February 8, 2021 • 45 mins
We've got another roundup of products and companies in the tech world that made some pretty big mistakes. That's not always bad - you can learn a lot from failure. Just ask Google!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a love of all things tech, and one of
my favorite topics in tech centers on projects that just
(00:26):
didn't work out. Not to be clear, this isn't all
about schadenfreude, which, for those who don't know, is a
German word that essentially means the feeling of pleasure you
get when you see someone else fail. Now there's a
little bit of that going on sometimes, but really, to me,
the interesting thing about failure is that you can learn
from it. By learning what doesn't work, you can refine
(00:49):
your approach and find ways that do work. Or sometimes
you figure out the thing you wanted to do isn't
necessarily possible. So in this episode, I'm going to look
at some projects, gadgets and campaigns that didn't succeed for
various reasons. Because for every iPhone success story, there's a
massive flop that hardly anyone remembers today. Long time listeners
(01:13):
know that once upon a time, I very confidently predicted
that Apple's iPad would be a failure. Obviously I was
as wrong as wrong can be about that. So there's
our first fail. It was mine. But at the time
I felt pretty sure of myself. After all, no one
had really made a successful consumer tablet computer at that point.
(01:38):
There were tablets on the market, or slate computers they
were sometimes called, but for the most part, the only
place you found them were in certain occupations or specific
use cases. No one had really hit it big with
a general use tablet computer. Q Michael Arrington, co founder
(01:59):
of tech Crunch, he wanted to create a useful tablet
or slate computer. He also wanted it to be affordable.
He really wanted to aim for a two dollar price tag,
which was pretty darn ambitious really. He and his team
got started in two thousand and eight on the concept,
and they were able to build a couple of prototypes,
(02:20):
and it turned out that making a tablet was really hard,
particularly getting the capacity of touchscreen just right so that
there was a good input method for the user. I mean,
obviously there's no keyboard or mouse. You have to have
a way to interact with the device. And after those
first couple of prototypes, Errington's team partnered unofficially it turns
(02:40):
out with a company called Fusion Garage, and that really
ended up being a bad choice. Now. At first, everything
was going okay, but then on November two thousand nine,
Errington got a message from the CEO of Fusion Garage,
and the message said that Fusion Garages shareholders felt that
(03:00):
Errington's team was superfluous and that their company, Fusion Garage,
should just move forward with this device on their own,
cutting Errington out entirely to make matters worse. This was
just days before Errington was going to show off the
working prototype at a live event. He had already talked
about the crunch Pad publicly and people were eager to
(03:23):
see what it was that his team had been working on.
It was supposed to be the launch of the product,
and the plan was to even take pre orders for
up to a thousand units, and boom, Errington gets this message. Now,
as you can imagine, that didn't go down well. Fusion
Garage announced that the tablet, now renamed Juju that's j
(03:44):
o O j o O, would go on pre sale
in December for five hundred dollars, more than twice the
price Errington wanted to aim for when he had started
working on the project. A couple of years earlier, Errington
sued Fusion Garage, but because there was no formal contract
about their agreement, a judge dismissed a lot of the
(04:06):
arguments that Errington's legal team made against Fusion Garage. But
it seemed like the whole thing would end up being
a moot point anyway, because during the court case, it
was revealed that the Juju device had only received ninety
that's nine zero pre orders before it finally began shipping
in March of The tablet was absolutely hamstrung by the
(04:31):
Apple iPad, which we first learned about in January and
which began shipping in April of that year. So a
lot of people were saying, well, if I want a tablet,
I'm just gonna wait for the iPad. While I don't
know how those court cases ultimately played out, I couldn't
find that when I was researching this episode, I can
tell you that the Juju Tablet didn't last very long.
(04:54):
Fusion Garage decided to stop supporting it before ten was
even over, So we're only talking about half a year
from the point it launched to the point that Fusion
Garage stopped supporting it, and Fusion Garage itself didn't last
a whole lot longer. That company went into liquidation in
twenty twelve. I think there's some real lessons to learn
(05:14):
from that story. One is that making a particular form
factor consumer friendly is really hard, and while Apple made
it work, countless other companies have made slates or tablets
that saw very little traction in the general tech consumer
market before and since the introduction of the iPad. Another
is that you always get those business agreements in writing always. Now,
(05:40):
let's take a leap, In fact, let's call it a
Magic Leap, a decade ahead. The company Magic Leap started
in two though it kept a pretty low profile for
the first few years. We would later learn that the
primary focus of the company was the development of an
augmented reality headset. Now, just in case you're not familiar
(06:01):
with that, term, augmented reality or a R refers to
using digital information to enhance a real environment in some way.
Typically we experience this digital enhancement through a screen or
a headset, though you could do it with audio like
with headphones, or even other methods of sensory input. But
(06:23):
the technology interprets what we are focusing on within our
environment and then enhances our experience in some way. So
a super simple implementation are the various filters on phone
apps that let you, you know, take pictures of yourself
with bunny ears, or you can turn into a dragon
or whatever. Magic Leap was working on a headset that
(06:45):
could overlay digital information on your view of the world,
and the applications for this technology are practically limitless, from
entertainment to productivity. And obviously there are other examples of
this technology on the market, such as micros offs hollow lens,
but Magic Leap had a sense of mystery and well
magic about it, and it attracted a lot of attention
(07:08):
and a lot of investors, who poured around two billion
dollars in the company years before it had a product
to even show off. In two thousand eighteen, Magic Leap
introduced its first headset, fittingly named the Magic Leap. One
had a steep price tag two thousand, three hundred dollars
per headset. The CEO's original hope was that the company
(07:29):
would sell one million headsets in its first year, but
in the official company projections that got reduced down by
an order of magnitude, down to one thousand units, but
reality was far more harsh. After the first six months,
the company had only sold around six thousand units, according
to Alex Heath of The Information. The Information Is a website.
(07:54):
By the way, Addie Robertson of The Verge got to
try out the Magic Leap and fell that the experience
was interesting but fell far short of expectations. Given all
the hype around the Magic Leap one for years, the
tech world had been teased with hints at what was
to come and lots of conceptual videos that really made
(08:15):
it seem phenomenal, and the anticipation was really high. But
by the time it finally came out, after the hollow
lens had already been demonstrated, the Magic Leap one just
didn't quite live up to its reputation. Magic Leap chose
to pivot towards catering to enterprise clients, meaning instead of
offering a consumer electronics product, the company was aiming at
(08:36):
something for other businesses to purchase, and the rocky launch
had some pretty big consequences, including massive layoffs like a
thousand people laid off at the company and the CEO
and founder of the company stepping down. Today, Magic Leap
is planning the release of their second headset. This one
(08:57):
is lighter, and the company says it will have a
larger few old of view, but there aren't many details
beyond some general statements about the physical specs of the
the high tech specs. It may be that the experience
of using them will match more closely with the perception
of what it was going to be like, but we'll
have to see. I personally get the feeling that a
(09:18):
R is kind of going through what VR went through
back in the nineteen nineties, which is when the actual
experience of VR ended up being a pale imitation of
what everyone thought it would be and then interest dropped
like like a stone as a result. But I hope
that they're successful. I would actually love to see more
innovation in the a R space. So while I have reservations,
(09:43):
my hope is that they make it work. Meanwhile, Magically
has some other challenges. It seems like a lot of
the planned partnerships that the company had with other big
companies have sort of stalled out, and in Florida, the
company has asked for an extension on a promise it
made to the Broward County Commission. Magic Leap had promised
to create seven jobs with an average salary of one
(10:07):
thousand dollars per year, and in return they got some
pretty sweet incentives to set up shop in Florida. But
due to the fallout of the Magic Leap one release
not going as planned and the subsequent layoffs and the
pandemic on top of everything else, the company needs more
time to make good on that promise. I'll keep my
eye on Magic Leap and I'll continue to hope that
(10:29):
the team is able to rebound. Let us now turn
our sights to Microsoft. Now, Microsoft has tons of candidates
I could choose from when it comes to failures. Years ago,
I did an episode on Microsoft Bob, arguably one of
the biggest flops in tech history. Also, it's the flop
that introduced the world to comic Sands. I could also
(10:51):
talk about Windows Vista or Windows eight, but instead let's
chat about the Zoom. The Zoon wasly a suite of
technologies centered around a portable media player called the Zoon.
It was kind of Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPod. Microsoft
launched the Zoo on November two thousand six. The original
(11:15):
Zoom device had thirty gigabytes of storage space built in
FM radio and a three inch screen, but two thousand
six was pretty late to get into the portable media
player game. Apple had introduced the first iPod in two
thousand one and had worked to create an ecosystem with iTunes.
An ecosystem I should add that worked okay if you
(11:36):
were on a Mac, but I maintained it was a
nightmare to use it on PC, at least in my experience.
Microsoft was trying to make up for some lost time
and lost ground, and it didn't go so well. When
it came to market share, the Zoon was never able
to get as high as ten percent of the whole market.
It was always in the single digits. The company stuck
(11:58):
with the product line for a file, including the introduction
of a touch screen Zoom in two thousand nine that
was the Zoom hd UH. Some first generation Zoom thirties failed.
They froze entirely. Microsoft later said that the reason for
the Zoom's freezing was because of a third party internal
clock that failed to account for a leap year the
(12:21):
host pesky clocks. One capability the Zoom players had that
got a lot of snark was that you could wirelessly
share a song from your library with a friend who
also happened to have a Zoom. Also, you could actually
send that song to any nearby Zoom device. If your
Zoom detected another Zoom within thirty feet, you could send
(12:43):
a song you know, or other piece of media like
a podcast their way, and the recipient would get a
little notification and they could choose to either accept or
deny that offer, and then if they accepted it, they
would have three days to you know, listen to the
media before it disappeared from their vice, and they also
had a limit of listening to it three times. And
(13:04):
hearing that you might think, well, was there to be
snarky about. Well, the snark wasn't about the capability, It
was the name that Microsoft gave to it. Microsoft called
it squirting. The lackluster sales of the Zoom ultimately led
to Microsoft deciding to stop development and production on the
Zoo in the company continued to support the Zoom software service,
(13:28):
which allowed you know, existing Zoom users to listen to
songs they had purchased through Microsoft and Stuff, or they
could listen to a catalog of streaming music for a
monthly fee, but all of that got shut down in
two thousand fifteen and while Microsoft would you know, move
users over from their service to a new service, the
Groove Music Service, not all the copyright licenses made that shift.
(13:54):
The the library of the zooon uh universe was different
from the Groove universe, so that wasn't great. It meant
a lot of Zoom users found themselves unable to listen
to music that they had previously purchased on the Zoom platform.
And it was also a reminder that the media model
we have these days where we don't really have copies
(14:15):
of media. Typically we normally access the media through streaming services.
That means that there can come a time where we
can't access that stuff anymore because of licensing issues that
are on the back end. So bye bye Zooon. We
hardly squirted d. On a related note, there was the Panto,
(14:36):
famous for its association with musician Neil Young. The bitch
for Panto is pretty simple. Most digital music we encounter
these days has been compressed, and in that compression process
you can lose fidelity, the quality of the audio, the
dynamic range of the music. That's the range between the
softest and the loudest bits of a piece that gets reduced.
(15:00):
So it makes the music more flat right, The softer
parts get boosted a little bit in volume, the loudest
parts get reduced in volume, and you have less variation.
You might also lose some harmonics because compression algorithms typically
determine if a sound is within the range of human hearing,
and if it figures that the sound is outside the
(15:21):
range of human hearing, it drops that information, thinking that's
not really important, but that can help shape the sound
a little bit, so that's also an issue. The Panto
would let you listen to uncompressed digital music. Ideally, you
would experience music as if you had been in the
recording studio when the artists were laying down the tracks
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for the first time, or maybe more realistically, you would
be in the studio after audio engineers had worked on
a track to sweeten it up a little bit before
recording it to a master. Neil Young first started talking
about Panto back in two thousand twelve. A Kickstarter campaign
helped fund the project initially, though the company called Ponto
Music reportedly had industry backing as well. Despite all this,
(16:07):
the project dragged on and it bled money, with the
company having to launch a crowdfunder campaign later to raise
even more money, so it had two different crowdfunding campaigns
in the company released the Panto music player device. The
sales must have been pretty lackluster. The Travel Insider blog
(16:27):
estimates that perhaps around fifteen thousand Pantos were sold as
part of the crowdfunding campaign, sort of pre sales. It
was an expensive piece of technology. It started at four
hundred dollars and ultimately I think Ponto failed because when
it comes to considerations people give for portable music, the
convenience factor typically rates much higher than fidelity. Plus, we
(16:48):
were starting to shift from downloads to streams around this
time too, And besides, there's a diminishing returns issue when
it comes to fidelity. Yes, you can from a nickel
level see an improvement in audio, like you can look
at the different meters and say, okay, we detect more
precisely that this recording is more uh accurate a representation
(17:13):
of the original sound than this other recording. You can
do that from a technical perspective, but a lot of
us have trouble telling the difference between a good music
playback session and an excellent music playback session. It's very
easy to tell bad from good. But once you get
up to good things, get a bit more subjective. The
(17:35):
Pano players stuck around for two whole years before it
faded away after various partners had already gone bankrupt. There
was talk of Pano leading to another service, you know,
kind of evolving into something else, but so far nothing
has come of that. Now when we come back, we're
gonna get all googly up in here, But first let's
take a break. Well, I've already spoiled it. But one
(18:05):
company that has had a very long history of abandoned
projects is Google, and that shouldn't be a surprise because
for more than a decade the company encouraged its employees
to experiment and think outside the box. Until about the
general policy at Google was that Googlers could spend twenty
of their time working on their own projects that could
(18:28):
potentially benefit Google down the line, but they weren't part
of the employee's normal work. So that could mean that
Monday through Thursday you work on your official projects, and
then on Fridays you just kind of experiment and build
stuff that might or might not ever see the light
of day. This was Google's way of encouraging innovation within
(18:48):
the company, and a lot of elements of Google products
emerged because of this policy, but we also saw stuff
that would get a launch or get incorporated into something
else and over time and Google would just step back
from it. Sometimes I think the problem was that Google
didn't really know how to launch and promote some of
these products. But in other cases it really was more
(19:10):
that the products just didn't appeal to non Google engineer types,
or that you were looking at something that was questionably useful,
or it just wasn't very user friendly in general. Anyway,
there's a bunch of Google products we could talk about
that didn't go very far, and a few that never
emerged beyond an announcement. Oh and before I forget, you
(19:32):
might wonder why Google abandoned that you know, employees get
time to pursue their own projects policy. Sometimes around it's
not because the company changed course on innovation, but because
of managers. See, managers at Google are accountable for the
productivity of the teams they manage, and that time really
(19:52):
eats into the number of hours teams can dedicate to
official Google projects, and that hits the managers when it
comes to review time. So there was a shift within
the company to eliminate the loosey goosey time component to
boost productivity and go with a more top down approach
to innovation. Anyway, let's talk about some Google products, some
(20:13):
which may have been spawned from that time policy that
ultimately flopped. And this is just a sampling. I could
do multiple episodes about all the different products from Google
that ultimately got the AX. So consider this more of
a sampler platter, arranged in no particular order. And we'll
start with a Google product that lasted all of one
(20:35):
whole day. I'm talking about Google X. Now, this is
not the moonshot Google X. That's a division inside Google
that focuses on bleeding edge R and D. It's kind
of Google's version of Lockheed's skunk Works. No. No, the
Google X i'm talking about was a different approach to
Google Search, and it was only available on March six,
(20:58):
two thousand five. Back in two thousand and five, the
basic Google search bar allows you to indicate what sort
of results you wanted to look for before you hit
search or I'm feeling lucky. The I'm feeling lucky button
would just take you to whatever the top search result
was for your query. You could search the web for
pages related to your query. You could search images, you
(21:21):
could search for news articles and so on. That stuff
still exists, by the way, but now it's after the jump,
after you've done that initial search. But in the old
days you could do it before you actually hit the
search button. Anyway, Google X was a new layout for search,
with icons replacing the text above the search bar. So
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there was a portrait in a frame icon that represented
image search, there was a newspaper icon that represented news,
and so on. It looked a lot like Apple's Mac
os ten or os x doc like a lot a
lot like it. Chakai O Haasama, the software engineer presumably
(22:04):
behind the redesign, acknowledge the connection to Mac os ten.
But here's the thing. There are certain companies that have
a reputation for really jealously guarding their I p. Apple
is one of those companies. In fact, the company has
been known to send legal teams after other companies that
looked like they were kind of copying Apple style. This,
(22:27):
by the way, is pretty rich if you know the
history of Apple's graphic user interface and how Steve Jobs
himself was famous for stealing other ideas and making them
Apple's own approach. Anyway, while neither Apple nor Google said
anything about it, the OS ten like layout of Google
Search was gone by March two five. Next is Google Lively,
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which I honestly don't remember being a thing. Now. It's
possible I heard about it at the time, but Google
launched this back in two thousand and eight. That is
the same year we paunched tech Stuff, So it's also
entirely possible that it just completely escaped my attention. It
wasn't around for very long, so it's not like I
had a lot of opportunities to get familiar with it.
(23:10):
So what the heck was Google Lively? We'll simply put
Google Lively was a way of creating online three D
spaces that kind of served as a sort of chat room.
You can think of something like Second Life but for Google,
or something that's kind of like an M M O RPG,
just without the overt game elements. It all fit inside
(23:34):
the web browser experience, so you didn't have to download
a program or anything. When it launched. It worked only
with PCs running Windows, specifically either Windows XP or Windows
Vista anyone remember those, and it was also compatible with
Internet Explorer or Firefox. I don't think It was even
compatible with Google Chrome, though to be fair, Chrome did
(23:56):
not launch until September two eight, so the same year
that Ly came out. The company planned future versions that
we're supposed to work on Mac and Linux computers as well.
Rooms within Google Lively had their own u r l s,
so you could link them together within Google Lively, and
moving from one virtual room to another was essentially the
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same thing as clicking on a link and going to
a new web page. Google Lively could be embedded into
other websites, so a web administrator for a big brand
could incorporate Google Lively into the brand's own web presence
and allow visitors to wander around a virtual space. You
could have some limited interactions with virtual objects and with
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other visitors to the three D room, you could chat.
Your messages would appear in a little word balloons above
your avatar's head. You could also open up a separate
chat window if you preferred, which made it a lot
easier to follow a conversation, and several actions were also
included as animations for your avatar, so rather than just
typing in something like hugs, you could have your avatar hug.
(24:59):
Another one Google Lively was one of those projects that
grew out of the twenty percent employee time policy. But
one thing it didn't have was a way to generate revenue.
There was no plan on how to use Google Lively
to make money, and so while it was kind of interesting,
it also didn't serve much of a business purpose, and
a lot of tech journals of the time pretty much
(25:22):
dismissed Google Lively, calling it more lame than Second Life.
That's their words, not mine. At the time, the world
was also sliding into a recession, which was affecting the
ad revenue business kind of like what we saw in
and since AD revenue is the way that Google makes
the vast majority of its money, leaders within the company
(25:44):
decided that Google Lively was a distraction and that really
all hands were needed on deck to deal with the
lagging AD dollars. It launched in July two and Google
killed it at the end of that year, so it
wasn't around for very long. Moving up to two thousand
and nine, we get to Google Wave, which was a
real time online collaborative editing tool. You had create a
(26:07):
document called a wave, then you could invite other people
to join it, and then together you could all make
changes all at the same time, and you could see
people making changes to stuff in real time, and you
could chat or leave comments about it. Now. At the
time it came out, I was preparing to launch a
tech Stuff video series with my original co host, Chris Palette.
(26:28):
We used Google Wave to help plan out our episodes.
We would build our show in Google Wave and we
had tech news segments. We also had some goofy stuff
in there. We had a tweet of the week segment. Gosh,
those were fun days. Anyway. Google Wave lasted only slightly
longer than our video series did. While some features would
(26:49):
find their way into other Google products, Google Wave itself
was washed out by when Google said it would no
longer support development for the platform, and Google a Fish
deleted everything that was on Google Wave in April of
tw Some of the features from Google Wave would find
their way into another failed Google product called Google Buzz,
(27:12):
which launched in two just a couple of months after
the company said it wasn't going to support Wave anymore.
Google Buzz was kind of a bridge between Google Wave
and Google Plus, and here's a news flash, none of
those products are around anymore. Google Buzz was all about
adding social features to Gmail, and Buzz was itself incorporated
(27:33):
directly into Gmail. That in itself would become a pretty
big problem for the company. But here's how Google described
it in their initial blog post announcing the service. Back
in quote, Google, Buzz is a new way to start
conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right
into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an
(27:54):
entirely new set of friends from scratch. It just works.
If you think about it, There's always been a big
social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings the network to the
service by automatically setting you up to follow the people
you email and chat with the most. We focused on
building an easy to use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos,
(28:15):
and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately,
so you don't have to use different tools to share
with different audiences. Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing
Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that
matters most as it happens in real time. End quote.
Buzz would let users or force them, depending upon your
(28:38):
point of view, aggregate feeds from their various social circles
into one place, so for example, you could see tweets
posted by your friends pop up and Google Buzz, assuming
you had those friends listed as contacts and Gmail. And
it wasn't just Twitter. You could aggregate stuff from other
services like Flicker because a friend, feed, Blogger, and YouTube
(29:03):
and I'm sure a couple of those names were blasts
from the past for some of you out there. You
can also post to Google Buzz directly, similar to making
a post on Facebook or Twitter. You could include pictures
or links, and friends could comment on those posts and
create a threaded conversation. Nothing groundbreaking, you know, but it
was all nested within Gmail. And then came the problems. See,
(29:26):
by incorporating Buzz into Gmail, it turned all Gmail users
into Buzz users, and that wasn't necessarily something that Gmail
folks wanted, and they weren't too terribly keen on their
contact lists becoming public or that stuff they thought they
had been posting to a small group of friends was
(29:47):
now circulating among much larger groups thanks to the fact
that Buzz would helpfully point out friends of friends that
you might know to expand your circle. In short, the
implementation was a pretty big min as far as privacy
and trust are concerned. Google was actually taken to court
and lost over the matter, and they paid out more
(30:07):
than eight million dollars As a result. Buzz got a
couple of changes to make it less intrusive, but it
just wasn't meant to be. It would be phased out
to make way for Google Plus, though the two services
did exist side by side for a short while. And
of course now Google Plus is gone too. But I
do have one last Google product I want to mention,
(30:28):
and it's not Google Plus. As I said earlier, I
could do a whole episode on all the different Google
products that came and went, with some of them having
features that found their way into other stuff. And one
of those gadgets is the Nexus Q. Now, the Nexus
QUE is special because it never actually came out as
a consumer product. It was announced Google unveiled it at
(30:50):
the company's Io conference for developers in twenty twelve. In fact,
people who were attending that conference actually got a Nexus Q,
which I guess makes it a special kind of collector's
item since Google pushed back the release date of the
consumer version until the whole thing just got canned. So
what was the Nexus Q simply? But it was a
(31:12):
media streaming device you would connect it to speakers or
to a television, and you used an app to control
the Nexus Q. You could send content to it that
then would play out either on the TV screen or
on the stereo speakers or whatever it was connected to.
The design of the gadget was very striking. It was
spherical with a flat section, so it could sit steady
(31:34):
on a table or on the floor, wouldn't just roll around.
It also had a circle of tiny led lights going
around it, kind of like an equator, but at a
forty five degree angle relative to the sphere. It weighed
about two pounds or not quite a kilogram, and it
looked pretty darn nifty. But that's sort of where the
positive remarks end. See The Nexus q was limited to
(31:58):
streaming content from Google server says like YouTube or what
was then Google Play. There was no support for any
other streaming services. The control scheme was somewhat confusing, according
to multiple reviews, and on top of everything else, it
was expensive. The projected price was two dollars, which also
didn't include stuff like speakers if you wanted to make
(32:21):
it a sound system, so this wasn't like the later
Google Home smart speakers or anything like that. It wasn't
as robust as the chrome Cast devices that would come later,
which allow you to stream all sorts of content to
a television using a connected phone or computer. It was
a limited media streaming device at a premium cost in
a world that already had stuff like Apple TV, Roku
(32:44):
and so Nose devices. Ultimately, Google chose not to release
the Nexus Queue. Instead, many of those features would go
into devices like the aforementioned chrome Cast and smart speakers.
They wouldn't be quite as striking from a stylistic standpoint
is the NEXTUS queue, but they did prove to be
more versatile. And that's our Google section for this episode.
(33:06):
Like I said, I can talk about tons more. Let's
say about Google Fiber, which I'm still waiting for here
in Atlanta. There's a Google Fiber office near our studios downtown.
I signed up years ago to connect to Google Fiber,
but never built out to my neighborhood, which actually sits
between two major points in the Google Fiber infrastructure in
(33:28):
our city. But that story would require a whole episode
on its own. And I'll just go to break so
I can be bitter for a bit. I'll be better
not bitter when we come back and I'll talk about
a few more flops, but first let's take another break.
(33:53):
In a recent Text of News episode, I talked about
an Apple TV Plus series about the not really a
tech many called we Work, and I figured we should
probably do a brief overview of we Work, because while
it isn't really a tech company, it consistently positioned itself
as if it were a tech company. And while this
(34:13):
story isn't over yet, it has had a massive fall
from grace so sky high overview. We Work as a
company that secures spaces and buildings and then leases or
subleases those spaces out to other professionals. So that can
include freelancers who just need a workspace of their own,
(34:34):
or companies that don't have their own offices yet. So
if you're launching a startup and you don't have the
cash on hand to get a space of your own,
you could rent some space from we Work. And it
came with some perks, like an internet infrastructure, so you
could just connect to the we Work offices internet. They
also had some goodies like free beer, no kidding. For
(34:57):
a while, that was one of the perks of a
wee Work in environment a breake area stocked with free beer,
oh and also wine. But the days of wine and
Bruskis were not to last. The company was leading up
to holding an i p O, or initial public offering
in two thousand nineteen. That's when a privately owned company
(35:18):
makes the transition to a publicly traded company and joins
the stock market. We works i p O was highly anticipated.
Investors had been pouring a lot of money into the
startup and it had reached a peak valuation of almost
fifty billion dollars that's billion with a B, a princely sum.
(35:39):
But then things went pear shaped. Well really, the pear
shaped stuff was kind of in the works for a while,
but it really came to a head at the i
p O when the company filed the i p O
S one registration document with the SEC. Because that document
seemed to belong to another universe. This is a document
that lay is a lot of information about a company
(36:02):
before it goes public, so stuff like the corporate structure
and succession planning. But this one didn't seem to belong
to our universe. It seemed to belong to a cartoon universe.
It included a corporate hierarchy in which you had at
the top the WE Company. Underneath that was the WE
Company m C l l C. Then under that you
(36:24):
had the WE Company Partnership, under which was the We
Work Company's ll C. So it's kind of like a
Russian nesting doll more than an organizational chart. Moreover, the
company had some massive expenses in there, like a private
jet for the CEO and co founder Adam Neuman, and
there were questions about the fact that Neiman had been
(36:45):
purchasing real estate on his own then leasing that real
estate to we Work, which would suble sit down to customers.
If you're the CEO of a company that is funded
by investors, it seems to me like it's a little
bit of a conflict of interest if you take the
money of the company to least real estate from yourself,
(37:07):
using essentially investor money to fund your pockets. But it
gets stranger the deeper you go. Another co founder of
We Work is Adam's wife, Rebecca, who is first cousins
with Gwyneth Paltrow. Now I mentioned that because I detect
a similar sort of magical thinking in Rebecca as I
see in Gwyneth, And that's not a compliment. Magical thinking
(37:30):
means you tend to believe that unrelated events have some
sort of causal link to them, you know, like if
you step on a crack, you will in fact break
your mama's back kind of thing. It's the opposite of
critical thinking. Anyway. Elements of that were in the I
p O filing as well, which is unusual to say
(37:50):
the least. The I p O prospectus gave current and
potential future investors pause. Maybe that fifty billion dollar valuation
mostly thanks to major investors SoftBank, maybe that was a
little bit off the mark, and everything then began to
crumble under criticism. The company withdrew its IBO filing and
(38:12):
postponed the offering, which to this day is still postponed.
A bit later, the board of directors demanded that Neuman
resign as CEO. But don't worry about him. He got
to leave with about one point seven billion dollars worth
of wealth because of a soft Bank buy out. Soft
Bank took over we Work as majority shareholder and controlled
(38:35):
the company. The value of the company at that point
had plunged by around nine percent. SoftBank divested we Work
of some side businesses that really had nothing to do
with office space. Like it owned a wave pool company
at one point. A report in October twenty from the
company stated that it might be profitable by the end
(38:56):
of one and that it's going to explore as for
an I p O again. More recently, there have been
rumors that We Work might go public through a special
purpose Acquisition company or sp a C. Now these are
shell companies that have their own i p O. So
it's a company that doesn't own anything, doesn't do anything,
(39:18):
but it goes public. Then it uses the money that's
raised by that i p O to buy a private company,
and the private company, now owned by a public company,
becomes a public company itself. So in other words, this
process bypasses the I p O process for that private company.
(39:38):
And you might think that sounds fishy, but this is
actually legal and accepted, though it can also be risky.
As I record this, We Work hasn't gone through with
the sp a C approach, nor has it announced formal
plans to hold its own I p O. I think
that we Work team are weighing their options, and we're
(39:59):
getting to the end of this episode. And as I said,
there are tons of companies and products that we could
talk about and not just from Google. So, like I said,
there's no shortage of those either, Like we could talk
about the Windows Phone story or the Facebook Phone or
movie Pass, but I'll save some of those for a
future installment of what I'm sure will be an endless series.
(40:22):
For this episode, I thought I would end with a
notable flop that brings another F word into the mix.
But not that one, not the dirty one. I'm talking
about the Samsung Galaxy Notes seven, which brings the word
fire to our a literate mix of failures, flops, and
falls from grace. On August, tech reviewers received the first
(40:46):
round of the Galaxy Note seven smartphone from Samsung, and
the initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The phone had a
really nice design, apparently felt great to use, had an
amaze in display, and the early consensus was that the
phone was just really well designed and potentially the best
(41:06):
smartphone of the year. And then they started to explode,
and yeah, that's what some of them did. Less than
a month after those review models went out, there were
reports of thirty five exploding Galaxy Notes sevens. The company
rushed to recall the Notes sevens that were still on
the market and tried to suss out where the problem was.
(41:29):
The company's engineers in Korea tried to replicate the issues,
but they couldn't get any of them to explode, and
the company was eager to fix these problems and get
the handsets back on the market after this, you know,
little hiccup, perhaps limiting the damage of that initial crisis.
After all, the phone received such great critical praise when
it was reviewed, it could still be a big seller
(41:51):
if the company could just make sure that none of
the other ones would blow up. Samsung stated that the
problem was likely due to the batteries that the company
had installed in these handsets, and those batteries came from
one of the company's suppliers. In fact, the company's supplier
being itself Samsung SDI or you know, a subsidiary company
of Samsung, and so they decided they would go with
(42:14):
a different supplier. They chose a Chinese company to produce
the batteries, and thus they began to install them into
the handsets and get those handsets back out on the market. Unfortunately,
the reports of exploding phones didn't stop with these new batteries,
indicating that either two different suppliers had the same faulty
(42:35):
batteries or there was some other issue at play. In
the meantime, Samsung recalled the phones again, and airlines began
to issue official statements banning passengers from carrying the Galaxy
Notes seven on board a plane. That's not a good look,
and there was a real danger of this crisis spreading
to other devices that might be perfectly safe, but without
(42:58):
knowing for sure the would be too high. Samsung kept
trying to get to the bottom of the issue. Ultimately,
after two recalls, the company halted production of the Note
seven and then scrapped the phone model entirely, a really
costly decision, but probably not as expensive as dealing with
numerous lawsuits should future phones continue the explosive trend. Three
(43:22):
months after discontinuing the Notes seven, Samsung issued a release
explaining the company's findings in an investigation as to what
caused these fires, and Samsung reps said that the first
battery had a flaw in the design. At the upper
right corner. The battery had a flaw where the negative
and positive terminals of the battery can make contact with
(43:43):
one another, which would cause a short circuit. Instead of
the electricity flowing through the circuit try of the phone,
it was going straight from one terminal to the other
terminal in the battery. That would make the batteries start
to heat up very very quickly, to the point where
it would catch fire and then explode. As for the
second battery, Samsung said there was a welding defect in
(44:04):
the production of some of those batteries, which led to
another short circuit issue and subsequent pyrotechnics. Apparently, the Chinese
company was really rushing these batteries into production in order
to meet these sudden demand and some corners might have
been cut in the process. So, in other words, according
to Samsung, the reason the Notes seven exploded was due
(44:25):
to two separate problems with two different batteries. Now I'll
likely do several more episodes about flops and failures, which, again,
these are not always tragedies. Sometimes we learn valuable lessons
from them. And on Wednesday's episode, we're going to follow
the career of a particular entrepreneur who has been associated
(44:46):
with some very high profile, very flashy failures. Hell's that
for a tease, And if any of you out there
have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes
of Tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a person ality
in tech, a specific technology. Maybe it's a trend in technology.
Any of those things let me know. Reach out to
(45:07):
me on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff H s
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech
Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
from My Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a love of all things tech, and one of
my favorite topics in tech centers on projects that just
(00:26):
didn't work out. Not to be clear, this isn't all
about schadenfreude, which, for those who don't know, is a
German word that essentially means the feeling of pleasure you
get when you see someone else fail. Now there's a
little bit of that going on sometimes, but really, to me,
the interesting thing about failure is that you can learn
from it. By learning what doesn't work, you can refine
(00:49):
your approach and find ways that do work. Or sometimes
you figure out the thing you wanted to do isn't
necessarily possible. So in this episode, I'm going to look
at some projects, gadgets and campaigns that didn't succeed for
various reasons. Because for every iPhone success story, there's a
massive flop that hardly anyone remembers today. Long time listeners
(01:13):
know that once upon a time, I very confidently predicted
that Apple's iPad would be a failure. Obviously I was
as wrong as wrong can be about that. So there's
our first fail. It was mine. But at the time
I felt pretty sure of myself. After all, no one
had really made a successful consumer tablet computer at that point.
(01:38):
There were tablets on the market, or slate computers they
were sometimes called, but for the most part, the only
place you found them were in certain occupations or specific
use cases. No one had really hit it big with
a general use tablet computer. Q Michael Arrington, co founder
(01:59):
of tech Crunch, he wanted to create a useful tablet
or slate computer. He also wanted it to be affordable.
He really wanted to aim for a two dollar price tag,
which was pretty darn ambitious really. He and his team
got started in two thousand and eight on the concept,
and they were able to build a couple of prototypes,
(02:20):
and it turned out that making a tablet was really hard,
particularly getting the capacity of touchscreen just right so that
there was a good input method for the user. I mean,
obviously there's no keyboard or mouse. You have to have
a way to interact with the device. And after those
first couple of prototypes, Errington's team partnered unofficially it turns
(02:40):
out with a company called Fusion Garage, and that really
ended up being a bad choice. Now. At first, everything
was going okay, but then on November two thousand nine,
Errington got a message from the CEO of Fusion Garage,
and the message said that Fusion Garages shareholders felt that
(03:00):
Errington's team was superfluous and that their company, Fusion Garage,
should just move forward with this device on their own,
cutting Errington out entirely to make matters worse. This was
just days before Errington was going to show off the
working prototype at a live event. He had already talked
about the crunch Pad publicly and people were eager to
(03:23):
see what it was that his team had been working on.
It was supposed to be the launch of the product,
and the plan was to even take pre orders for
up to a thousand units, and boom, Errington gets this message. Now,
as you can imagine, that didn't go down well. Fusion
Garage announced that the tablet, now renamed Juju that's j
(03:44):
o O j o O, would go on pre sale
in December for five hundred dollars, more than twice the
price Errington wanted to aim for when he had started
working on the project. A couple of years earlier, Errington
sued Fusion Garage, but because there was no formal contract
about their agreement, a judge dismissed a lot of the
(04:06):
arguments that Errington's legal team made against Fusion Garage. But
it seemed like the whole thing would end up being
a moot point anyway, because during the court case, it
was revealed that the Juju device had only received ninety
that's nine zero pre orders before it finally began shipping
in March of The tablet was absolutely hamstrung by the
(04:31):
Apple iPad, which we first learned about in January and
which began shipping in April of that year. So a
lot of people were saying, well, if I want a tablet,
I'm just gonna wait for the iPad. While I don't
know how those court cases ultimately played out, I couldn't
find that when I was researching this episode, I can
tell you that the Juju Tablet didn't last very long.
(04:54):
Fusion Garage decided to stop supporting it before ten was
even over, So we're only talking about half a year
from the point it launched to the point that Fusion
Garage stopped supporting it, and Fusion Garage itself didn't last
a whole lot longer. That company went into liquidation in
twenty twelve. I think there's some real lessons to learn
(05:14):
from that story. One is that making a particular form
factor consumer friendly is really hard, and while Apple made
it work, countless other companies have made slates or tablets
that saw very little traction in the general tech consumer
market before and since the introduction of the iPad. Another
is that you always get those business agreements in writing always. Now,
(05:40):
let's take a leap, In fact, let's call it a
Magic Leap, a decade ahead. The company Magic Leap started
in two though it kept a pretty low profile for
the first few years. We would later learn that the
primary focus of the company was the development of an
augmented reality headset. Now, just in case you're not familiar
(06:01):
with that, term, augmented reality or a R refers to
using digital information to enhance a real environment in some way.
Typically we experience this digital enhancement through a screen or
a headset, though you could do it with audio like
with headphones, or even other methods of sensory input. But
(06:23):
the technology interprets what we are focusing on within our
environment and then enhances our experience in some way. So
a super simple implementation are the various filters on phone
apps that let you, you know, take pictures of yourself
with bunny ears, or you can turn into a dragon
or whatever. Magic Leap was working on a headset that
(06:45):
could overlay digital information on your view of the world,
and the applications for this technology are practically limitless, from
entertainment to productivity. And obviously there are other examples of
this technology on the market, such as micros offs hollow lens,
but Magic Leap had a sense of mystery and well
magic about it, and it attracted a lot of attention
(07:08):
and a lot of investors, who poured around two billion
dollars in the company years before it had a product
to even show off. In two thousand eighteen, Magic Leap
introduced its first headset, fittingly named the Magic Leap. One
had a steep price tag two thousand, three hundred dollars
per headset. The CEO's original hope was that the company
(07:29):
would sell one million headsets in its first year, but
in the official company projections that got reduced down by
an order of magnitude, down to one thousand units, but
reality was far more harsh. After the first six months,
the company had only sold around six thousand units, according
to Alex Heath of The Information. The Information Is a website.
(07:54):
By the way, Addie Robertson of The Verge got to
try out the Magic Leap and fell that the experience
was interesting but fell far short of expectations. Given all
the hype around the Magic Leap one for years, the
tech world had been teased with hints at what was
to come and lots of conceptual videos that really made
(08:15):
it seem phenomenal, and the anticipation was really high. But
by the time it finally came out, after the hollow
lens had already been demonstrated, the Magic Leap one just
didn't quite live up to its reputation. Magic Leap chose
to pivot towards catering to enterprise clients, meaning instead of
offering a consumer electronics product, the company was aiming at
(08:36):
something for other businesses to purchase, and the rocky launch
had some pretty big consequences, including massive layoffs like a
thousand people laid off at the company and the CEO
and founder of the company stepping down. Today, Magic Leap
is planning the release of their second headset. This one
(08:57):
is lighter, and the company says it will have a
larger few old of view, but there aren't many details
beyond some general statements about the physical specs of the
the high tech specs. It may be that the experience
of using them will match more closely with the perception
of what it was going to be like, but we'll
have to see. I personally get the feeling that a
(09:18):
R is kind of going through what VR went through
back in the nineteen nineties, which is when the actual
experience of VR ended up being a pale imitation of
what everyone thought it would be and then interest dropped
like like a stone as a result. But I hope
that they're successful. I would actually love to see more
innovation in the a R space. So while I have reservations,
(09:43):
my hope is that they make it work. Meanwhile, Magically
has some other challenges. It seems like a lot of
the planned partnerships that the company had with other big
companies have sort of stalled out, and in Florida, the
company has asked for an extension on a promise it
made to the Broward County Commission. Magic Leap had promised
to create seven jobs with an average salary of one
(10:07):
thousand dollars per year, and in return they got some
pretty sweet incentives to set up shop in Florida. But
due to the fallout of the Magic Leap one release
not going as planned and the subsequent layoffs and the
pandemic on top of everything else, the company needs more
time to make good on that promise. I'll keep my
eye on Magic Leap and I'll continue to hope that
(10:29):
the team is able to rebound. Let us now turn
our sights to Microsoft. Now, Microsoft has tons of candidates
I could choose from when it comes to failures. Years ago,
I did an episode on Microsoft Bob, arguably one of
the biggest flops in tech history. Also, it's the flop
that introduced the world to comic Sands. I could also
(10:51):
talk about Windows Vista or Windows eight, but instead let's
chat about the Zoom. The Zoon wasly a suite of
technologies centered around a portable media player called the Zoon.
It was kind of Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPod. Microsoft
launched the Zoo on November two thousand six. The original
(11:15):
Zoom device had thirty gigabytes of storage space built in
FM radio and a three inch screen, but two thousand
six was pretty late to get into the portable media
player game. Apple had introduced the first iPod in two
thousand one and had worked to create an ecosystem with iTunes.
An ecosystem I should add that worked okay if you
(11:36):
were on a Mac, but I maintained it was a
nightmare to use it on PC, at least in my experience.
Microsoft was trying to make up for some lost time
and lost ground, and it didn't go so well. When
it came to market share, the Zoon was never able
to get as high as ten percent of the whole market.
It was always in the single digits. The company stuck
(11:58):
with the product line for a file, including the introduction
of a touch screen Zoom in two thousand nine that
was the Zoom hd UH. Some first generation Zoom thirties failed.
They froze entirely. Microsoft later said that the reason for
the Zoom's freezing was because of a third party internal
clock that failed to account for a leap year the
(12:21):
host pesky clocks. One capability the Zoom players had that
got a lot of snark was that you could wirelessly
share a song from your library with a friend who
also happened to have a Zoom. Also, you could actually
send that song to any nearby Zoom device. If your
Zoom detected another Zoom within thirty feet, you could send
(12:43):
a song you know, or other piece of media like
a podcast their way, and the recipient would get a
little notification and they could choose to either accept or
deny that offer, and then if they accepted it, they
would have three days to you know, listen to the
media before it disappeared from their vice, and they also
had a limit of listening to it three times. And
(13:04):
hearing that you might think, well, was there to be
snarky about. Well, the snark wasn't about the capability, It
was the name that Microsoft gave to it. Microsoft called
it squirting. The lackluster sales of the Zoom ultimately led
to Microsoft deciding to stop development and production on the
Zoo in the company continued to support the Zoom software service,
(13:28):
which allowed you know, existing Zoom users to listen to
songs they had purchased through Microsoft and Stuff, or they
could listen to a catalog of streaming music for a
monthly fee, but all of that got shut down in
two thousand fifteen and while Microsoft would you know, move
users over from their service to a new service, the
Groove Music Service, not all the copyright licenses made that shift.
(13:54):
The the library of the zooon uh universe was different
from the Groove universe, so that wasn't great. It meant
a lot of Zoom users found themselves unable to listen
to music that they had previously purchased on the Zoom platform.
And it was also a reminder that the media model
we have these days where we don't really have copies
(14:15):
of media. Typically we normally access the media through streaming services.
That means that there can come a time where we
can't access that stuff anymore because of licensing issues that
are on the back end. So bye bye Zooon. We
hardly squirted d. On a related note, there was the Panto,
(14:36):
famous for its association with musician Neil Young. The bitch
for Panto is pretty simple. Most digital music we encounter
these days has been compressed, and in that compression process
you can lose fidelity, the quality of the audio, the
dynamic range of the music. That's the range between the
softest and the loudest bits of a piece that gets reduced.
(15:00):
So it makes the music more flat right, The softer
parts get boosted a little bit in volume, the loudest
parts get reduced in volume, and you have less variation.
You might also lose some harmonics because compression algorithms typically
determine if a sound is within the range of human hearing,
and if it figures that the sound is outside the
(15:21):
range of human hearing, it drops that information, thinking that's
not really important, but that can help shape the sound
a little bit, so that's also an issue. The Panto
would let you listen to uncompressed digital music. Ideally, you
would experience music as if you had been in the
recording studio when the artists were laying down the tracks
(15:43):
for the first time, or maybe more realistically, you would
be in the studio after audio engineers had worked on
a track to sweeten it up a little bit before
recording it to a master. Neil Young first started talking
about Panto back in two thousand twelve. A Kickstarter campaign
helped fund the project initially, though the company called Ponto
Music reportedly had industry backing as well. Despite all this,
(16:07):
the project dragged on and it bled money, with the
company having to launch a crowdfunder campaign later to raise
even more money, so it had two different crowdfunding campaigns
in the company released the Panto music player device. The
sales must have been pretty lackluster. The Travel Insider blog
(16:27):
estimates that perhaps around fifteen thousand Pantos were sold as
part of the crowdfunding campaign, sort of pre sales. It
was an expensive piece of technology. It started at four
hundred dollars and ultimately I think Ponto failed because when
it comes to considerations people give for portable music, the
convenience factor typically rates much higher than fidelity. Plus, we
(16:48):
were starting to shift from downloads to streams around this
time too, And besides, there's a diminishing returns issue when
it comes to fidelity. Yes, you can from a nickel
level see an improvement in audio, like you can look
at the different meters and say, okay, we detect more
precisely that this recording is more uh accurate a representation
(17:13):
of the original sound than this other recording. You can
do that from a technical perspective, but a lot of
us have trouble telling the difference between a good music
playback session and an excellent music playback session. It's very
easy to tell bad from good. But once you get
up to good things, get a bit more subjective. The
(17:35):
Pano players stuck around for two whole years before it
faded away after various partners had already gone bankrupt. There
was talk of Pano leading to another service, you know,
kind of evolving into something else, but so far nothing
has come of that. Now when we come back, we're
gonna get all googly up in here, But first let's
take a break. Well, I've already spoiled it. But one
(18:05):
company that has had a very long history of abandoned
projects is Google, and that shouldn't be a surprise because
for more than a decade the company encouraged its employees
to experiment and think outside the box. Until about the
general policy at Google was that Googlers could spend twenty
of their time working on their own projects that could
(18:28):
potentially benefit Google down the line, but they weren't part
of the employee's normal work. So that could mean that
Monday through Thursday you work on your official projects, and
then on Fridays you just kind of experiment and build
stuff that might or might not ever see the light
of day. This was Google's way of encouraging innovation within
(18:48):
the company, and a lot of elements of Google products
emerged because of this policy, but we also saw stuff
that would get a launch or get incorporated into something
else and over time and Google would just step back
from it. Sometimes I think the problem was that Google
didn't really know how to launch and promote some of
these products. But in other cases it really was more
(19:10):
that the products just didn't appeal to non Google engineer types,
or that you were looking at something that was questionably useful,
or it just wasn't very user friendly in general. Anyway,
there's a bunch of Google products we could talk about
that didn't go very far, and a few that never
emerged beyond an announcement. Oh and before I forget, you
(19:32):
might wonder why Google abandoned that you know, employees get
time to pursue their own projects policy. Sometimes around it's
not because the company changed course on innovation, but because
of managers. See, managers at Google are accountable for the
productivity of the teams they manage, and that time really
(19:52):
eats into the number of hours teams can dedicate to
official Google projects, and that hits the managers when it
comes to review time. So there was a shift within
the company to eliminate the loosey goosey time component to
boost productivity and go with a more top down approach
to innovation. Anyway, let's talk about some Google products, some
(20:13):
which may have been spawned from that time policy that
ultimately flopped. And this is just a sampling. I could
do multiple episodes about all the different products from Google
that ultimately got the AX. So consider this more of
a sampler platter, arranged in no particular order. And we'll
start with a Google product that lasted all of one
(20:35):
whole day. I'm talking about Google X. Now, this is
not the moonshot Google X. That's a division inside Google
that focuses on bleeding edge R and D. It's kind
of Google's version of Lockheed's skunk Works. No. No, the
Google X i'm talking about was a different approach to
Google Search, and it was only available on March six,
(20:58):
two thousand five. Back in two thousand and five, the
basic Google search bar allows you to indicate what sort
of results you wanted to look for before you hit
search or I'm feeling lucky. The I'm feeling lucky button
would just take you to whatever the top search result
was for your query. You could search the web for
pages related to your query. You could search images, you
(21:21):
could search for news articles and so on. That stuff
still exists, by the way, but now it's after the jump,
after you've done that initial search. But in the old
days you could do it before you actually hit the
search button. Anyway, Google X was a new layout for search,
with icons replacing the text above the search bar. So
(21:42):
there was a portrait in a frame icon that represented
image search, there was a newspaper icon that represented news,
and so on. It looked a lot like Apple's Mac
os ten or os x doc like a lot a
lot like it. Chakai O Haasama, the software engineer presumably
(22:04):
behind the redesign, acknowledge the connection to Mac os ten.
But here's the thing. There are certain companies that have
a reputation for really jealously guarding their I p. Apple
is one of those companies. In fact, the company has
been known to send legal teams after other companies that
looked like they were kind of copying Apple style. This,
(22:27):
by the way, is pretty rich if you know the
history of Apple's graphic user interface and how Steve Jobs
himself was famous for stealing other ideas and making them
Apple's own approach. Anyway, while neither Apple nor Google said
anything about it, the OS ten like layout of Google
Search was gone by March two five. Next is Google Lively,
(22:49):
which I honestly don't remember being a thing. Now. It's
possible I heard about it at the time, but Google
launched this back in two thousand and eight. That is
the same year we paunched tech Stuff, So it's also
entirely possible that it just completely escaped my attention. It
wasn't around for very long, so it's not like I
had a lot of opportunities to get familiar with it.
(23:10):
So what the heck was Google Lively? We'll simply put
Google Lively was a way of creating online three D
spaces that kind of served as a sort of chat room.
You can think of something like Second Life but for Google,
or something that's kind of like an M M O RPG,
just without the overt game elements. It all fit inside
(23:34):
the web browser experience, so you didn't have to download
a program or anything. When it launched. It worked only
with PCs running Windows, specifically either Windows XP or Windows
Vista anyone remember those, and it was also compatible with
Internet Explorer or Firefox. I don't think It was even
compatible with Google Chrome, though to be fair, Chrome did
(23:56):
not launch until September two eight, so the same year
that Ly came out. The company planned future versions that
we're supposed to work on Mac and Linux computers as well.
Rooms within Google Lively had their own u r l s,
so you could link them together within Google Lively, and
moving from one virtual room to another was essentially the
(24:17):
same thing as clicking on a link and going to
a new web page. Google Lively could be embedded into
other websites, so a web administrator for a big brand
could incorporate Google Lively into the brand's own web presence
and allow visitors to wander around a virtual space. You
could have some limited interactions with virtual objects and with
(24:37):
other visitors to the three D room, you could chat.
Your messages would appear in a little word balloons above
your avatar's head. You could also open up a separate
chat window if you preferred, which made it a lot
easier to follow a conversation, and several actions were also
included as animations for your avatar, so rather than just
typing in something like hugs, you could have your avatar hug.
(24:59):
Another one Google Lively was one of those projects that
grew out of the twenty percent employee time policy. But
one thing it didn't have was a way to generate revenue.
There was no plan on how to use Google Lively
to make money, and so while it was kind of interesting,
it also didn't serve much of a business purpose, and
a lot of tech journals of the time pretty much
(25:22):
dismissed Google Lively, calling it more lame than Second Life.
That's their words, not mine. At the time, the world
was also sliding into a recession, which was affecting the
ad revenue business kind of like what we saw in
and since AD revenue is the way that Google makes
the vast majority of its money, leaders within the company
(25:44):
decided that Google Lively was a distraction and that really
all hands were needed on deck to deal with the
lagging AD dollars. It launched in July two and Google
killed it at the end of that year, so it
wasn't around for very long. Moving up to two thousand
and nine, we get to Google Wave, which was a
real time online collaborative editing tool. You had create a
(26:07):
document called a wave, then you could invite other people
to join it, and then together you could all make
changes all at the same time, and you could see
people making changes to stuff in real time, and you
could chat or leave comments about it. Now. At the
time it came out, I was preparing to launch a
tech Stuff video series with my original co host, Chris Palette.
(26:28):
We used Google Wave to help plan out our episodes.
We would build our show in Google Wave and we
had tech news segments. We also had some goofy stuff
in there. We had a tweet of the week segment. Gosh,
those were fun days. Anyway. Google Wave lasted only slightly
longer than our video series did. While some features would
(26:49):
find their way into other Google products, Google Wave itself
was washed out by when Google said it would no
longer support development for the platform, and Google a Fish
deleted everything that was on Google Wave in April of
tw Some of the features from Google Wave would find
their way into another failed Google product called Google Buzz,
(27:12):
which launched in two just a couple of months after
the company said it wasn't going to support Wave anymore.
Google Buzz was kind of a bridge between Google Wave
and Google Plus, and here's a news flash, none of
those products are around anymore. Google Buzz was all about
adding social features to Gmail, and Buzz was itself incorporated
(27:33):
directly into Gmail. That in itself would become a pretty
big problem for the company. But here's how Google described
it in their initial blog post announcing the service. Back
in quote, Google, Buzz is a new way to start
conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right
into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an
(27:54):
entirely new set of friends from scratch. It just works.
If you think about it, There's always been a big
social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings the network to the
service by automatically setting you up to follow the people
you email and chat with the most. We focused on
building an easy to use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos,
(28:15):
and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately,
so you don't have to use different tools to share
with different audiences. Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing
Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that
matters most as it happens in real time. End quote.
Buzz would let users or force them, depending upon your
(28:38):
point of view, aggregate feeds from their various social circles
into one place, so for example, you could see tweets
posted by your friends pop up and Google Buzz, assuming
you had those friends listed as contacts and Gmail. And
it wasn't just Twitter. You could aggregate stuff from other
services like Flicker because a friend, feed, Blogger, and YouTube
(29:03):
and I'm sure a couple of those names were blasts
from the past for some of you out there. You
can also post to Google Buzz directly, similar to making
a post on Facebook or Twitter. You could include pictures
or links, and friends could comment on those posts and
create a threaded conversation. Nothing groundbreaking, you know, but it
was all nested within Gmail. And then came the problems. See,
(29:26):
by incorporating Buzz into Gmail, it turned all Gmail users
into Buzz users, and that wasn't necessarily something that Gmail
folks wanted, and they weren't too terribly keen on their
contact lists becoming public or that stuff they thought they
had been posting to a small group of friends was
(29:47):
now circulating among much larger groups thanks to the fact
that Buzz would helpfully point out friends of friends that
you might know to expand your circle. In short, the
implementation was a pretty big min as far as privacy
and trust are concerned. Google was actually taken to court
and lost over the matter, and they paid out more
(30:07):
than eight million dollars As a result. Buzz got a
couple of changes to make it less intrusive, but it
just wasn't meant to be. It would be phased out
to make way for Google Plus, though the two services
did exist side by side for a short while. And
of course now Google Plus is gone too. But I
do have one last Google product I want to mention,
(30:28):
and it's not Google Plus. As I said earlier, I
could do a whole episode on all the different Google
products that came and went, with some of them having
features that found their way into other stuff. And one
of those gadgets is the Nexus Q. Now, the Nexus
QUE is special because it never actually came out as
a consumer product. It was announced Google unveiled it at
(30:50):
the company's Io conference for developers in twenty twelve. In fact,
people who were attending that conference actually got a Nexus Q,
which I guess makes it a special kind of collector's
item since Google pushed back the release date of the
consumer version until the whole thing just got canned. So
what was the Nexus Q simply? But it was a
(31:12):
media streaming device you would connect it to speakers or
to a television, and you used an app to control
the Nexus Q. You could send content to it that
then would play out either on the TV screen or
on the stereo speakers or whatever it was connected to.
The design of the gadget was very striking. It was
spherical with a flat section, so it could sit steady
(31:34):
on a table or on the floor, wouldn't just roll around.
It also had a circle of tiny led lights going
around it, kind of like an equator, but at a
forty five degree angle relative to the sphere. It weighed
about two pounds or not quite a kilogram, and it
looked pretty darn nifty. But that's sort of where the
positive remarks end. See The Nexus q was limited to
(31:58):
streaming content from Google server says like YouTube or what
was then Google Play. There was no support for any
other streaming services. The control scheme was somewhat confusing, according
to multiple reviews, and on top of everything else, it
was expensive. The projected price was two dollars, which also
didn't include stuff like speakers if you wanted to make
(32:21):
it a sound system, so this wasn't like the later
Google Home smart speakers or anything like that. It wasn't
as robust as the chrome Cast devices that would come later,
which allow you to stream all sorts of content to
a television using a connected phone or computer. It was
a limited media streaming device at a premium cost in
a world that already had stuff like Apple TV, Roku
(32:44):
and so Nose devices. Ultimately, Google chose not to release
the Nexus Queue. Instead, many of those features would go
into devices like the aforementioned chrome Cast and smart speakers.
They wouldn't be quite as striking from a stylistic standpoint
is the NEXTUS queue, but they did prove to be
more versatile. And that's our Google section for this episode.
(33:06):
Like I said, I can talk about tons more. Let's
say about Google Fiber, which I'm still waiting for here
in Atlanta. There's a Google Fiber office near our studios downtown.
I signed up years ago to connect to Google Fiber,
but never built out to my neighborhood, which actually sits
between two major points in the Google Fiber infrastructure in
(33:28):
our city. But that story would require a whole episode
on its own. And I'll just go to break so
I can be bitter for a bit. I'll be better
not bitter when we come back and I'll talk about
a few more flops, but first let's take another break.
(33:53):
In a recent Text of News episode, I talked about
an Apple TV Plus series about the not really a
tech many called we Work, and I figured we should
probably do a brief overview of we Work, because while
it isn't really a tech company, it consistently positioned itself
as if it were a tech company. And while this
(34:13):
story isn't over yet, it has had a massive fall
from grace so sky high overview. We Work as a
company that secures spaces and buildings and then leases or
subleases those spaces out to other professionals. So that can
include freelancers who just need a workspace of their own,
(34:34):
or companies that don't have their own offices yet. So
if you're launching a startup and you don't have the
cash on hand to get a space of your own,
you could rent some space from we Work. And it
came with some perks, like an internet infrastructure, so you
could just connect to the we Work offices internet. They
also had some goodies like free beer, no kidding. For
(34:57):
a while, that was one of the perks of a
wee Work in environment a breake area stocked with free beer,
oh and also wine. But the days of wine and
Bruskis were not to last. The company was leading up
to holding an i p O, or initial public offering
in two thousand nineteen. That's when a privately owned company
(35:18):
makes the transition to a publicly traded company and joins
the stock market. We works i p O was highly anticipated.
Investors had been pouring a lot of money into the
startup and it had reached a peak valuation of almost
fifty billion dollars that's billion with a B, a princely sum.
(35:39):
But then things went pear shaped. Well really, the pear
shaped stuff was kind of in the works for a while,
but it really came to a head at the i
p O when the company filed the i p O
S one registration document with the SEC. Because that document
seemed to belong to another universe. This is a document
that lay is a lot of information about a company
(36:02):
before it goes public, so stuff like the corporate structure
and succession planning. But this one didn't seem to belong
to our universe. It seemed to belong to a cartoon universe.
It included a corporate hierarchy in which you had at
the top the WE Company. Underneath that was the WE
Company m C l l C. Then under that you
(36:24):
had the WE Company Partnership, under which was the We
Work Company's ll C. So it's kind of like a
Russian nesting doll more than an organizational chart. Moreover, the
company had some massive expenses in there, like a private
jet for the CEO and co founder Adam Neuman, and
there were questions about the fact that Neiman had been
(36:45):
purchasing real estate on his own then leasing that real
estate to we Work, which would suble sit down to customers.
If you're the CEO of a company that is funded
by investors, it seems to me like it's a little
bit of a conflict of interest if you take the
money of the company to least real estate from yourself,
(37:07):
using essentially investor money to fund your pockets. But it
gets stranger the deeper you go. Another co founder of
We Work is Adam's wife, Rebecca, who is first cousins
with Gwyneth Paltrow. Now I mentioned that because I detect
a similar sort of magical thinking in Rebecca as I
see in Gwyneth, And that's not a compliment. Magical thinking
(37:30):
means you tend to believe that unrelated events have some
sort of causal link to them, you know, like if
you step on a crack, you will in fact break
your mama's back kind of thing. It's the opposite of
critical thinking. Anyway. Elements of that were in the I
p O filing as well, which is unusual to say
(37:50):
the least. The I p O prospectus gave current and
potential future investors pause. Maybe that fifty billion dollar valuation
mostly thanks to major investors SoftBank, maybe that was a
little bit off the mark, and everything then began to
crumble under criticism. The company withdrew its IBO filing and
(38:12):
postponed the offering, which to this day is still postponed.
A bit later, the board of directors demanded that Neuman
resign as CEO. But don't worry about him. He got
to leave with about one point seven billion dollars worth
of wealth because of a soft Bank buy out. Soft
Bank took over we Work as majority shareholder and controlled
(38:35):
the company. The value of the company at that point
had plunged by around nine percent. SoftBank divested we Work
of some side businesses that really had nothing to do
with office space. Like it owned a wave pool company
at one point. A report in October twenty from the
company stated that it might be profitable by the end
(38:56):
of one and that it's going to explore as for
an I p O again. More recently, there have been
rumors that We Work might go public through a special
purpose Acquisition company or sp a C. Now these are
shell companies that have their own i p O. So
it's a company that doesn't own anything, doesn't do anything,
(39:18):
but it goes public. Then it uses the money that's
raised by that i p O to buy a private company,
and the private company, now owned by a public company,
becomes a public company itself. So in other words, this
process bypasses the I p O process for that private company.
(39:38):
And you might think that sounds fishy, but this is
actually legal and accepted, though it can also be risky.
As I record this, We Work hasn't gone through with
the sp a C approach, nor has it announced formal
plans to hold its own I p O. I think
that we Work team are weighing their options, and we're
(39:59):
getting to the end of this episode. And as I said,
there are tons of companies and products that we could
talk about and not just from Google. So, like I said,
there's no shortage of those either, Like we could talk
about the Windows Phone story or the Facebook Phone or
movie Pass, but I'll save some of those for a
future installment of what I'm sure will be an endless series.
(40:22):
For this episode, I thought I would end with a
notable flop that brings another F word into the mix.
But not that one, not the dirty one. I'm talking
about the Samsung Galaxy Notes seven, which brings the word
fire to our a literate mix of failures, flops, and
falls from grace. On August, tech reviewers received the first
(40:46):
round of the Galaxy Note seven smartphone from Samsung, and
the initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The phone had a
really nice design, apparently felt great to use, had an
amaze in display, and the early consensus was that the
phone was just really well designed and potentially the best
(41:06):
smartphone of the year. And then they started to explode,
and yeah, that's what some of them did. Less than
a month after those review models went out, there were
reports of thirty five exploding Galaxy Notes sevens. The company
rushed to recall the Notes sevens that were still on
the market and tried to suss out where the problem was.
(41:29):
The company's engineers in Korea tried to replicate the issues,
but they couldn't get any of them to explode, and
the company was eager to fix these problems and get
the handsets back on the market after this, you know,
little hiccup, perhaps limiting the damage of that initial crisis.
After all, the phone received such great critical praise when
it was reviewed, it could still be a big seller
(41:51):
if the company could just make sure that none of
the other ones would blow up. Samsung stated that the
problem was likely due to the batteries that the company
had installed in these handsets, and those batteries came from
one of the company's suppliers. In fact, the company's supplier
being itself Samsung SDI or you know, a subsidiary company
of Samsung, and so they decided they would go with
(42:14):
a different supplier. They chose a Chinese company to produce
the batteries, and thus they began to install them into
the handsets and get those handsets back out on the market. Unfortunately,
the reports of exploding phones didn't stop with these new batteries,
indicating that either two different suppliers had the same faulty
(42:35):
batteries or there was some other issue at play. In
the meantime, Samsung recalled the phones again, and airlines began
to issue official statements banning passengers from carrying the Galaxy
Notes seven on board a plane. That's not a good look,
and there was a real danger of this crisis spreading
to other devices that might be perfectly safe, but without
(42:58):
knowing for sure the would be too high. Samsung kept
trying to get to the bottom of the issue. Ultimately,
after two recalls, the company halted production of the Note
seven and then scrapped the phone model entirely, a really
costly decision, but probably not as expensive as dealing with
numerous lawsuits should future phones continue the explosive trend. Three
(43:22):
months after discontinuing the Notes seven, Samsung issued a release
explaining the company's findings in an investigation as to what
caused these fires, and Samsung reps said that the first
battery had a flaw in the design. At the upper
right corner. The battery had a flaw where the negative
and positive terminals of the battery can make contact with
(43:43):
one another, which would cause a short circuit. Instead of
the electricity flowing through the circuit try of the phone,
it was going straight from one terminal to the other
terminal in the battery. That would make the batteries start
to heat up very very quickly, to the point where
it would catch fire and then explode. As for the
second battery, Samsung said there was a welding defect in
(44:04):
the production of some of those batteries, which led to
another short circuit issue and subsequent pyrotechnics. Apparently, the Chinese
company was really rushing these batteries into production in order
to meet these sudden demand and some corners might have
been cut in the process. So, in other words, according
to Samsung, the reason the Notes seven exploded was due
(44:25):
to two separate problems with two different batteries. Now I'll
likely do several more episodes about flops and failures, which, again,
these are not always tragedies. Sometimes we learn valuable lessons
from them. And on Wednesday's episode, we're going to follow
the career of a particular entrepreneur who has been associated
(44:46):
with some very high profile, very flashy failures. Hell's that
for a tease, And if any of you out there
have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes
of Tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a person ality
in tech, a specific technology. Maybe it's a trend in technology.
Any of those things let me know. Reach out to
(45:07):
me on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff H s
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech
Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
from My Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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