Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Top 5 Fastest Discontinued Tech Products!”.
Hey what is up guys, I’m Kay PhD here, and there are some pretty awful products out there today. We all know that, but in the tech industry, and especially the high-tech stuff products are kind of expected to come out once a year. Now a product life cycle is around about one year, so the galaxy s 1 to the S 2 to the S 3 to the S 4. It all takes one year in between each of them the iPhone 4 to the 4s to the 5.
It’S all one year cycles. In fact, some companies are even accused of what’s called planned obsolescence, which is where they basically intentionally make products that are only valid until the next product comes out and it kind of gets you to buy the next version of their product. So iterations tend to last about one year whether the company wants you to or not, but sometimes sometimes there are products that don’t even make it through an entire life cycle products that are so bad that they don’t make it that long I mean yeah. Some companies will, you know, kind of be too proud to discontinue a product, even if it’s not selling that well they’ll keep selling it anyway, but sometimes the product is so bad that a company has to discontinue it, they’re forced to take it off the market or Just lose money because of its existence and it’s those miserable products that inspire today’s video so that any further ado these are the fastest discontinued products in text, so apples, Power, Mac, g4 cube, is actually a perfect example of this. It’S a classic. It lasted for exactly 12 months between July 2000 and 2001. When it came out, it was quote the coolest computer ever in Steve Jobs words in 2000, but a year later it turned out quote: most customers decided to buy the Power Mac g4 instead, and so the Power Mac g4 cube was discontinued, Google’s Nexus Q.
That sort of media center thing was also killed off exactly a year after its original announcement. The Google Play Movies app was the last app to officially support that and an app update came out for that exactly 365 days after the Nexus Q came out that broke compatibility with it. So, on its birthday, the Nexus Q was unofficially cut by Google, but there are some products that didn’t even make it to the one-year anniversary before getting the axe. In fact, take a look at vigas mondo, portable handheld gaming console.
It was first announced by tiger telematics in 2005 and it was supposed to be great for sort of handheld racing gaming, but it only sold twenty five thousand units, so it was discontinued eleven months after it was initially came out, but it gets shorter than that. Remember the juju tablet, probably not it was this Linux based tablet that basically came out of nowhere as a supposed I pad competitor, no one really heard of it, but a burst onto the scene. So when it was finally announced it turned out to be this embarrassingly bad, just terrible tablet. It was not only was it three quarters of an inch thick and 2.2 pounds, but it was insanely slow, just incredibly unresponsive, just a bad bad tablet and retailed for more than the iPad that it was supposed to be competing against so just shot itself in the Foot basically there, and so it was no surprise that fusion garage pulled the plug on that one.
In an embarrassingly short seven months, Nintendo had won to the Virtual Boy. Console was supposed to be this sort of 3d augmented reality wearable gaming headset, but the only problem with this was this was 1995, so you can imagine 3d augmented reality wearable gaming in 1985. It was not great.
It was a sort of an awkward clunky form factor with an awkwardly attached controller. It only displayed the color red when it played these games and had a very limited supply of 3d, augmented reality wearable games honestly bottom line was this was terrible. A Nintendo pulled the plug on this one in six months, half a year before the Nintendo just said no and went on to making other better thing.
So half a year can products really get worse than only lasting for half a year. Of course they get worse than that. Take a look at Sony’s evila.
It was this sort of handheld, but also desktop portable Internet entertainment, console appliance thing. It was way ahead of its time. No one really had any use for it and no one bought one and the fact that no one bought it meant that Sony was losing money every time they built one so that one was cut in a ridiculously short three months.
Luckily, Sony actually handled that. One really well, though, they refunded everyone who was paying money for that if they returned it and actually returned everyone’s money, who was paying the 2195 a month internet plan to get internet on that plan, so bottom line that was way ahead of its time did so Well, at all, but Sony pulled it off in three months, but there are some products that did not even make it three months into their cycle before getting discontinued. That’S one quarter of the one year cycle that we expect tech to last and that’s where we get into our top five quickest discontinued tech products for five is Google Wave, and this was actually one of two failures from Google attempting to make a sort of social Network in 2010, the other was Google Buzz, but this one lasted just 75 days.
That’S actually shorter than Kim Kardashian’s wedding, believe it or not. This was a product that went public and immediately stopped development. Seventy-Five days later and Google just open sourced it and said hey, you can have it. This isn’t really working. Obviously, Google Plus has done a lot better than Google Wave. It still exists for one thing, but yeah 75 days for Google way that did not go well.
Speaking of Kim Kim Microsoft, Kin, Microsoft, skin was one of the strangest legendary failures of a product. It lasted for a legendary 48 days and it was funny because Microsoft actually put millions of dollars of backstory into this. There was research and advertising and marketing and hype, and they all went into making this piece of crap. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking that the entire backstory of decane is honestly hilariously depressing I’ll include the whole wiki about it down below the like button. On this video, if you want to check it out, every line of that article is cringe-worthy but hilarious, and this kid was just a massive failure of a product. So after 48 days, they stopped selling it and Verizon Wireless, actually just shoveled back all the ones that they didn’t sell to Microsoft, which is officially abandoning all hope.
Microsoft then went on to shut down the online hub. That was necessary to keep these pieces of crap running, which made that a pretty much useless product, so they actually started giving out free 3G smartphones after the Kinze just went dead in the water. This phone was a mess, a very expensive mess that lasted exactly 48 days for Microsoft, but number three was the HP TouchPad, which out does the Kin by just one day and it only lasted 47 days.
It was actually more famous for the fire sale that went on after it was this black or white webOS tablet that didn’t really sell well at all, so HP decided that they’re just going to cut it and sell them for $ 99 and not promise any software Updates and then people found a way to put Android on it, and there was a massive flock to go, buy these things and make $ 99 Android tablets out of them, which was sad because they actually sold more after they discontinued the product than before. That sucks. So, to beat that we have a device that only lasted 30 days before essentially being discontinued, that’s one month, 1/12 of the 1 year cycle that we expect tech to last. That’S the HTC first now ATT refuses to acknowledge this, but when you drop a phone from $ 100 to $ 0.99 after only 15,000 sales, that’s basically acknowledging its depth and to put that under perspective, the HTC ChaCha sold better than that.
But that’s only number two and something had to be discontinued faster than 30 days to beat that out for the number one spot. What is that the Cisco flipped live? This takes it to a whole nother level. Remember those flip cameras that everyone used to buy those very inexpensive lightweight flip cameras. They were insanely popular, remember that cisco bought the flip company for 590 million dollars and started running it from there on out in 2009, and they continued to sell very well. So those 12 cameras are really popular like we said among youtubers vloggers. Do these very lightweight, inexpensive cameras that you can hold out and record yourself? It’S not like you’re going to drop it! It’S very lightweight, so they sold really well so cisco decided to hold a press conference and announce an additional line up to the flip cameras. So they held a press conference and decided that they would have the flip live, which would be a new flip camera with Wi-Fi built in and some bluetooth and some integration. That would talk to a computer and allow you to stream video from the camera.
So they line it up and announce that the product would be available on April 13th that year, so the days in the weeks pass and people are waiting for this interesting new live streaming camera to go on sale, but unfortunately, one day before it was supposed to Go on sale on April 12th, cisco decides to cut the entire flip, the entire company, the whole thing they fired. 550 employees laid off everyone and just chop that off chopped off the whole arm of the Cisco branch that was the flipped company. So that sets a record for never putting a product on sale and having it discontinued after negative one days, that’s probably worthy of number one. So what do we learn here from these fastest discontinued tech products? Well, I can say that I learned that it’s safe, that you would want to know that a product is bad before you release it. That’S kind of a theme of all these products here either way.
What was your favorite quickly discontinued product? It was probably a failure and there’s probably no way to pick a favorite of the crappy products that were all released, but let me know what was your favorite. There are plenty I didn’t even mention like Windows, Vista and the Palm Treo or folio. I think it was called, for example, but there are tons of other things that were disconnected very quickly so feel free to leave a thumbs up.
If you enjoyed this video and leave a comment below of what your favorite was either way. Thank you for watching and I’ll talk to you guys in the next article .