Companies in Silicon Valley are fond of saying that they like to “fail fast.” They mean that it’s virtuous to try lots of new things, but to give up quickly when something’s not working. But sometimes they fail fast in a manner that’s nothing to brag about. They invest millions (or hundreds of millions) of dollars in a new product and hype it to the Heavens -- and then kill it after only a few months, if they ever release it at all.
From this day henceforth, Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad may be the poster child for bizarrely short-lived tech products. But it has lots of company -- famously infamous flops such as Google Wave, the G4 Cube, and the Kin. Let’s honor them, shall we?
For this list, I considered only products that were on the market for less than a year, or which never quite made it to consumers, period. Every item that made it was from a large company that should have known better. And while they all share the indignity of a short, embarrassing life, they represent multiple types of failure. (Some of them should never have left the drawing boards in the first place; others could have been great if they’d been given more time to succeed.)
没有评论:
发表评论