Three interesting examples of good ideas and interesting models which flopped for a variety of reasons

As much as people hope and pray, failure is an undeniable fact, some even say that it is an important step to success! So in this blog post I will be looking at and describing a couple of the most interesting ideas that had potential, but unfortunately were unable to live up to it due to one reason or another.


Google Glass

Sadly Google Glass falls into this category, unlike many of the products and services that I considered putting on the list, this one brought me the most sadness to put on here. I personally had high hopes for this product, when the rumors and leaks started surfacing on the internet around 2012, there was excitement and anticipation, and google later that year released a what could be video confirming the peoples hopes and giving rise to a new fervor! Then Google did a very eye catching demo of the Google Glass by having multiple sky divers wear the device and transmit everything live as they skydived to the conference, truly that was the peak of the excitement. 

When the prices where announced, the excitement sure died down quick, with the model sold to developers being at around 1000 euro and the standard public model being 1500 euro, not many people were able swing that, to the price in perspective an iPhone at the time was only 200 – 400 euro. With the price being so high and the Google Glass not being everything it was promised to be when it was released, that was the start of the end for it. It might have recovered if it had had a good chance, but the the privacy concerns came along and put the final nail in its coffin for the public.

Sure it’s successor does live on as a corporations only product, and not the most successful one at that, but it is sadly almost inaccessible to the public tho leading to many people declare it dead.


Microsoft Zune

I can honestly admit that I have never heard of this product before I did the research for this blog post, but reading about it does make me a little hesitant to label it as a good idea, but I wasn’t able to find anything that would fit into the category of a good idea in a existing market that flopped, so I decided to go with this.

Now, Microsoft’s Zune was the answer to Apples iPod, not the phone but the music player. Admittedly Zune was a number of years late to the party, almost 4, but it did come with several advantages that were supposed to allow the Zune to carve out its own chunk of the market, like the built in radio, the wider verity of colors, the price and the easily replaceable batteries. All the additional features that the iPod either lacked or were under developed, should have allowed it to sprout were sadly overshadowed by the release of the newer version of the iPod that had a camera, making it more appealing then any of the extra features presented by the Zune, and that led to it not gaining the popularity that Microsoft was expecting and eventually its death.


Google+

Now this is an interesting case, normally if any other company other then Google was creating this social media I would say that it isn’t a good idea and so it wouldn't have made this list, but this is Google, when they were lunching they already had a lot of user on YouTube, Google maps and many other platforms/services that they ran, so creating some kind of social media to connect everything together was actually a good idea. But that may have been their doom, after reading some articles and reading some peoples blog posts about G+, there were many small reasons why they failed, everything from Vic Gundotra leaving and the service loosing it’s vision, to the disconnect between the services themselves, but the main thing that a good number of lists and articles mention is that the interface was confusing. 

With G+ almost directly competing with Facebook, a service that a grandma can figure out by herself, I believe that this was a large reason for the smaller then predicted amount of users. Which snowballed into a good chunk of users leaving when the multi-year data leak was revealed, basically putting the final nail in the coffin.


I believe that if someone went back in time and created the exact same thing at the exact same time, but now with the knowledge to avoid the mistake that either put the idea / project on the path to failure, then all of these projects could have been amazing successes, or at the very least not flops.


Sources:

  • cbinsights.com/research/corporate-innovation-product-fails/
  • businessinsider.com/33-startups-that-died-reveal-why-they-failed-2013-6
  • forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/06/21/these-seven-startups-had-amazing-ideas-and-failed/?sh=197a63d613ee
  • growthlab.com/famous-product-ideas-that-failed/
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass
  • reviewgeek.com/34547/you-can-now-buy-google-glass-2-but-you-probably-shouldnt/
  • microsoft.com/en-us/hololens
  • pocket-lint.com/ar-vr/news/google/132399-google-glass-a-brief-history
  • youtube.com/watch?v=D7TB8b2t3QE
  • youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4
  • investopedia.com/articles/investing/052115/how-why-google-glass-failed.asp
  • quora.com/What-are-the-advantages-of-Zune-over-iPod
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune
  • brainiuminfotech.com/blog/why-did-google-plus-fail/
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B

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