Calling the Iridium network a failure is wrong. Iridium has been in consistent active use by the military and ships at sea from its inception to now and they are still launching new satellites as recently as last year.
And the blurb on No Man's Sky ends with "the game later managed a major turnaround from its disastrous launch and became a great success". Great Success is not the same as Failure.
In fairness... The military bought it in a fire sale after it failed.
Totally agree on No Man's Sky.
Minidisc was questionable because it definitely found a few niches, of which I knew a bunch of people in college:
- Music Fans / Bootleggers
- Radio station DJ's
- People who thought portable CD players were too big (before MP3 players)
- Audiophiles(?)
It had some good use cases, it just didn't live up to Sony's Dream of becoming the new standard. Sony, for its part, had a few huge successes, but their past is littered with failed formats they hoped would be the Next Big Thing.
Always disappointed to see minidisc on these lists, especially as it was much more successful outside the US (I think the perception is often US centric).
But OTH, you can still buy CDs, it did fail as a replacement.
Note that this is mostly commercial failure. A lot of these entries were either too early, implemented badly or adopted by hackers, nerds, independent musicians, etc.
For example, the Roland TB-303 is listed as a commercial flop, but for some reason they omitted the TR-808, which was also a commercial flop [0]. The narrative goes that the "affordably" priced synths then got dumped into thrift stores and available at bargain basement prices that the next generation of musicians then picked up and used. I've heard Snoop Dogg did something similar with editing equipment (though I can't find the reference now).
Pets.com was a failure but Chewy.com is going strong. Cue-Cat was a financial failure but was a shot in the arm of a lot of hardware hackers at the time.
Weird to see "No Man's Sky" as I was under the impression that was a commercial success.
Of course, some were just abject failures, like Theranos.
The problem with Wave was that it requires a network effect to be of any use, and Google was very stingy with invites early on. Interest had died down by the time they started allowing more people to join.
You probably had a high-spec PC, and were using it with only a couple of friends at a time? Wave was cool but the performance issues from being built on XMPP killed it.
This museum also has a physical side that travels from place to place opening for a couple of months and then moving on. I saw it last summer in Washington DC where it was installed in the upper floor of a dying shopping mall, appropriately enough.
A fun site indeed, but I felt that the entries were quite random. Many were successes that eventually failed (as many do) and others were failures that became successes, and everything in between. What's the real criteria for inclusion?
I've worked on Tablet PC, Windows Phone, and Microsoft Band.
I'm surprised all three aren't in there! (Along with WebTV, Microsoft's ebook stuff, and Microsoft Auto, all of which were good ideas attempted way too early!)
They list Google TV, but that feels unfair, as some variant of something resembling Google TV still exists.
Calling the Iridium network a failure is wrong. Iridium has been in consistent active use by the military and ships at sea from its inception to now and they are still launching new satellites as recently as last year.
And the blurb on No Man's Sky ends with "the game later managed a major turnaround from its disastrous launch and became a great success". Great Success is not the same as Failure.