 Hello, my name is Matt Darnell with Comptail.Cloud as always joined here by Greg Jackson. You can find us online at Comptail.Cloud. Cloud is up in the sky. That's where you can find us. And we wanted to start off with something that I read that makes perfect sense but is such a huge threat that I don't think people realize. I didn't realize, I'm in tech. And this involves key fobs. Any car you've bought probably since 2004 maybe even earlier has come with a fob. So you have your fob with you? I do. Yeah, a key fob. Big key, it's got buttons on it, it does things. Some are more sophisticated than others. And there are some fobs. Well, let me ask you this. What does fob stand for? Let me say key fob. I was curious last night what key fob, everybody says that when I was deploying RSA keys we were calling them fobs and it was kind of an obscure term. What I read, I read on the internet, so it's got to be true, that it's a reference to a watch fob back in the 1800s, watches, pocket watches had a thing called a fob. It makes perfect sense. Yeah, I totally draw the correlation. Hello. So it doesn't stand for foreign object beacon, I mean I was trying to think what could it stand for. Okay, but what happens is with some newer cars, even some older cars, it will automatically as you walk to your car unlock it based on what you have there and even start the car when you get close. You can just press the button because you're in the, but your car, it's like with your car so I guess I want to steal it. But if you have the key fob and you walk close to it, can you just unlock it or do you have to press a button to unlock it? You know, I have a Wrangler and it's very sophisticated and it doesn't do that. It does not do that, okay. But I mean a lot of modern cars, just by practicing it, you get there, you can unlock it and then you sit down in the car and you press the start button and it goes. It's really great for when you have too many groceries in your hand and you want to walk up and wave your foot or something in the back of a van, you can release the van truck. So that's, I mean because I'm looking to buy a new car and proximity was one of the things I really wanted to have in that car and then you read about how, here it comes, right? So what they do, so you have your key fob, right? It's obviously constantly sending out a ping and that the car would hear and you think, okay, I'm all the way inside. What the thieves do is in the middle of the night, they walk up to your door and they have a key fob receiver. I like credit cards. It's in your car. Then they have their partner stand next to your car. So your key fob talks to the device they're holding. It relays it to a device their partner's holding next to your car and it sends it. It's like an extension cord for your key fob and they just stand right next to your door and the other person next to your car. They open the door and it sounds an awful lot like man in the middle. Or women in the middle. You have that out there and that's the kind of thing that I don't think people think about that. So because a lot of times you walk in the door and you put your keys right there on the ring. And they had experiments that showed even without that, if your car is within 12 feet, you can just walk up to it and open the door because your key fob is doing that. And those kind of things are as we have this connected world. It's got to be beyond this device, beyond this key fob. How can it tell it to me if a 150 pound person sits down in the seat, that's not me. I mean, unless I lose half my body here, what kind of thing. So if they're five feet tall, that's not me. And even with any RFID, you put energy into it, it sends out a wave. You can capture that, relay it. So what they had recommended is, one, take your key upstairs with you. How humbug, right? But I'm really going to buy a third-aid kit. You have that. There's a wire mesh, I mean, it looks nice. But there's wire mesh in the middle, and it will block those signals. I mean, that's a real thing, because they're not, they're taking your car, they're driving it to some place and stripping it, right there on the road, and then they take the parts back to their garage because the GPS monitoring that kind of stuff. And they can strip a car in like an hour, even on the side of the road, right there. So I just thought that was so interesting that how creative they are in the ability to do that. And they just walk up to your door, they're walking down the street, oh, we got one. And 10 minutes later, you know, after they're going up slightly, you know, it takes 10 seconds when they're there. But they do a little bit of recon, they send somebody back, and it's there. So this one's a little nice because you can do the remote start, the unlock. So if someone captures it, you still have to have, the chip has to check in when you turn the ignition. Oh, so it's not a push button, no. But you can remote start it, but you can't drive away, you have to put the key in to drive away. Okay. And my whole thing is, I don't want to take the key out of my pocket. I just want to be able to walk up to the car, open the door, sit down, push the button and drive. They still have limo services, you could, you know, that's a business, you know, where you don't own a car. We should think about that. We should think about it. We could call it Uber. Yeah. That's great. So if you have that kind of car, you really look at, go to Amazon or anywhere online and then look at getting a Faraday cage for my key. No joke. That is something that is happening. Okay. So here what we're talking about are some of the biggest tech fails of all time. And I think one thing that's going to come out of this is, what makes a tech fail? When you sell a million of something and still call it a failure, you know, Blackberry, Blackberry, right? I mean, you know, what is a failure? If anyway, so we'll do that. And disclaimer, in 1943, there might have been a, you know, mechanical calculator that was a failure, you know, that that was tech at the time. This is kind of 1990s internet timeframe on tech tech failures we have here. Okay. So you haven't seen these. So it'll be interesting to kind of get your initial reaction and you might not have one and you might not even think it's a failure. So we'll go ahead and start. The first one, what is that that look like to you right there? What is that? That looks like, that reminds me of what, Zune or something? A Zune. Yeah. So you obviously never bought one. I had friends at bottom. You had friends, right? I had something worse called a Dell Axe-M. A Dell Axe-M. Okay. See, that was too low of the radar to make the list. But the Zune was Microsoft's iPod competitor. And what they had done with that, and I thought, see, personally, I like the interface. A lot of people did. You know, they had, you know, the iPod had the scroll wheel, the click wheel kind of thing. I thought it was pretty simple, but the Zune, you could watch movies sooner, but it just never caught on. So to me, that's how you understand, I mean, how do you define a tech failure? I think it's a failure because when they cancel, after they spend billions on the UI, and then they, you know, just kill the product in less than two years, I mean, to me, that's the definition of a failure. It's different from like, you know, back in the day in the 80s, you know, you heard Osborn effect, right? Hit me. What is that? The effect is there was a gentleman who, forget his first name, but his last name was Osborn. He started Osborn Computer Company, and he built the first mass-produced, readily-sold portable computer. Okay. I mean, it was huge. It was like a small suitcase and had a five-inch screen and two floppy, you know, two floppy disks. But it was Osborn one. Two floppy disks. You know, do a floppy. You have one for the OS, one for your... One, three, one, five? No, no. They're both five and a quarter. And he had one, you know, the keyboard was about that thick and had it. So it was an Osborn one. And what had happened was he started bragging to some industry people about the Osborn two. So sales for the Osborn one just tanked. All these computer people canceled all their orders for Osborn ones. And this was like 18 months after it was released. So it was wildly popular. But then the Osborn... But then the Osborn two came out, but it had been passed up by that time. But the Osborn one, that was the end of it. That's where software assurance comes in. Software... For hardware as well. Yes, when people talk about the Osborn effect, it's like pre-announcing another product. But it kills that, you know, your current product. It's like when the, you know, PlayStation 2 comes out, it's going to kill the PlayStation original sales, you know, if you advertise, oh, it's going to be half as much and twice as much RAM and play all the same games. Like, well, maybe I'll wait. We all think that at Black Friday when the prices get cut in half, they're like, oh, here goes the next version. I guess it's coming out. Well, and we just got, you know, one of our manufacturers, that huge discounts. I'm like, oh, OK, maybe the F is coming out. You know, you'll always think that. So, yeah, the Zoom, I thought it was a great value. I love the interface. But it didn't have, I think where it fell down was Microsoft didn't have the infrastructure behind it. There was no iTunes where you could just buy songs for $0.99. Getting, you know, buying a song on iTunes and getting it over with the DRM and everything over to the Zoom was really painful. AAC, that's about the same time that it was coming out. Yeah, so it wasn't that same smoothness with this. So, to me, I think that's the main reason why it felt like that fell to Zoom. OK, next we got, here we got. This is, I think, every marketing student ever, taking your key by the way, has studied this. Does that look like anything to you? Oh, I see Betamax. It's a Betamax, Betamax versus VHS. Yeah, they are really popular still in broadcasting. That people that haven't moved over to AHD and digital. Well, it's lossless, right? Well, it's tape. So there's some kind of the degradation over time. But compared to VHS, it was far superior picture. You, the tapes, they were shorter. But it was way better. Technically, the picture, it could cost less. And it had Sony behind it. I mean, the absolute brand recognition. Absolutely, but it failed. And for a long time, people have studied why the Betamax failed. And again, broadcasters loved it because they weren't on brand. They weren't on that. They had the Betamax tapes for the cameras. And it was a huge failure because of marketing. And it's kind of like DVD or CD versus VHS. This was just superior to anything else. But it was a huge failure because of the marketing. It didn't have behind it. People didn't release movies on it. The tapes were a little smaller, shorter. But it was a far superior product. So that's just flies in the face. If you've got a far superior product for nearly the same amount of money, you would expect it to be able to succeed in the marketplace. What was that big disc that they had out there? It was a laser disc. Yeah. Is that on your list? No, no. But that was there. And those were humbug because the earlier players, you had to turn the thing over. End of side one. And not that. But yeah, those big lilies. The picture was fantastic, right? But it looked like an LP. It did. For anybody that knows what an LP is to have that. OK, so my name's Matt Darnell with council.cloud. We're going to take a short break and continue on with our top tech failures of all time. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. It's choose to treat it with the help of a physical therapist. Physical therapists treat pain through movement and exercise. No warning labels required. And you get to actively participate in your care. Choose to improve your health without the risks of opioids. Choose physical therapy. I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 PM, I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments, and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. But welcome back. We'll continue on with our tech failures of all time. OK, next, we have something that's fairly recent. And there are some not-safe-for-work names for this, but Google glasses. And when I first read about them and heard about them, I thought, wow, that is so cool to be able to have. Because they say when the screen, it's glasses much like what you're wearing, but there's a screen. I think it's like a quarter inch by quarter inch. But when it's that close to your eye, it's like a 19-inch monitor. That's what it appears. And the ability to have real-time information, watch movies, just how can that lose? Video, they had a camera on the front. Yeah, it would record. Yeah, and you could record things later. Hi, Matt, that's your name. And then all your stats come up on the screen. Like all the sci-fi movies when they have that. Did you ever wear a pair of those? No, they were hard to get. They were expensive too, like $1,500. And there was a waiting list. They opened it up, I think, to developers first. And then that was really hard. And then they opened it up to everybody, and they thought there would be like, I don't even know if it's still in production. But it was just really, I think, snobbish. People kind of thought of walking around that. It is. They didn't look. I mean, that's when, because the fact that you have something over one eye and nothing over the other eye. I'm looking at a doctor. Exactly, they had the little thing on their head. So Google Glasses, that's an example of you design something and think it's going to be great. Wow, this is stylish. This is going to be what everybody wants. Like Apple with the iPod, the smartest thing they did, in my opinion, was have that white headphone. Because every other headphones before that had a black cable. But their headphones were white. So you could tell. That was like the status symbol. If you had those white earbuds. Now you got those little ones, those wireless ones. I see them all over the place now. Yeah, exactly. That was that. So yeah, so this is an example of too expensive. There's not the app behind it. What are you going to do when you're walking down the street to be able to go ahead and do that? I mean, there's a commercial guy trading stocks in the park or that type. Doing hand motions or something? Yeah, exactly. Virtual reality. Tom Cruise, what was that movie? My order. My order report, yeah. Anyway, so Google asses, huge tech fail. I can't imagine how much money Google spent on, especially when you have a phone. I can hold my phone up and be able to do the same thing. I have a feeling that it hasn't gone away. It's probably just version one has died. And they're either going to integrate it into another product. Or they'll be like a revival come up. Because it seems fairly useful. And like heads up display in a car. You know, to be able to get your speed for your. They haven't caught on. I mean, it's still around, but they haven't caught on. But they're interesting. Yeah, absolutely. OK, next, what do we got? Do you know what that is? Does that look like anything to you? It looks, I don't know. It almost looks like it wants to be an earpiece or a speaker. You can't quite tell the size. But it's about 10 inches tall. Oh. And speaker. I'll go with speaker. It is the eye smell. Oh, goodness. Smell a vision. Right. So what they had done, this is during the internet craze where you had any kind of idea you could get millions of dollars. There were, I think, 256. They called them base scents, scents like a smell. And you could combine those in any fashion, in some fashion, and get any smell. So is this a collector or a distributor of smells? This was a distributor. The collector of smells was your nose. But you would just plug it into a USB port on your computer. So if you went to Papa John's or any pizza place, oh, man, what does that pizza smell like? It would just combine those base scents and squirt it out to you. And you go, oh, OK. I mean, that's movie theaters. That's how they earned their money, it was popcorn. They'd actually take the popcorn smell and the exit fans would be in the front. They would pipe it out. Yeah, they'd pipe it out in the dropy corner. That smells good, yeah. So but that was, and there's all kind of adult entertainment, things with that, and food, and, but it just, do we really need to smell things? I remember when I was just. It's aromatherapy, right? Yeah, scratch and sniff. That was a huge thing, you know? And I remember we had those markers that would smell. And you'd hand it to somebody and say, hey, smell this marker. Then you'd hit them on the bottom and it would always get a line right down to their nose. Oh, you had it tough. I still do that. Smell this, smell this. This is really good. But yes, that's millions, hundreds of millions of dollars invested into the eye smell. And it was just too bulky, and you had to buy cartridges and get these, and it just never worked. And you know, imagine. It almost sounds like the precursor to vaping. Maybe they put, they didn't put enough addicting things in there, right? All right, OK, so that's the eye smell. I believe that was a real product. OK. Now, I'm sure you know what this is, what that is there. How do you want to know? Microsoft Bob. No, I definitely don't know what that is. You're lucky, because you've kind of been. But Microsoft Bob was, they thought, Microsoft thought that Windows, this is kind of precursor to Windows 95, kind of in between 311 and Windows 95. And it was, the internet was too complicated. I still hear that. The desktop. So they thought, OK, we'll have, like, this is clippy. They thought that would be great. Remember clippy, the little guy in office? Looks like you're writing a letter. You want help with that? No. Oh, yeah, I do. I remember. Yes, and get a little piece of paper, and you kind of like, sprung up. Yes, I know. I didn't know his name. OK, OK. And then it would say, oh, you want to go on the internet. And it would kind of give you sites. And just a front end that made it harder, kind of got in your way more than helped you. And they probably spent millions of dollars on research and focus groups and trying to make it easy. Was this like an OS or something? It was kind of like a front end that you would put on top. I mean, like Windows 3.1 was a shell on top of DOS. Sure. But same kind of thing. This was a shell. This was an overlay on top of DOS to make things easy for you. But yeah, so Windows Bob, I mean, you ever want to see something comical? Just go on YouTube and type Windows Bob, or even Clippy. I know the RS6000 Bob, but I don't know this one. Oh, OK, there you go. OK, here we go. Now, the Newton. I clearly remember this is an Apple product. There's so many Microsoft. I had to put some Apple products on it to balance it out. I know. It's like Microsoft's got a million on this list, man. That screen just screams old. It does. And it has handwriting recognition. You could beam from one Newton to another. And contact cards and that kind of stuff. I mean, everybody says it was the precursor to the iPhone and that tablet. And I remember someone telling me, they're an Apple fan. This was back, gosh, where I got married. It was like Dark Ages, like mid-90s, early 90s. Oh, wow. Demoing it to me and just showing me how great it was. And look, I can write in cursive. And then it converts it into letters. But there was, again, no apps. There was no compelling reason to go ahead and do that. Where is, to me, what made the PC so great was Lotus 123. That was the app, right? I mean, compared to doing a spreadsheet so long ago. Yeah, right. And that was early 80s, right? You said mid-90s, and I was thinking, I'm still doing WordPerfect for DOS, man. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, so the Newton, it had a stylus. I mean, it looks a lot. I mean, when I look at my Note, whatever it is, Note 8, there's not a lot of difference. Speaker, I mean, the screen's better. But the stylus, all those kind of things, is very similar. So the Newton is great technology. It was ahead of its time, but probably too far ahead of its time. The hardware and operating system was there. But the apps behind it just weren't there. OK, this is 3D TV. And this was recent. Maybe five years ago. Was that all the rage? You were going to sit in your living room, wear those goofy glasses, right, and have that. And I never bought a 3D TV. Did you buy a 3D TV? No, but I mean, they still have 3D shows through our cable company. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's broadcast or over the wire? OK. Yeah, it's really, apparently it's still out there. And I've gone, I saw that movie with those people in the blue and the blue people. Yes. What was that movie? I don't know. James Cameron. Yeah, I can't remember. Really, are you just kidding me? What was the name of the movie? Avatar. Avatar, yes. I was trying to string you along there. Yeah, exactly. How can you miss that one? So I saw Avatar on the 3D. So it's great. It's great. But when you're doing 3D, because we turn on the TV and I don't sit there in front of the couch very often to watch TV, I'm doing other things. I'm walking to the kitchen. I'm going around. But no one in their living room wants to wear these glasses because as soon as you look away, as soon as you start doing something else, you still got these 3D glasses on. So to me, that was the big failure that they really thought that they could capture people's attention and have sit down and watch this movie. And they were saved by 4K. 4K. 4K saved the TV. Right, they're having that. OK. Now, Windows Vista. When was the last time you used Windows Vista? I want to say we had it at one of our customers. And that was, I pointed my finger on it and go, yep, we'll be upgrading that one. And I still don't think it's that bad. I still don't think. I mean, stability-wise and. I didn't realize you were such a forgiving person. I mean, depending on, like, for home people, people at home. I would have expected Windows 8, to be honest. Vista, I'm surprised. Windows 8 was a flop. Windows 8 was worse. And to me, it's all about the drivers. And drivers are what you use to run the other parts of your computer. And that's what I remember about Vista. We had the Windows 7, everything worked great. We upgraded Windows Vista, and none of the drivers worked. So in a corporate environment where you're very structured, where all the computer, you know, you have 100 computers that are the same, or 10 computers, or five, they're all the same. So if you figure it out on one computer, you load this version of this driver, this one for this one, and you do it to the rest, and you're done. But when you're at home and you got this kind of notebook and this kind of desktop, and you automatically upgrade, and nothing works, you can't, you know, have an all-in-one printer that can now it can't scan or can't do those things. It was great for IT support. Absolutely, no, absolutely. And it has gone by the wayside, but that's just too much too soon. To me, that was changed for the sake of change. Yeah. Okay, Windows Vista. Now, the segue, you know, and that's an example of, we say it's a failure. Did you ever ride one of the original segues? No. It was really funky, the control, the lean forward, lean back, to go forward and back was pretty intuitive. But on the horizontal bar, there was, on the very inside, there was a little dial, and you would like this, it was one finger wide, you'd go like this way to turn right, and the thing was solid, and this, and go forward to turn left. And it wasn't the whole bar, like a motorcycle, it was a, the left-right turn was really bizarre. You know, they were like five grand. You know, they were not cheap. But that technology, like that's the precursor, so this product failed. The technology is wildly successful. The, from remote control skateboards, you know, where you're just standing on the skateboard. I see some mall security guys using that. Yeah, they had the three wheel ones now, where you stand. So, the technology was the way to go. The gyroscope on there, they call them hoverboards. But, I mean, I've seen back to the future, I know what a real hoverboard is, that, what the people call it. I've seen Star Wars. I've seen, I know what hoverboard is. You're right, you know what hovercraft is, yeah. But that's an example of too expensive, too hard to do, and it was just, I mean, if it was a grand, I could see buying one, but yeah, so for, and then who, what president fell, was it? I don't know. I think George W., it wasn't turned on. So, yeah, he had to activate it, and then he just stood on it and he fell right over. But the segue there, okay. So, let's talk about these three, I don't know if you say they're failures, like America Online, do you know what that icon is with the three heads? You've got mail. Yeah, you've got mail, right? Friendster, and the upper left hand. What is the people one? Myspace. Wow. So those are all gone. Is that a tech failure? Is Myspace gone? It might be there, but. A skewer, but not gone, I mean. Yeah, yeah. So it's popular with musicians, but that's about it. And like Friendster, that was a precursor to Facebook, same with Myspace and AOL. But they're gone. So that's an example of, are those failures? Because they're no longer here. That's like Blackberry, just having a time out. Blackberry sold millions of units, but they just, they did that. They're on the 0% scale right now. Zero of one, right, exactly. Zero of a million. Okay, so again, my name is Matt Darnell with Comtel. Thank you so much, Greg, for joining me. We're going over some of our favorite tech failures of all time. Wishing you a happy holidays and Merry Christmas. Aloha.