement that the Zune was the best music player I ever had, and Zune Pass was far ahead of its time. It’s a shame MS was a day late and dollar short with every iteration of it.
19
Theranos. I watched the show about Holmes and that company. Absolutely amazed at how stupid or easily bamboozled people can be.
20
Johnny "Football" Manziel.
