Here is a list of Top 10 Tech Product Failure in the last decades which either fail to launch or fail to sustain its business operation and go bust. In addition to that, some products incurred millions of dollars in investment but could not turn into profit. On example is YouTube in which Google bought over for USD1.65billion but does not have a proper business model to recoup the investment. With millions of YouTube viewers, Google is still unable to make good money from it.
1. Microsoft Vista
Vista was released worldwide on January 30, 2007. It was the most recent generation of the flagship product of the world's largest software company. Vista was created to improve the security of the most widely used PC operating system in the world. The securities features were not much better than the previous versions of Windows based on most reviews of the software. Vista was also not compatible with a number of older PCs which limited the number of users who were likely to upgrade from the earlier version of Windows, known as XP. Many analysts claim that Vista also ran more slowly on PCs than XP. All of these factors prevented Vista from being viewed as clearly better than its predecessors.
2. Gateway PC
Gateway was founded in 1985 and was one of the most successful PC companies in the US. Its sales quadrupled in 1990. By 2004, it was No. 3 in US market share behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell and had 25% of the retail PC business. But, by 2007 Gateway was in such poor shape that Acer was able to buy it for $710 million. Gateway's failure has been blamed on several things, primarily its reluctance to enter the laptop business. Its share of the desktop business was strong through the early part of the decade, but it did not shift to portable computers as fast as its major competitors did.
3. HD DVD
HD DVD was one of two formats for high definition DVDs. The other format was Blu-ray. HD DVD specifications were put in place in 2002. Negotiations among consumer electronics companies to have only one product for playing high definition discs ended when there was no consensus about royalties. HD DVD was primarily funded and marketed by Toshiba and NEC and was first released as a consumer product in 2006. When HD DVD was first launched, it had a sales lead over Blu-ray. Industry analysts say that Toshiba lost almost $1 billion supporting the format before abandoning it in 2008. There are a number of reasons that the HD-DVD format lost out to Blu-ray, which was championed by Sony (SNE). The most commonly cited explanation is that Sony did a better job convincing major film studios to release high definition editions of movies for Blu-ray.
4. Vonage VOIP
Vonage was the grandfather of voice-over-IP (VoIP). It is now hardly a footnote in the growth of the industry which is currently dominated by products from cable companies and free services, primarily from Skype, which had 405 million registered users at the end of 2008 and produced $551 million in revenue.
5. YouTube
YouTube is the largest video sharing site in the world. According to comScore, 99.7 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com in the US during March 2009. In November 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. There is a fairly good chance that the search company will never get a return on that investment. YouTube has not come up with a model to make money by either selling advertising or charging for premium content, even though it has an a enormous audience and library of content. Most of the video content placed on YouTube is of such low quality that marketers are reluctant to marry it with their messages.
6. Sirius XM
Sirius XM satellite radio was supposed to be one of the most successful consumer electronics devices of all time. A subscriber would be able to listen to more than 100 stations coast-to-coast in either a moving vehicle, or using a portable version of the device. Initially, the service planned to run no commercials. One of the two companies that would eventually be the merged Sirius XM was XM Satellite Radio which launched its service in September 2001. At the end of the year, the company had almost 28,000 subscribers, a figure that jumped to about 350,000 by the end of the 2002 and 5.9 million by the end of 2005. Over this period, the company accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars of debt in order to cover capital expenses, operating deficits, and sales and marketing costs.
7. Microsoft Zune
Microsoft's Zune was launched in November 2006. The world's largest software company believed that it could compete with the Apple (AAPL) iPod, which had been in the market since 2001 and dominated the multimedia player and music download business around the world. Apple had sold well over 100 million iPods, when the Zune was launched. Microsoft was able to get the four largest music labels to sign licensing agreements with the company. Sales were dreadful during the first several months after the launch.
8. Palm Smartphone
Palm produced both a portable wireless device and an operating system for portable hardware devices and desktops. Palm launched its Palm Pilot hardware device in 1996 as a personal organizer. In 1999, it released its Palm V. The Palm Treo smartphone was developed by Handspring which Palm acquired. In the quarter that ended in September 2005, Palm sold 470,000 Treo units, up 160% from the same quarter the year before. At that point, three companies dominated the smartphone market: Palm, Research-In-Motion, maker of the Blackberry, and cell phone giant Nokia (NOK). By the September 2007 quarter, Treo sales had only moved up to 689,000, but sales of the Blackberry hit almost 3.2 million and the newly launched Apple (AAPL) iPhone sold more than a million units during the same period after it debuted on June 29 of that year. Palm, one of the earliest makers of smartphones, was unable to follow up its success in the personal organizer business.
9. Iridium Satellite Phone
Iridium, the global satellite phone company backed by Motorola, filed for bankruptcy in 1999, after the company had spent $5 billion to build and launch its infrastructure of satellites to provide worldwide wireless phone service. At the time, it was one of the 20 largest bankruptcies in US history. To work properly, the system needed 66 satellites. The creation of this enormous system forced the company to default on $1.5 billion of debt. The service had been such a failure that it only had 10,000 subscribers.
10. Segway personal transportation
The Segway two-wheel personal transportation vehicle was launched in 2002. When the product was launched, the head of Segway said it "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy". Famous venture capitalist John Doerr said that Segway sales might hit $1 billion as fast as any company in history. The company spent about $100 million developing the product. Segway did not understand that its price point, well above $3,000 for most models and $7,000 for some, was too high to draw a mass consumer base.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Post a Comment