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Museum of Failure
- appleflaxen 8y agothis would be more interesting if there were more examples with a deeper description
- iceninenines 8y agoThey need: - :CueCat - New Coke - Olestra - OS/2 WARP - Microsoft Bob - Betamax - Smell-O-Vision - Apple Newton - Honeywell Kitchen Computer
- bhauer 8y agoSome more: - Fire Phone - HDDVD - Google Wave - Google+
- notimetorelax 8y agoFrom a YouTube video, I believe, they have Apple Newton. Interesting trivia, Apple Newton supported growth of ARM: https://www.wired.com/2013/08/remembering-the-apple-newtons-prophetic-failure-and-lasting-ideals/ https://www.wired.com/2013/08/remembering-the-apple-newtons-...
- tijn 8y agoLast summer I took a detour to visit the exposition in Helsingborg. I remember seeing New Coke and the Newton. I think I saw MS Bob too, I could be mistaken though. By the way, I think the collection has potential to grow a lot bigger and I would have liked to seem more in-depth information about each failure. Maybe the hacker-news community can help with that. (Surely someone here must be knowledgeable about failure :-P)
- geuszb 8y agoI think I also saw :Cuecat at their last show in LA.
- triangleman 8y agoNew Coke was a wildly successful strategy by Roberto Goizueta to 1) Reignite the public's love of Coca-Cola (taking it off the shelves for three months), while at the same time 2) Reformulating "Classic" Coca-Cola to use HFCS which tastes slightly different from the sugared version. It was such a ballsy and creative move, I can hardly believe it really happened. Betamax was technically superior to VHS, and was at the center of a Supreme Court case that ruled home recording to be fair use. It lost out to VHS in the marketplace for various reasons, so it's a good case study of a business failure for sure, but not because the product was bad or ill-conceived.
- curuinor 8y agoI have an attestation from the Goizueta family that they aren't that smart and they aren't that stupid (as the COO put it)
- nkoren 8y agoI find business failures of technically superior products to be absolutely fascinating and well worth studying. The Amiga and BeOS are two of my all-time favourite failures.
- benj111 8y ago"Betamax was technically superior to VHS" Surely that's the point of this museum. These aren't rubbish products, but they failed, and they failed for a reason, and we can learn something from that.
- benj111 8y agoMy suggestions: Dasani (uk launch) [1] Sinclair C5 [2] [1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/19/foodanddrink https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/19/foodanddrink [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5
- psim1 8y ago> - OS/2 WARP Failed to beat Windows as a desktop or server OS, but succeeded in other ways. It was widely used as an embedded OS for ATMs and distributed as a support software for IBM mainframes. Did it fail because it is no longer around? (Cf. other operating systems such as IRIX or Solaris, which is basically dead now, but strong for a time) Or because it did not fulfill a certain purpose--though it did fulfill another?
- beckler 8y agoBetamax might have been a consumer failure, but I had to use it as recently as 2009 because some TV stations would only take our commercials in a Betamax format. Granted, it was for some local Spanish stations that just had a bunch of old equipment, but I was surprised that it popped up. I'm still not sure what the ad was about, because I don't speak Spanish, but it was a political ad. I just did audio post-production on it.
- RickJWagner 8y agoShouldn't the Museum of Failure actually be closed?
- furyofantares 8y agoOnly if it contains itself
- vmednis 8y agoTom Scott did a really good video [0] on it some time ago which includes some more examples than the website. 0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfdBTsyrqaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfdBTsyrqaI
- Whatevers 8y agoFor completeness sake: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6649475/US-man-Swedens-museum-failure-declared-bankrupt.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6649475/US-man-Swed...
- FearNotDaniel 8y agoOff topic, but: is there an Adblocker-style tool that automatically removes sidebars full of shitty celebrity gossip and swimsuit pictures? It's not the only reason I almost never click a Daily Mail link, but it's the one that usually makes me wish I hadn't. Makes my head hurt trying to filter that out while figuring out if the actual story has anything intelligent or interesting to say.
- boomlinde 8y agoYou can use µBlock Origin to manually block individual elements on the site, which seems to work fine for the Daily Mail sidebar.
- branweb 8y agoFirefox reader-mode solves this problem well (most of the time).
- Whatevers 8y agoSorry, I should have found a better link. I agree with you on daily mail - I was too lazy. In cases anyone else reads this, here's a link with less crap: https://unv.is/dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6649475/US-man-Swedens-museum-failure-declared-bankrupt.html https://unv.is/dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6649475/US-man-S...
- falsedan 8y agoI thought this was an offshoot of the Library of Mistakes[0], would like to see something other than consumer product/services. 0: https://www.libraryofmistakes.com/ https://www.libraryofmistakes.com/
- philk10 8y agoInterestingly the website has a failure in that the top navigation links (Locations, Gallery etc) turn white and cant be read as you mouse over them...
- Fnoord 8y agoThe Cube Design museum in Kerkrade, The Netherlands (near Aachen) [1] has an expo about design in general. This includes half a floor about design flaws, including products which failed. For an English page on it, see [2]. I went to there a few years ago and can recommend. Supported languages are English/Dutch/German. Not sure about French. [1] https://www.cubedesignmuseum.nl/ https://www.cubedesignmuseum.nl/ [2] https://www.cubedesignmuseum.nl/en/activiteiten/intro https://www.cubedesignmuseum.nl/en/activiteiten/intro