WebTV

The WebTV (or MSN TV) was an device connected to a television that allows the customer to be connected to the Internet, primarily for web browsing and e-mail.  While WebTV does not allow as much functionality as a computer-based web browser, it is a low-cost alternative to a traditional computer connection to the Internet. On July 1, 2013, Microsoft send an email that the service will be shutting down on September 30, 2013. WebTV Networks was founded in July 1995 located in a building in  Palo Alto, California. After some months  the company was sold to Microsoft and nowadays is called MSN TV.

WebTV was launched on September 18, 1996,  with WebTV set-top boxes in stores from Sony and Philips. One of the downside of the first boxes was the very limited processing and memory resources. The first set-top boxes were using a 33.6 kbit/s dialup modem. The biggest problem was that the Web pages looked bad and ugly, some media formats didn't work at all, and using the remote control was problematic. One other problem was that the set-box containing strong cryptography and this limited the shipping of these boxes outside of US due to the export regulations.

Sales and Recover

April 1997, WebTV had only 56,000 subscribers, but the pace of subscriber growth accelerated after that. By April 1998 the company achieved about 325,000 subscribers and about 800,000 subscribers by May 1999. WebTV achieved profitability by Spring 1998, and grossed over US$1.3 billion in revenue through its first 8 years of operation.

Microsoft played a key role for the survival of the company. Web TV was not a failed product, but it was really close to fail.  The biggest problem especially at the beginning was the bad design and the unsupported media formats. 

RealNetworks RealPlayer

Installation wizard of Realplayer. You can't select
not to install the adware!

RealPlayer was introduced in 1995 as "RealAudio Player" and it was one of first players that supported online streaming.  For some time there was an extra paid "Plus" version, that included additional features. RealPlayer was popular because it was the only reliable plugin at that period that supported video streaming or audio streaming.

RealPlayer is notorious for its adware and spyware. The program has been heavily criticized for its  pop-up advertisements. If we summarize the reasons behind the small adoption these days we can list them:

• Replaced from other tools with less "spam", that support more audio and video formats. 
• Flash player is used mainly for video streaming now.
• Slow (mainly from the badware included). Application that provide similar functions free of charge or even open source replace the RealPlayer.
• Privacy issues: initial versions were sending back information about the songs listened.

Despite the low penetration in the market nowadays, it was the first free player that supported many video and audio formats. Furthermore, it was the first one that supported acceptable video streaming, when dial up connection was the common case. As of May 2015, the Real website states that RealPlayer has been replaced by RealTimes, a product that makes multimedia montages from users' photographs and videos, backed up and accessible via cloud storage.

Zip Drives

The options for transferring data between machines were limited in the early 1990s. The most common medium used was the 3.5-inch disc that could hold 1.44 megabytes of data. Tape drives and other specialty systems could transfer considerably more information, but they were expensive and focused as enterprise solution. They were rare among computer hobbyists. In 1994, however, Iomega released a new product called the Zip disk drive [1], marketing it as the next generation of removable media.

The Zip drive is a high capacity removable disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Originally, Zip disks launched with capacities of 100 MB, but later versions increased this to first 250 MB and then 750 MB. The format became the most popular of the super-floppy type products which filled a niche in the late 1990s portable storage market. However it was never popular enough to replace the 3.5-inch floppy disk nor could ever match the storage size available on rewritable CDs and later rewritable DVDs that introduced later.

Zip drives initially sold well after their introduction in 1994, owing to their low price and high, for the time, capacity.  Thus, backing up with Zip disks was very economical for home users. Moreover, some computer suppliers such as Dell and Apple included Iomega internal Zip drives with their machines. Zip drives also made significant advances in the graphic arts market, as a cheaper alternative to the Syquest cartridge hard disk system [2]. The price of additional cartridges swiftly dropped further over the next few years, as more companies began supplying them. Eventually, the suppliers included Fujifilm, Verbatim, Toshiba and Maxell. Epson and NEC also produced a licensed 100 MB drive model with its brand name.

Hardware Problems

Unfortunately, the Zip drive design was prone to hardware failure. The read heads of a Zip drive were extremely fragile and could become misaligned through rough usage or power failure, rendering them incapable of reading or writing coherent data. This would cause the heads to snap back and forth inside the drive repeatedly, creating a sound called the "click of death" by users [3]. In addition, a sufficiently damaged Zip disk could actually damage the read heads in a working drive, creating a chain reaction of failing hardware and media in any group where users shared equipment.

Decline

At the time of the Zip drive's introduction, it represented a cost-effective way to back-up and transfer large amounts of data. The development and widespread adoption of recordable CD drives, however, quickly reduced the market share for this type of hardware. Blank CDs could hold around 750 megabytes of data, cost less than a dollar each, and were not prone to the same type of mechanical failures that Zip disks were. The development of rewritable CDs further diminished the Zip drive's appeal, and recordable DVDs cemented optical media's domination of the removable disc market. Though Iomega sold tens of millions of Zip and Jaz drives that worked flawlessly, thousands of the drives died mysteriously, issuing a clicking noise as the drive head became misaligned and clipped the edge of the removable media, rendering any data on that disc permanently inaccessible.

Sales of Zip drives and disks declined steadily from 1999 to 2003.[5] Zip disks had a relatively high cost per megabyte compared to the falling costs of then-new CD-R and CD-RW discs. The growth of hard disk drives to multi-gigabyte capacity made backing up with Zip disks less economical. Furthermore, the advent of inexpensive recordable CD and DVD drives for computers, as well as USB flash drives, pushed the Zip drive out of the mainstream market. However, the advantages of magnetic media over optical media and flash memory, in terms of long-term file storage stability and high erase/rewrite cycles, still affords them a niche in the data storage arena. In such applications, Zip competes primarily with USB external hard drives and the Hi-MD version of Sony's MiniDisc, which stores up to 1 GB on a disk that is smaller and less expensive than a 100 MB Zip disk.

References

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death
[4] upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/ZipDiskNDrive_unitsales_1998to2003.svg

Windows Vista

Windows Vista® is an operating system released on January 2007 in several variations by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The release of Windows Vista came more than five years after the introduction of its predecessor, Windows XP. Windows Vista includes many changes and new features: updated graphical user interface and visual style (Aero), multimedia tools including Windows DVD Maker, and redesigned networking, audio, print, and display subsystems.

Unfortunately, adoption of Windows Vista was limited compared with other operating systems released from Microsoft. To understand better why this operating system was not successful as the previous windows versions, we are going to list the technical and marketing issues. Before start analyzing the technical reasons, i should clarify something: an operating system is a really complex piece of software that many developers work on it. Mistakes are easy and debugging hard. So let's see the biggest technical problems: 

1) Increased code size compared with Windows XP: The vista was really huge project and maintaining the code is really hard. Vista has over 50 million lines of code. In contrast, XP had 40 million when it was released. At first glance these are huge numbers. On the other hand, Mac OS X 10.4 has 86 Million lines of code [1,2]. Thus, the problem here is the architecture and the "Spaghetti" source code. Windows 7 later decreased the code side down to 40M [3].

2) Dropped futures: There are a number of features missing from the final version of Vista due some technical difficulties. The most famous is the WinFS [4] support.The filesystem was based on relational databases. Although the file system released as beta, it was canceled in 2006.

3) Missing drivers. It seems incredible that some of the Windows drivers that worked with XP did not necessarily work with Vista. Even some drivers for Nvidia graphic cards were not available.

5) Low Performance: This was the biggest technical issue. The performance was unacceptable in many aspects. The memory consumption it was huge even after clean boot. Moreover, most of the games had a performance hit compared with the execution in the Windows.

Next we are going to discuss the Marketing issues related with the launch of Windows Vista.

6) Delay of the release: Initial release date was mid-end of 2006. Unfortunately, Vista released on January of 2007. 7) Decoupling Office and Windows. Microsoft usually ships these products together. For example . For example, Microsoft used Office to propose the application transition from 16-bit to 32-bit software. Meanwhile, Windows 95 helped drive up Office penetration. In contrast, Microsoft should have been able to do something similar with Office 2007 and Windows Vista. They did nothing about this.

8) Apple strikes back: Apple used the "I’m a Mac" ads to successfully driven the perception that Windows Vista is buggy, boring, and difficult to use.

9) Market confusion: too many versions of the OS for sale. There are six different versions [5]: 

• Windows Vista Starter
• Windows Vista Home Basic
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• Windows Vista Business
• Windows Vista Enterprise
• Windows Vista Ultimate

Which one is better for you? It seems giving too many options to the customer does not help much.

10) The "Vista Capable" sticker mess: Microsoft let PC makers to add a sticker on Windows XP machines that seemed to say they were good to go for Vista, when all they could handle was the basic version that lacked the Aero interface.

11)  The rise of netbooks: Again here is more performance issue. Netbooks don't have the power and the memory to run Vista. 

Summary

Windows Vista had the great potential. However, some wrong marketing and technical decisions minimized the adoption of the operating system. My personal opinion, the performance was the biggest issue. It was slow and required much more memory than XP. Don't let this post to fool you, Vista was a great operating system with really many new features that exist now in Windows 7 and 8.

Note: Microsoft, Windows Vista, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code

[2] http://www.knowing.net/index.php/2005/12/06/how-many-lines-of-code-in-windows/

[3] http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_editions

Solyndra's cylindrical solar panels

Solyndra was a manufacturer of cylindrical solar panels of thin-film solar cells based in Fremont, California. Unfortunately, the company ceased all business activity and filed bankruptcy on September 1, 2011. The solar cell panels design is unique and has higher performance than the typical solar cells. However, the company failed economically to survive. In this article we will explain the basic concepts of the solar panel design and analyze the reasons of failure.

Technology

Their cylindrical modules claim to capture sunlight across a 360-degree photovoltaic surface capable of absorbing energy from direct, indirect, and reflected light. The solar panels were made of cylindrical tubes (or tubular solar panels). The company rolled its thin films into a cylindrical shape and placed 40 of them in each 1-meter-by-2-meter panel. Although initial reports of the flat PV modules has 12%-14% efficiency, the cylindrical modules have about 8,5% power efficiency.

The panels have three advantages over the conventional solar panels:

• First, the panels do not have to move to track the Sun. The panels are always presenting some of their face directly perpendicular to the Sun any time in contrast with the flat panels.
• Increased resistance to snow. The snow will pass through the cylinders and
  the reflected light will also increase the power production. There is no need of cleaning the panels from the snow and as side effect more power is produced.
• Panels attract less dirt and airborne particles, and rain that lands on the modules clean the cylinders

Reasons of failure

Two are the major reasons of failure:

• Manufacturing cost: Conventional solar modules made in China are much cheaper. Cylindrical modules are more expensive due to extra process of adding extra glass layers.
• Competition: Oversupply  and compression of prices of solar panels.

Summary

Solyndra was a Silicon Valley company that was producings cylindrical solar photovoltaic (PV) modules. The advantages of this technology is better performance using reflecting light and better resistance to the weather elements (snow, rain) and dirt The company went bankrupt due to complex manufacturing process, high prices and hard competition.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

http://www.solyndra.com/technology-products/cylindrical-module/

LaserDiscs

A Philips LaserDisc player.
Photo courtesy Werner Kretz

LaserDisc (LD) is a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium. Initially licensed, sold, and marketed as MCA DiscoVision in 1978. Later, Pioneer Electronics purchased the majority stake in the format and marketed it as both LaserVision (format name) and LaserDisc (brand name) in 1980.

Laser discs had superior video and sound to VHS tapes. They used digital audio as opposed to the analog audio found on tapes. Laser disc also offered greater video resolution than tape. The different layers on the disc allowed the movie to broadcast in multiple audio formats, so you could activate features, such as commentary by actors and directors and dubbing in different languages. Laser discs also offered scene selection, a large improvement over VHS, where the only options were "forward" and "reverse" to jump to a new scene. The random-access features of LaserDisc players to create interactive movies in the same concept like a game. You can watch a interactive player in action from 1985 here.

The first laser disc was released to the public on December 15, 1978. This was almost 4 years before the first compact disc and a little less than 20 years before DVDs. The first LaserDisc movie release was "Jaws".  

Technical Details 

The standard home video Laserdisc was 11.81 in (30 cm) in diameter and made up of two single-sided aluminum discs layered in plastic. Although appearing similar to compact discs or DVDs, Laserdiscs used analog video stored in the composite domain with analog sound and/or some form of digital audio. However, despite its analog nature, the Laserdisc at its most fundamental level was still recorded as a series of pits and lands much like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays. The spiral track of a Laserdisc is 42 miles (67 km) long. Early Laserdiscs featured in 1978 were entirely analog but the format evolved to incorporate digital stereo sound in CD format, and later multi-channel formats such as Dolby Digital and DTS.

Types of LaserDiscs :

• CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) or Standard Play discs supported several unique features such as freeze frame, variable slow motion and reverse. CAV discs were spun at a constant rotational speed (1800 rpm for 525 line and 1500 rpm for 625 line discs) during playback, with one video frame read per revolution. In this mode, 54,000 individual frames (30 minutes of audio/video) could be stored on a single side of a CAV disc.
• CLV (Constant Linear Velocity) or Extended Play discs offer simple playback on all but the high-end Laserdisc players incorporating a digital frame store. These high-end Laserdisc players could add features not normally available to CLV discs such as variable forward and reverse, and a VCR-like "pause". By gradually slowing down their rotational speed (1,800–600 rpm) CLV encoded discs could store 60 minutes of audio/video per side, or two hours per disc. The vast majority of titles were only available in CLV.
• CAA (Constant Angular Acceleration). In the early 1980s, due to problems with crosstalk distortion on CLV extended play Laserdiscs, Pioneer Video introduced CAA formatting for extended play discs. Constant Angular Acceleration is very similar to Constant Linear Velocity, save for the fact that CAA varies the angular rotation of the disc in controlled steps instead of gradually slowing down in a steady linear pace as a CLV disc is read. With the exception of 3M/Imation, all Laserdisc manufacturers adopted the CAA encoding scheme. CAA encoding noticeably improved picture quality and greatly reduced crosstalk and other tracking problems.

Audio :

Audio could be stored in either analog or digital format and in a variety of surround sound formats; NTSC discs could carry two analog audio tracks, plus two uncompressed PCM digital audio tracks, which were CD encoded channels, (EFM, CIRC, 16-bit and 44.1 kHz sample rate). PAL discs could carry one pair of audio tracks, either analog or digital. Dolby Digital (also called AC-3) and DTS first became available on Laserdisc, and Star Wars: Episode I which was released on Laserdisc in Japan, is among the first home video releases ever to include 6.1 channel Dolby Digital EX Surround.

Laserdiscs store Dolby Digital in a frequency modulated form within a track normally used for analog audio. Extracting Dolby Digital from a Laserdisc required a player equipped with a special "AC-3 RF" output and an external demodulator in addition to an AC-3 decoder. The demodulator was necessary to convert the 2.88 MHz modulated AC-3 information on the disc into a 384 kbit/s signal that the decoder could handle. DTS audio, when available on a disc, replaced the digital audio tracks; hearing DTS sound required only an S/PDIF compliant digital connection to a DTS decoder.

Reasons of Failure

LaserDisc Compared with a VHS tape!

Although the format was capable of offering higher-quality video and audio than the VHS and Betamax videocassette systems, Laserdisc never managed to gain widespread use in North America, largely owing to high costs for the players and the video titles themselves.  It also remained a largely obscure format in Europe and Australia. However, it was much more popular in Japan and in the more affluent regions of southeast Asia, such as Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. Laserdisc was the prevalent rental video medium in Hong Kong during the 1990s. Significantly, the technologies and concepts behind Laserdisc are the foundation for later and more popular optical disc formats, including Compact Discs and DVDs.

Overall the main reasons of failure are:

• Expensive hardware
• Very expensive recording hardware
• VCR were much cheaper
• Expensive movies
• No interest in Europe/Australia
• Size of the Disk

Summary

You can watch a summary of futures and disadvantages of  LaserDisc Players here.  Laser discs was popular among collectors because they featured exclusive material that cannot be found on DVD releases. Laser disc was popular in Japan, where they were sold until 2001. The format no longer has broad commercial value, but there is a market for old discs and players among collectors. You can still find some shops selling LaserDiscks, such as ebay, LaserDisc Database, Laser Disc Shop, Discount laser Disc, DaDon's laserdiscs, and LaserDisc Vault.

References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc

Failed technological products

What is a failed technological product ?

In simple words the product sales forecasting turns out to be wrong. For every 4 projects that enter development, only 1 makes it to the market, and at least 1 of 3 products fail despite research and planning*.

This blog includes a small set of articles to guide through the biggest failed technological products in history. We will include products from personal computers, storage devices, transmission devices, software products and others. If you think that one products belongs to this category, feel free to drop me an email (malvanos !at! gmail.com).

We believe that this information is valuable to guide the development of new products and avoiding the mistakes of the past. Many of the best-funded and most-publicized product launches have ended in failure. Many large technology companies which had significant market share lost a great amount of money.

We have learn from these mistakes to avoid them in the future. The biggest difference of humans compared with animals is the ability to aggregate knowledge. I hope this blog would be valuable tool for inspiration and a walk-through to avoid some pitfalls. As Confucius said: "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."


*"Winning at New Products: Accelerating the Process from Idea to Launch", ISBN: 0738204633.