Some products launched with the best-funded and publicized tech release campaigns in the last decade turned out to be disastrous failures. Irrespective of the large market share and product advantages these companies enjoyed; the big fishes lost their ways with these products.
24/7 Wall street carried out a research report to ensure the worst tech failures of the last decade.
To make the list:
â–ª The product had to be broadly recognized and easily available to consumers all around the world.
â–ª It also had to be technologically equivalent or superior to its competitors.
â–ª It had to be a product capable of earning billions of Dollars, like it’s competitors did with the similar sort of product.
â–ª Finally, it had to be a flop: letting down its creators, consumers and the media speculation.
YOUTUBE
The largest video sharing site on earth, Youtube, according to a website had 99.7 million users in March 2009 who watched about 5.6 billion videos.
In November 2006, Google bought Youtube for a whooping $1.65 Billion. There is a fairly positive chance Google will never get a return on that investment.
Youtube hasn’t been able to come up with a strategy to make money by selling advertisements or selling premium content in spite of its paramount audience and library data. Majority of the content uploaded is of very low quality therefore it keeps the advertisers away from it.
Forbes estimated that the site’s 2008 sales were $200 million.
Stearns put YouTube’s 2008 domestic revenue at $90 million.
Recently, reports indicated that Youtube is all set to lose $ 470 million this year due to the costs of storage and the bandwith required to run the website.
The New York Times recently wrote "while YouTube, along with other new media properties like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, is seen as leading the challenge against traditional media companies, the company itself is struggling to profit from its digital popularity."
Youtube may be a big site but that doesn’t mean it is successful.
Microsoft Vista
Globally released world wide, Microsoft Vista hit the markets on the 30th of January 2007. It was the most exciting launch from the world’s largest software company. It’s basic ideology was to enhance the security system of the Personal home computer. But the security features weren’t all that better than its previous versions of Microsoft windows, according to many software critics.
Windows Vista was also not compatible on all sorts of PC’s therefore the number of consumers (due to compatibility issues) limited down to consumers who had computers compatible for Microsoft Windows Vista. According to many anaylists, Vista runs slower on PC’s compared to Windows XP.
All of this added up to fail Vista to be a better version than Microsoft’s previous releases. According to the website "Net Applications" – Vista’s global share of PC operating systems was even less than 24 %.
When the earnings released, CNNMoney stated: "Microsoft’s Vista operating system, which was released in early 2007, never took off like the company had hoped. Sales in the division that produces Vista fell 16% in the previous quarter. User satisfaction has been underwhelming, and IT departments have largely opted to stick with Vista’s predecessor, Windows XP."
The company is in a hurry to create Windows Vista’s replacement, known as Windows 7.
Gateway
Founded in 1985, Gateway was one of the most successful PC companies in the United States. Its sales grew by 1990 and by the year 2004 it was Number 3 in the U.S market share just behind HP and DELL.
But then came the downfall, as by 2007 it went so low; Acer was able to purchase it for $ 710 million. The failure of Gateway is observed to be primarily to remain with desktop PC’s and not enter the laptop business.
GigaOm wrote (when Gateway was sold):, "The $710 million price tag is quite a comedown from the mid-1990s, when Gateway and Dell (DELL) were spoken of in the same breath and commanded mega-billion dollars in market capitalization."
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