Tech Losers

Five gadgets destined for the dustbin

June 22, 2006—It’s a fundamental law of technology: For every iPod, there’s a Newton. The hard part is predicting in advance which is which. Undaunted, we asked Pip Coburn, author of the new book The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn, to pick a few current bombs in the making.

HD Radio: "HD radio had about ten days of marketing in January then fell off the map. The content isn't interesting, and only a few retailers carry the hardware. Sure, the content is free, but 'free' doesn't mean 'good.' "

Sony Book Reader: "People don't have problems reading books, and the audience they're targeting—the people who read the highest percentage of books—are ‘analogists.’ They make up 80 percent of the book-reading market, and most of them are scared of technology."

Origami Tablet PC: "Bill Gates thinks all you need to do is get the price down and people will buy them, but the price has come down and they still haven't taken off. Over the last 25 years we've become a keyboard society."

Sony PlayStation 3: "They're targeting a November release—which looks like it's going to get pushed again—and a $600 price tag. The Xbox 360 costs only $250, and the Nintendo Wii, also scheduled to come out this fall, is just $300. They expect people to pay an extra $300 for a built-in Blu-ray player?"

Nike+iPod Sport Kit (above): "I think it's brilliant, but there's virtually no market for it. If you take the group of hard-core runners, parse out the ones who wear Nikes, the ones that use an iPod, those who listen to their iPod when they run, those who'd care about syncing their iPod to their shoes, and you're left with only a few thousand people. A few years ago Intel put computers on surfboards. It was cool, but how many people do you think actually bought them?"