Betamax was technically superior to VHS, and was at the center of a Supreme Court case that ruled home recording to be fair use. It lost out to VHS in the marketplace for various reasons, so it's a good case study of a business failure for sure, but not because the product was bad or ill-conceived.
Surely that's the point of this museum. These aren't rubbish products, but they failed, and they failed for a reason, and we can learn something from that.
By the way, I think the collection has potential to grow a lot bigger and I would have liked to seem more in-depth information about each failure. Maybe the hacker-news community can help with that. (Surely someone here must be knowledgeable about failure :-P)
Granted, it was for some local Spanish stations that just had a bunch of old equipment, but I was surprised that it popped up.
I'm still not sure what the ad was about, because I don't speak Spanish, but it was a political ad. I just did audio post-production on it.
Failed to beat Windows as a desktop or server OS, but succeeded in other ways. It was widely used as an embedded OS for ATMs and distributed as a support software for IBM mainframes.
Did it fail because it is no longer around? (Cf. other operating systems such as IRIX or Solaris, which is basically dead now, but strong for a time) Or because it did not fulfill a certain purpose--though it did fulfill another?
Dasani (uk launch) [1]
Sinclair C5 [2]
- :CueCat
- New Coke
- Olestra
- OS/2 WARP
- Microsoft Bob
- Betamax
- Smell-O-Vision
- Apple Newton
- Honeywell Kitchen Computer