Three Cool Products That Failed to Sell
One of my hobbies is something called "retro-tech" -- cool products that were way ahead of their time. Retro-tech interests me because such product illustrate eternal truths about sales and marketing. Here are three of my favorites, from three different decades, each with a brief description of what went wrong and how the product might have sold more successfully:
The world's first picture phone (1965). The Bell PicturePhone had a high resolution screen, worked over a regular telephone wire, and even had a really groovy design that looked like something from the original Star Trek series. The PicturePhone did have one drawback, though - you could only use four or five of them at the same time without bringing down the entire municipal telephone system of Chicago. Why it failed: In this case, it was technical limitations that did the device in. There was probably no way to market something that essentially crippled the entire telephone system when you tried to use it.
The world's first mass produced video game (1970). Computer Space had the exact same plot as most of the games available for the consoles; you pushed various buttons to steer a spaceship across the screen while attacking alien creatures. Only 200 units of Computer Space were manufactured, but the designer, Nolan Bushnell, later became a multimillionaire with the coin-op Pong, which launched the videogame craze. Why it failed: People didn't "get" the idea of blowing up spaceships and needed something simple, like Pong, to get them into the computer game concept. What would have worked? Beats me. Paid celebrities using the product, maybe? A tie-in to Star Trek?
The world's first massively parallel computer (1985). The "Connection Machine" concept postulated that a wealth of small processors could work together, not just to solve complex problems, but to emulate the "massively parallel" structure of the human brain. While some machines were constructed, the product line never caught on. Why it failed: The notion of emulating the human brain on a computer (generalized artificial intelligence) is junk science, so there was no way to program the thing effectively. To make it successful, they needed a programming environment that made sense to mere mortals.
Now for a trivia question. All three of the above products made cameo appearances in famous science fiction films. Can you identify the name of these films and the scenes in which they appear?
- Hint #1: IBM +1
- Hint #2: "It's people!"
- Hint #3: DNAsaur