Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech, and you know, I
Speaker 1: occasionally like to do episodes like the one that you're
Speaker 1: listening to now, where I talk about tech companies or
Speaker 1: tech products are just tech in general that failed. Now
Speaker 1: I would be fibbing if I said part of this
Speaker 1: wasn't due to schaden freuda, you know, that weird sense
Speaker 1: of pleasure you get from seeing someone else fail. I'm
Speaker 1: not proud of that. It is a factor, But mostly
Speaker 1: I like to cover these things to really look at
Speaker 1: what went wrong when that is you know, determinable. So
Speaker 1: was it just a bad idea? Was it a good
Speaker 1: idea but ahead of its time? Was it you know,
Speaker 1: poor execution? So it had nothing to do with the idea.
Speaker 1: Was just the way that people tried to, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: take advantage of it? You know? Was it crumby people
Speaker 1: scamming other folks or sacrificing the health of a business
Speaker 1: for their own self gain or was it some combination
Speaker 1: of these things or something entirely different. So today I
Speaker 1: thought we would revisit some various companies and tech products
Speaker 1: that failed and see what lessons we can learn, if any,
Speaker 1: and maybe maybe you know, indulge our schadenfreude along the way. Also,
Speaker 1: some of these are stories that I've covered in other
Speaker 1: episodes of Tech Stuff, but since we recently passed the
Speaker 1: one thousand, six hundred episode mark, I figure a lot
Speaker 1: of y'all probably haven't heard those. I hope you'll forgive
Speaker 1: me for going back over some stories I've talked about
Speaker 1: in the past. But let's get to it, because there
Speaker 1: are a couple of them where I feel like I
Speaker 1: need to make some updates. So I figured to start
Speaker 1: this all off it would be fun to talk about
Speaker 1: Microsoft Bob, because not only was this a notorious flop,
Speaker 1: but it also spawned some stuff famous the famously irritates
Speaker 1: people to this day, like like the comics Sans font
Speaker 1: Um often gets lumped in with Microsoft Bob. Let's let's
Speaker 1: break this all down. What exactly was Bob Well? In
Speaker 1: the early days of personal computers, using a computer was
Speaker 1: a bit daunting for the uninitiated before g u I
Speaker 1: or gooey operating systems. That's graphical user interfaces that would
Speaker 1: be stuff like the Mac operating system and Windows. Before
Speaker 1: all that we had DOSS. This was a command line
Speaker 1: based operating system. That means you would have to type
Speaker 1: in stuff to navigate the file systems and to execute programs,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't exactly intuitive, like you'd be doing c
Speaker 1: D to change different directories and things. That these systems
Speaker 1: were a bit of a barrier to entry for a
Speaker 1: lot of folks because it just looked like, you know,
Speaker 1: gibberish if you were to glance at the screen not
Speaker 1: really understand what the command's all meant. But then you
Speaker 1: had the gooey systems, the graphical user interface systems, so
Speaker 1: you had stuff like Windows and mac os where you
Speaker 1: can represent programs with icons, and clicking on an icon
Speaker 1: launches a program. This is way easier to grasp than
Speaker 1: using directory commands typed into a text based operating system.
Speaker 1: But even this could be a little intimidating for new
Speaker 1: users who had never worked with a computer ever, and
Speaker 1: so some engineers at Microsoft came up with an alternative.
Speaker 1: Bob replaced the familiar desktop layout of Windows three point
Speaker 1: one with a cartoon representation of various rooms and the
Speaker 1: objects in the room would stand end in as icons
Speaker 1: for different programs. So if you wanted to check your schedule,
Speaker 1: you could click on a calendar that's hanging on the
Speaker 1: wall in your room. Do you want to look at
Speaker 1: your monthly budget, you click on a little binder has
Speaker 1: a dollar sign on it, and that's sitting on a
Speaker 1: little coffee table. You even had a little dog named
Speaker 1: Rover who would pop up in the corner and he
Speaker 1: would give you either helpful tips or irritating ones on
Speaker 1: how to navigate and use the system. Rover would serve
Speaker 1: as a model for another Microsoft creation that would get
Speaker 1: tons of hate over the years. That would be Clippy,
Speaker 1: the paper clip that would pop up and say things like,
Speaker 1: it looks like you're trying to write a letter, would
Speaker 1: you like some help with that? And for the record,
Speaker 1: I actually did not mind Clippy, except for the times
Speaker 1: when it would try to help me do something that
Speaker 1: I had done a thousand times before. The goal of
Speaker 1: Bob was to map various computer functions to the real
Speaker 1: life equivalent of the activities you would, you know, do
Speaker 1: to manage the same thing. So it was to strip
Speaker 1: all the computer stuff away and to make it really
Speaker 1: intuitive to use. So what happened? Why did Bob flop? Well,
Speaker 1: there are several reasons. One was that Microsoft's major update
Speaker 1: to Windows, which was Windows, was right around the corner,
Speaker 1: so getting an overlay for Windows three point one just
Speaker 1: before Windows launched probably wasn't the best timing. Another was
Speaker 1: that Microsoft Bob was a one dollar purchase at launch,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty pricey piece of software. It was
Speaker 1: also resource hungry, so to run Microsoft Bob you needed
Speaker 1: a computer, and that was at least a four D
Speaker 1: six meaning Ahead and Intel four a D six processor
Speaker 1: or better. You needed eight megs of RAM and thirty
Speaker 1: megs of disk space. Now today that's nothing. Your phone
Speaker 1: has far more capabilities than that, But back in the
Speaker 1: mid nineties this represented a fairly hefty computer, and not
Speaker 1: that many people had them. But wait, there's more. According
Speaker 1: to PETTERI Jarvinen and I know I've butchered the name,
Speaker 1: I apologize anyway, a writer for a computer magazine, Microsoft
Speaker 1: Bob also had non existent security. Alright, so Bob was
Speaker 1: designed to work not just for individuals but for households,
Speaker 1: So you could create a password for your account to
Speaker 1: let you access Microsoft Bob. But apparently this was more
Speaker 1: for personalizing your experience rather than securing it. As the
Speaker 1: review said, if you entered a password incorrectly three times,
Speaker 1: the assistant like Rover would pop up to help you
Speaker 1: reset your password. Do you see an issue with that?
Speaker 1: Let's say you and I share a computer, and I
Speaker 1: happen to know that you've got a digital personal diary
Speaker 1: on that computer, but I can only access it if
Speaker 1: I were to log in as you, because you've protected
Speaker 1: it in a private space that I don't have general
Speaker 1: access to. Well, if this is true, if this piece
Speaker 1: in Computer magazine was accurate, I wouldn't even need to
Speaker 1: guess what your password was. I could type anything three
Speaker 1: times in the password field, and then reset your password
Speaker 1: to something I know and log in as you. Then
Speaker 1: I can read all your juicy secrets in that diary.
Speaker 1: When you try to log in, well, first it looks
Speaker 1: like you're locked out of your account, but if you
Speaker 1: enter the wrong password three times, you get to reset
Speaker 1: the password again, and so it goes. Or you could
Speaker 1: log into my account and reread Havock. I should add
Speaker 1: that there were only a couple of reports that this
Speaker 1: feature existed. Like I looked around to see if I
Speaker 1: could find verification that in fact, this was something that
Speaker 1: Microsoft Bob did, And in our episode where we talked
Speaker 1: about Microsoft Bob many years ago, we talked about this
Speaker 1: feature because that's what we were finding the reports on. However,
Speaker 1: I do not have Microsoft Bob installed on my machine,
Speaker 1: so I can't actually verify that that really happened, and
Speaker 1: I did see some discussions that suggest that maybe that
Speaker 1: wasn't the case. Maybe they were using an earlier version
Speaker 1: of Bob or something. I don't know because I've never
Speaker 1: personally used it, and I cannot verify this, So it's
Speaker 1: a it's good to say that this is a possibly
Speaker 1: apocryphal story, and I sure hope it is an apocryphal story,
Speaker 1: because otherwise this is effectively the same as having no
Speaker 1: password protection at all. Again, unless the password didn't exist
Speaker 1: to secure things, but rather to create a personalized experience
Speaker 1: for each individual who was using that computer. So everyone
Speaker 1: with access to that computer would be able to log
Speaker 1: in and see the UI that's laid out like a house,
Speaker 1: and each person could create their own private rooms, and
Speaker 1: they could even lock those rooms with password protection, but
Speaker 1: there would also be public rooms that everyone shared. What's more,
Speaker 1: you can make changes to public rooms. Actually can make
Speaker 1: changes to your private rooms too. You can move stuff around.
Speaker 1: You can even delete icons that go to applications. You
Speaker 1: could vandalize rooms in other words, and I don't know
Speaker 1: if the room passwords were connected to the user passwords,
Speaker 1: or if they were if you could use the same
Speaker 1: password trick that I mentioned earlier to get through it,
Speaker 1: but either way, it's not a good solution. Even if
Speaker 1: you logged in as a guest, you can make changes
Speaker 1: to all the public rooms. You could delete stuff and
Speaker 1: move things and hide icons in different places and just
Speaker 1: make life generally unpleasant for the other people who use
Speaker 1: that same shared computer or One last thing that really
Speaker 1: killed Bob was that Microsoft didn't really want to make
Speaker 1: deals with o e MS, or rather wasn't able to
Speaker 1: make any deals with O E M S. And O
Speaker 1: e M is an original equipment manufacturer, and those deals
Speaker 1: would have had Bob pre installed on new computers, but
Speaker 1: Microsoft didn't really pursue that. This is typically how companies
Speaker 1: like Microsoft get their products on brand new machines. So
Speaker 1: if you buy a computer off the shelf at a
Speaker 1: retail store or online through most providers, chances are it
Speaker 1: comes with an operating system and a suite of software
Speaker 1: that's pre installed on that machine. So behind the scenes
Speaker 1: you have these big deals going on, and Microsoft just
Speaker 1: didn't really do that with Bob very much. So Bob
Speaker 1: didn't Bob, Bob sunk. What's next. Let's talk about Microsoft
Speaker 1: a little bit longer, just for a moment. There are
Speaker 1: certain builds of Microsoft's Windows operating system that received a
Speaker 1: really bad reputation. So, for example, Windows Vista, which was
Speaker 1: released in two thousand and six, became the punching bag
Speaker 1: for a lot of computer review magazines. It was following
Speaker 1: up on the massively popular Windows XP operating system. In fact,
Speaker 1: that operating system is so popular that there are still
Speaker 1: some people out there using it like two decades later.
Speaker 1: Windows Vista confused people like right all the gate because
Speaker 1: upon launch there were six different versions of the operating
Speaker 1: system you could choose from. There was Starter Home, Basic Home, Premium, Business, Enterprise,
Speaker 1: and Ultimate. That immediately caused some confusion right away. Windows
Speaker 1: Vista also required a pretty beefy PC to run well,
Speaker 1: so people who wanted to just upgrade from Windows Xpedo
Speaker 1: Windows Vista and still use their old computer, they often
Speaker 1: found that the new operating system made their computer is
Speaker 1: really sluggish and unresponsive. And I have complained multiple times
Speaker 1: on this podcast about how I hate an operating system
Speaker 1: that hogs up computer resources because back and rag J
Speaker 1: years to dang dang, dsh prompt, and yet I liked it,
Speaker 1: and it just it was a much lighter lift for
Speaker 1: your computer, so more of your resources could go to
Speaker 1: all the programs you want to run, not the operating
Speaker 1: system that's in the background. Vista did improve over time,
Speaker 1: but that initial launch version turned a lot of people off.
Speaker 1: It was a really bad first impression. Microsoft would seemingly
Speaker 1: learn its lesson, and when Windows seven came out, the
Speaker 1: company incorporated the best of Vista's features while leaving out
Speaker 1: the worst of them. And then came Windows eight. Alright,
Speaker 1: so let's go ahead and do this one too while
Speaker 1: we're here. Windows eight launched in twenty twelve, and you
Speaker 1: know what, when I start looking at this list, I
Speaker 1: see a lot of entries that hover around twin eleven
Speaker 1: and twelve is launch dates. There was something about those
Speaker 1: years anyway. This was Microsoft's attempt to unify the PC
Speaker 1: and the tablet experience. I suppose the thought was that
Speaker 1: there were all these computers coming out they had touch screens,
Speaker 1: you know, laptops and just regular displays that were touch
Speaker 1: screen displays, and that we were all going to migrate
Speaker 1: to using computers that had these touch screen interfaces, even
Speaker 1: though most people I talked to who have machines that
Speaker 1: do have touch screen capabilities very rarely use the touch
Speaker 1: screen part. But this meant that Microsoft really doubled down
Speaker 1: on a user interface that just didn't take off. It
Speaker 1: was really optimized for like that tablet touch screen experience,
Speaker 1: but that didn't really work so well for desktop users.
Speaker 1: And as a result, the operating system was not really
Speaker 1: simple to use, and people hated it. Many people hated
Speaker 1: it enough that they uninstalled it and went back to
Speaker 1: Windows seven and again. Microsoft addressed many of the issues
Speaker 1: of Windows eight with updates, but it really wasn't until
Speaker 1: the launch of Windows ten that people came back round
Speaker 1: two being excited about a more recent Windows build. I
Speaker 1: don't know what happened to Windows nine, don't ask me.
Speaker 1: And we'll have to see if the release of Windows
Speaker 1: eleven will show that the company has actually learned its
Speaker 1: lesson or if it will repeat its past mistakes. All right,
Speaker 1: let's look at two thousand and twelve and get away
Speaker 1: from Microsoft. Two thousand twelve is when Google introduced a
Speaker 1: spherical media streaming device called the Nexus Q. And by introduced,
Speaker 1: I mean unveiled, not launched. Uh. It kind of looked
Speaker 1: a bit like a black bowling ball with you know,
Speaker 1: a logo on it. It was sort of a predecessor
Speaker 1: to Google's Smart Speaker homes system and the Google Chrome
Speaker 1: Cat gadgets. The Nexus Queue was meant to bring streaming
Speaker 1: media to the living room. Now by streaming media, I
Speaker 1: should be really clear, the Nexus Que had very limited options.
Speaker 1: You could stream YouTube videos, you could stream Google Play
Speaker 1: movies and TV shows, or you could stream music from
Speaker 1: Google Play Music, and that was it. This was two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve. Netflix had been streaming content for five years already.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of other streaming audio services out there
Speaker 1: that were really interesting, and critics lamented that you had
Speaker 1: such limited options on the Nexus Q. To control the
Speaker 1: Nexus Que, you needed to pair a smart device with it,
Speaker 1: whether it's smartphone or a tablet, and there was a
Speaker 1: special app that you would run on that Android based device.
Speaker 1: This would effectively turn your phone or tablet into a
Speaker 1: remote control. There was no voice integration with the Nexus Q,
Speaker 1: and it was expensive. The base model was meant to
Speaker 1: retail for two dollars that didn't include speakers, so if
Speaker 1: you wanted to use your Nexus Queue to listen to music,
Speaker 1: you would have to shell out some extra dough for speakers.
Speaker 1: Unless you just happen to have some speakers that had
Speaker 1: you know, banana plugs, that's the style of plug that
Speaker 1: would go into the Nexus queue, then you could repurpose
Speaker 1: those for your Nexus queue. Otherwise you had to buy
Speaker 1: new ones that could be a few hundred bucks. Buying
Speaker 1: the cables would also set you back another fifty dollars
Speaker 1: or so. Google handed out free Nexus Q units to
Speaker 1: attendees of the IO event that year. I did not go.
Speaker 1: I've only been to one I O event and it
Speaker 1: was one of the ones where Google had nothing to
Speaker 1: hand out. So uh, I mean, I'm not big on
Speaker 1: getting handouts anyway, because I don't review products, so it'd
Speaker 1: feel weird to get them. But this was one of
Speaker 1: those things that sticks in my craw the fact that
Speaker 1: the one year I go was Yere where there was
Speaker 1: there was no goodies anyway. Apparently Google got some feedback
Speaker 1: about how the Tech was lackluster in comparison with other
Speaker 1: similar streaming solutions on the market, and Google pushed back
Speaker 1: the planned launch date from the summer of twelve to never.
Speaker 1: Google abandoned plans to launch it, so now they're just
Speaker 1: kind of collector's items. I guess maybe now I could
Speaker 1: do an entire episode just on Google failures. In fact
Speaker 1: that I think I might have done that at some point.
Speaker 1: So instead of that, we're going to cover some other
Speaker 1: notable misfires in tech after we take this quick break.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. Let's get back to two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: two thousand, two thousand and twelve and magical time and tech.
Speaker 1: A startup called color Labs started up it right in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven. They wanted to take aim at photo sharing
Speaker 1: on smartphones with a brand new app called Color. Bill Nuen,
Speaker 1: fresh off a massive deal in which he sold off
Speaker 1: an earlier startup he had founded called La La. He
Speaker 1: sold that to Apple for a whopping eighty million dollars,
Speaker 1: founded Color Labs, and it was intended to compete with
Speaker 1: apps like Instagram, which was not yet part of the
Speaker 1: Facebook family back in twenty eleven, but it was going
Speaker 1: to do this in a fundamentally different way. So rather
Speaker 1: than follow specific people like your friends or celebrities or
Speaker 1: you know, dogs that you know, I might be talking
Speaker 1: more about my habits on Instagram here. Instead, you would
Speaker 1: use color to look at photos that were taken an
Speaker 1: uploaded near wherever you were in the world at that time. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, you would wander around the world. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's just your town, maybe it's a city you've never
Speaker 1: visited before. You would whip out your phone, you'd open
Speaker 1: up the Color app, and you would see who had
Speaker 1: taken what photos near the spot you were in, which
Speaker 1: I guess sounds interesting for certain types of experiences and photos,
Speaker 1: but to me, it also sounds kind of like just
Speaker 1: peeking in on the photos of people you most likely
Speaker 1: don't know most of the time. I suspect that's pretty boring.
Speaker 1: Or you're looking at photos, it's something that you can
Speaker 1: actually see for yourself right where you are at that moment,
Speaker 1: so you can say, like, hey, look, honey, someone uploaded
Speaker 1: a picture of a tree that's right there, which doesn't
Speaker 1: seem super compelling. Now I can see how such an
Speaker 1: app might be interesting during big events that are happening
Speaker 1: in a specific place like if you attended a concert
Speaker 1: or a festival, or the Olympics or something, then you
Speaker 1: might want to open up Color and look at photos
Speaker 1: of other people were taking and uploading. But again, and
Speaker 1: you'd likely get a ton of people who are taking
Speaker 1: pictures with their friends, and you know, without knowing anyone
Speaker 1: in the photos, you'd just be looking at random pictures.
Speaker 1: Add to this issue the fact that the user interface
Speaker 1: on Color was needlessly up tous, and you had a
Speaker 1: recipe for failure. And that's exactly what happened with Color Labs.
Speaker 1: The company is stuck around for a little less than
Speaker 1: two years. Before it closed up shop. Color was a flop.
Speaker 1: You know. One recent flop I feel like I need
Speaker 1: to talk about briefly was Quimby, which I've done episodes
Speaker 1: on before. Quimby was a failed service that that crashed
Speaker 1: partly due to just incredibly bad timing and partly because
Speaker 1: I'm just not sure that the actual use case for
Speaker 1: Quimby was that compelling to start with. In other words,
Speaker 1: you could blame the pandemic for Quimby's demise, but I'm
Speaker 1: not convinced Quimby would have stuck around even if we
Speaker 1: hadn't had the pandemic. Now, if you don't remember Quimby,
Speaker 1: don't blame you. Even though it launched just last year.
Speaker 1: It was a video streaming service in which subscribers would
Speaker 1: be able to watch exclusive, highly produced content on mobile devices.
Speaker 1: The whole use case for Quimby was that people like
Speaker 1: to be on their phones. So you might, you know,
Speaker 1: get in line somewhere like at the coffee shop, and
Speaker 1: you look at your phone as you wait. So the
Speaker 1: thought was, why not design an app that specifically targets
Speaker 1: those people. This design extended not just to the user interface,
Speaker 1: but also to the content itself. So, for one thing,
Speaker 1: you could watch quimby content either in portrait mode or
Speaker 1: in the landscape mode on your device, and your view
Speaker 1: would shift to get a full screen experience, no matter
Speaker 1: which way you were holding your smartphone, for example. But
Speaker 1: this meant that content creators needed to be aware of that,
Speaker 1: and that meant that they needed to be really careful
Speaker 1: at how they film thinks, because if you were viewing
Speaker 1: it in portrait mode, you know long ways like up
Speaker 1: and down, you might miss out on important details that
Speaker 1: would otherwise be at the edge of the frame. If
Speaker 1: you were watching it in landscape mode, so filmmakers had
Speaker 1: to take that into consideration. Otherwise, you know, like let's
Speaker 1: say you're watching a mystery and there's a visible clue
Speaker 1: if you're holding your phone and landscape, but when you
Speaker 1: hold an in portrait, it's punched in and you don't
Speaker 1: see that clue, You're missing out on something important. As
Speaker 1: for the content piece, Quimby content was meant to be short,
Speaker 1: like ten minutes, bite sized, quick bites. That's what Quimby was.
Speaker 1: Content creators can make long form shows and movies, but
Speaker 1: the user would access these in chapters that maxed out
Speaker 1: at ten minutes. This meant that as a content creator,
Speaker 1: you needed to structure your work so that you could
Speaker 1: tell a story or at least an effective part of
Speaker 1: a story, in ten minute chunks. For movies, this would
Speaker 1: mean that would ideally have a piece, though it end
Speaker 1: on a cliffhanger, and that kind of encourages the viewer
Speaker 1: to keep watching and go to the next chapter, which
Speaker 1: is sort of like a Dan Brown novel and just
Speaker 1: as awful. I admit my bias is showing and I
Speaker 1: don't care. The subscription models for Quimby came in two flavors.
Speaker 1: You could cough up five bucks a month to watch
Speaker 1: the content, along with ad support thrown in so you
Speaker 1: would get commercials, or you could up that to eight
Speaker 1: dollars per month and get an ad free experience. It
Speaker 1: wasn't as expensive as some other streaming media platforms, so
Speaker 1: at least it had that going for it. Back in ten,
Speaker 1: when Jeffrey Katzenberg of Disney and DreamWorks fame first founded
Speaker 1: the company, he brought on Meg Whitman to serve as CEO.
Speaker 1: Even then, the idea was a long shot. But then
Speaker 1: when the service launched in April of twenty the world
Speaker 1: was in a very different place. COVID nineteen outbreaks meant
Speaker 1: that the world was going into lockdown. People weren't finding
Speaker 1: themselves in these situations that Quimby's founders had envisioned as
Speaker 1: being the perfect scenarios to engage in Quimby content. Because
Speaker 1: you know, there were no more lines, people were at home,
Speaker 1: they could watch stuff on computers and television's. The short
Speaker 1: form approach that was optimized for mobile just didn't make
Speaker 1: much sense at that point. Making matters worse is that
Speaker 1: the company really front loaded the content for launch. They
Speaker 1: spent an enormous amount of money to have a library
Speaker 1: of shows and films for users, and Quimby offered a
Speaker 1: pretty generous free trial, but saw that many people simply
Speaker 1: canceled their accounts rather than switching to becoming paid subscribers,
Speaker 1: so it was unsustainable. Quimby was only around for about
Speaker 1: half a year. The company announced it would be shutting
Speaker 1: down and in early one it sold off all remaining
Speaker 1: assets to Roku. Let's go from Quimby to Quirky. This
Speaker 1: one was a heck of a one to look into.
Speaker 1: I went down a rabbit hole while researching quirky. Uh,
Speaker 1: And this one's an outlier in our list because Quirky
Speaker 1: is maybe still around today, but it's in a different
Speaker 1: form from what it was at launch. So back in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, there was an entrepreneur, an inventor named
Speaker 1: Ben Kaufman who launched this new company and the purpose
Speaker 1: of this company was to give would be inventors an
Speaker 1: opportunity to monetize inventions and turn them into real products.
Speaker 1: And that was a kind of nifty idea. Of the
Speaker 1: idea is that the inventors would submit their ideas Quirky analysts.
Speaker 1: Analysts for quirky nut analysts who were quirky would review
Speaker 1: the submissions and the good ones would get turned into products,
Speaker 1: and the people who submitted the invention would get a
Speaker 1: royalty on a per sale basis. Uh, it's one thing
Speaker 1: to come up with the world's next hit invention, but
Speaker 1: it's another thing to actually bring that invention to market.
Speaker 1: So inventors are not always, you know, in the employee
Speaker 1: of a big company, and so that's where Quirky was
Speaker 1: really stepping in, and inventors could submit their work and
Speaker 1: then they could possibly profit off of that. The royalties
Speaker 1: were very small, like one and a half percent per sale.
Speaker 1: But if you think about it, if you don't have
Speaker 1: any way of actually producing your invention and bringing it
Speaker 1: to market yourself, then it's not doing you any good
Speaker 1: at all. So it's it was kind of like a
Speaker 1: better than nothing kind of alternative. Kaufman's team raised around
Speaker 1: two million dollars in various rounds of financing, and the
Speaker 1: company did bring some products to market. In fact, several
Speaker 1: products to market, including an automated home hub platform called Wink,
Speaker 1: but not all the products were hits, and the costs
Speaker 1: of manufacturing were such that Quirkies broad approach became unsustainable.
Speaker 1: In early Quirky change strategies and rather than produced stuff itself,
Speaker 1: it would seek out licensing partnerships with established big companies
Speaker 1: like Ge and Amazon. But Quirky was still losing money,
Speaker 1: and in the summer of the company was out of
Speaker 1: cash and filed for bankruptcy. In that process, the company
Speaker 1: sold off its wink platform for fifteen million dollars to
Speaker 1: another company called Flextronics. Flex Stars had actually been contracted
Speaker 1: to manufacture the Wink products, so they just bought the
Speaker 1: i P and a group of investors bought out the
Speaker 1: rest of Quirky's assets, and a couple of years later,
Speaker 1: Quirky returned with a slightly different approach. The new Quirky
Speaker 1: doesn't get into the manufacturing side at all. Investors get
Speaker 1: that one point five percent royalty on the wholesale price
Speaker 1: of the product inmming from their invention, and that's paid
Speaker 1: out once per quarter, so four times a year. Max
Speaker 1: Gina wald Horn, who had co founded a company called Evolation,
Speaker 1: took over as president of the new organization, but according
Speaker 1: to her LinkedIn profile, she stepped down in two thousand nineteen. However,
Speaker 1: her Twitter bio still reads that she's president of Quirky.
Speaker 1: I honestly don't know who is in charge of Quirky
Speaker 1: right now. I did a search and everything. I even
Speaker 1: searched the Secretary of State website to try and find
Speaker 1: out more information, but everything pointed back to Gina, who
Speaker 1: appears to be pointed away from Quirky. She now serves
Speaker 1: as the chief operating officer of the Sports Innovation Lab.
Speaker 1: So I don't know who's in charge of Quirky at all,
Speaker 1: or if Quirky is still an ongoing thing. The company
Speaker 1: hasn't posted a video to its YouTube site since two
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen, or I'm sorry two thousand eighteen. It hasn't
Speaker 1: posted an Instagram posts since two thousand nineteen, so I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know if it's currently active or not.
Speaker 1: All the sources I found say it's active and the
Speaker 1: website still up. You can still create an account there
Speaker 1: and everything, so I don't know anyway. Next, let's talk
Speaker 1: about a company that was aiming to shake up the
Speaker 1: smartphone space a bit, and I'm talking about Essential Products,
Speaker 1: a company co founded by the Android founder Andy Ruben
Speaker 1: in two thousand fifteen. This was before the allegations about
Speaker 1: misconduct and sexual harassment, and worse about Reuben. It was
Speaker 1: before all that became public, Reuben was seen as as
Speaker 1: a kind of tech genius. The Android operating system had
Speaker 1: become the most popular mobile os in the world, and
Speaker 1: people were eager to see what Reuben would bring when
Speaker 1: given the chance to head up the DESI line of
Speaker 1: a new phone and not answer to Google. The company
Speaker 1: worked largely in secret for two years before announcing the
Speaker 1: Essential Phone in two thousand seventeen, and the design was
Speaker 1: pretty attractive. The screen on the phone was more or
Speaker 1: less bezel less, meaning the screen just covered the entire
Speaker 1: front section of the phone phone except for a tiny
Speaker 1: notch for the phone's camera. The company received a billion
Speaker 1: dollars and investments from various big companies like Amazon and
Speaker 1: Fox Con as well as other investor groups, and the
Speaker 1: Essential Phone debuted two months late, and early reviews found
Speaker 1: a few flaws. Uh there were bugs in the software
Speaker 1: that made it difficult to use, the camera wasn't nearly
Speaker 1: as good as what had been promised, and making matters
Speaker 1: worse for the company was the launch of the iPhone ten,
Speaker 1: which had a similar form factor without the issues of
Speaker 1: the Essential Phone. So sales were disappointing. They were lackluster.
Speaker 1: The company announced plans for a second phone, but that
Speaker 1: second phone never materialized. The world heard about the allegations
Speaker 1: against Reuben and the subsequent enormous golden parachute he received
Speaker 1: from Google upon leaving the company, and that seriously overshadowed
Speaker 1: anything that Essential was working on. The company folded in
Speaker 1: early twenty Now, our next entry requires a bit of
Speaker 1: an ancient history lesson, So scooch closer to the fire
Speaker 1: and let old prospector Johnny tell you a tale of
Speaker 1: m m O RPGs, or masterly multiplayer online or ale
Speaker 1: playing games. Now, before there was a world of Warcraft,
Speaker 1: which for some people is synonymous with m m O RPG,
Speaker 1: there was a little fantasy game called EverQuest. Ever Quest
Speaker 1: was the was not the first m m O RPG either.
Speaker 1: I want to make that clear. That's a story for
Speaker 1: a different time. Ever Quest is a game that technically
Speaker 1: still running today. You can even play ever Quest for free.
Speaker 1: But the thing I want to talk about was a
Speaker 1: proposed spinoff of EverQuest called ever Quest Next. This would
Speaker 1: have gone beyond an expansion pack or an iterative update
Speaker 1: it was in some form of development, since at least
Speaker 1: the ideas for ever Quest Next were really ambitious. The
Speaker 1: world of EverQuest Next would change organically as players interacted
Speaker 1: with it. So one example I heard is that imagine
Speaker 1: that you and some other players clear out of space.
Speaker 1: You go adventuring, you you clear out of space of monsters,
Speaker 1: and you decide to decide to establish a town there,
Speaker 1: and you you build houses and you've got a town.
Speaker 1: But then you go off adventuring and you're gone for
Speaker 1: a really long time, and there's no one left behind
Speaker 1: at your town. You might come back and find that
Speaker 1: your town has been resettled by bandits or orcs or
Speaker 1: something like that. So, in other words, there would be
Speaker 1: emergent gameplay that would develop on its own, just based
Speaker 1: on what was happening within the world. This is in
Speaker 1: contrast with the way most online world's work, in which
Speaker 1: game developers design scenarios for players to go through that
Speaker 1: have a beginning, middle, and end that's already pre written
Speaker 1: and there's no lasting impact on the online world itself.
Speaker 1: Creating a changing online world is a tough path to follow.
Speaker 1: I mean, imagine if a game server were invaded by griefers,
Speaker 1: and the griefers set about just trying to change the
Speaker 1: online world in such a way that it becomes unwelcoming
Speaker 1: to everyone else, for example. But it was a really
Speaker 1: cool idea. Unfortunately, it was a cool idea that was
Speaker 1: really hard to do, and the developers went back to
Speaker 1: the drawing board at least once as technology continued to
Speaker 1: improve while the game development languished in developmental hell, we
Speaker 1: saw a very similar issue with the game Newcombe Forever,
Speaker 1: which famously was considered vaporware for the better part, in fact,
Speaker 1: more than a decade before it finally came out. And
Speaker 1: part of the reason it was considered vaporware is that
Speaker 1: the head of that project kept demanding the game be
Speaker 1: rebuilt essentially from scratch in order to take advantage of
Speaker 1: the latest in game engines and computational abilities. So the
Speaker 1: team would be working on a build of the game,
Speaker 1: then you would get a better game engine, and the
Speaker 1: lead of the project would say, all right, well we
Speaker 1: need to make this game for this new game engine.
Speaker 1: Subscribe everything and start over. Meanwhile, other issues were complicating
Speaker 1: matters for the EverQuest team. In two thousand fifteen, Sony,
Speaker 1: which had been uh you know publishing ever Request under
Speaker 1: Sony Online Entertainment spun off that division into a new
Speaker 1: company with the name Daybreak Game Company, So now Daybreak
Speaker 1: Game Company was in charge of EverQuest Next. A year later,
Speaker 1: development on EverQuest Next came to an end. Reportedly, the
Speaker 1: reason for stopping was because they had been working on
Speaker 1: this property for several years and the end result just
Speaker 1: wasn't fun to play, So rather than chase a moving target,
Speaker 1: the company focused on other titles, including ever Request to
Speaker 1: a more traditional M M O RPG one where the
Speaker 1: world doesn't change with player activity. When we come back,
Speaker 1: we'll look at a few more random failures in the
Speaker 1: tech world, but first let's take a quick break. The
Speaker 1: next one is another story that has an addendum to it,
Speaker 1: and we get to go back to two thousand twelve.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's something about that year right Anyway, That's
Speaker 1: when the world learned that Valve, the company famous for
Speaker 1: the computer game online marketplace called Steam as well as
Speaker 1: for creating really notable games like Half Life Portal and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, was going to release some hardware, and
Speaker 1: not just any hardware, but a dedicated game console that
Speaker 1: would be able to play PC games. In fact, The
Speaker 1: console was essentially a Linux based PC running a special
Speaker 1: Linux distro or version called Steam OS. Valve partnered with
Speaker 1: various companies to make it all come true, and therein
Speaker 1: was part of the problem. It was kind of like
Speaker 1: what happened with the old three D O game console
Speaker 1: years earlier, and the result was that you had Valve
Speaker 1: working with different PC companies and they were each producing
Speaker 1: Steam machines, so that meant that different companies produced their
Speaker 1: own version of the Steam Machine console. That meant there
Speaker 1: was no unifying design or set of specs, so you
Speaker 1: could look at two different Steam machines and find that
Speaker 1: they have wildly different features, really confused market. It also
Speaker 1: didn't help the game developers were kind of thrown under
Speaker 1: the bus for this. Even game developers that hoarded games
Speaker 1: to run on Linux found that those games weren't necessarily
Speaker 1: running so smoothly on Steam operating system. Sometimes they couldn't
Speaker 1: run at all. Many of the manufacturers chose to include
Speaker 1: Windows as well as the Linux distro, or some of
Speaker 1: them would just sub Windows in entirely and get rid
Speaker 1: of the Steam operating system. That was not a great look.
Speaker 1: The consoles did start to come out around two thou fourteen,
Speaker 1: but they got pretty mediocre reviews. Uh, the Steam controller
Speaker 1: had a little more love than the consoles did. By
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen, most companies had just stopped making Steam machines.
Speaker 1: They were pretty much extinct. But life, uh finds a way. Recently,
Speaker 1: Valve announced it was producing a handheld gaming device capable
Speaker 1: of playing PC games. And it's called the Steam Deck
Speaker 1: and its supposed to be available starting this December one.
Speaker 1: I do wonder how the semiconductor chip shortage is going
Speaker 1: to affect the supply of the Steam Deck. Don't know
Speaker 1: about that yet, but it is an interesting design. It
Speaker 1: kind of makes me think of the Nintendo Switch when
Speaker 1: you're using Nintendo Switch in handheld mode. Uh. Just like
Speaker 1: the Nintendo Switch. You will be able to connect the
Speaker 1: Steam Deck to a television using a dock or cables.
Speaker 1: This one will come in a few different loadouts. The
Speaker 1: prices range from three dollars for the base model up
Speaker 1: to six for one that has greater storage capacity. The
Speaker 1: Steam Deck will run on an updated version of the
Speaker 1: Steam operating system. The Linux users will also be able
Speaker 1: to take advantage of the normal Linux desktop if they
Speaker 1: want to, and just navigate to other sources, not just Steam,
Speaker 1: in order to get the content on these these handheld computers,
Speaker 1: that's what they are. I'll likely do a full episode
Speaker 1: about this later on, maybe when we get closer to launch.
Speaker 1: But this is not the time to talk about unreleased tech.
Speaker 1: It's time to talk about tech fails. And hopefully the
Speaker 1: Steam Deck will not join that list, but it's too
Speaker 1: early to say. So let's get to things that we
Speaker 1: do know failed. Now. Some fails seem inevitable in retrospect
Speaker 1: because and even casual examination of the technology reveals problems.
Speaker 1: Let us talk for a moment about the Juicero Press,
Speaker 1: which was a curig like device that could produce a
Speaker 1: fresh glass of fruit or vegetable juice at the touch
Speaker 1: of a button. So you would purchase the juice and pouches.
Speaker 1: You would insert the pouches into this machine, which would
Speaker 1: scan the the pouch and then it would, you know,
Speaker 1: you touch a button and the machine would squeeze the
Speaker 1: bag empty and the contents of the pouch would go
Speaker 1: into a glass beneath the machine. Or alternatively, if that
Speaker 1: was too much work, you could just grab one of
Speaker 1: the juice pouches by hand hold it over a glass,
Speaker 1: squeeze the bag yourself, and you would get the same result.
Speaker 1: So the Juicero Press was a very expensive pouch squeezing machine.
Speaker 1: So how expensive while at launch it costs seven hundred
Speaker 1: dollars and on top of that, you would have to
Speaker 1: subscribe to the company to get a selection of fruit
Speaker 1: and vegetable juice pouches sent to you on a regular basis.
Speaker 1: You couldn't just put like fruit in there. I had
Speaker 1: to be these pouches. But wait, it gets worse. So
Speaker 1: the Juicero Press did have a little more tech to
Speaker 1: it than just a pouch squeezing mechanism. It had a
Speaker 1: scanner and it could connect to WiFi, and you use
Speaker 1: that scanner to scan the pouches that had a little
Speaker 1: Q hard code on them, and you'd have to do
Speaker 1: that before you could enjoy a glass of juice. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't squeeze the pouch until you scanned it first. Now,
Speaker 1: the company claimed the purpose of this feature was to
Speaker 1: verify that the juice was fresh, because these juice pouches
Speaker 1: had a shelf life of a little more than a week,
Speaker 1: so you wanted to make sure you weren't drinking spoiled juice.
Speaker 1: That's not a great idea. So the company said, the
Speaker 1: Juice roe Press will verify that the pouch is actually
Speaker 1: good to go before actually squeezing it into your glass.
Speaker 1: But other people pointed out that this specific approach also
Speaker 1: meant that the company could deny any other organization from
Speaker 1: making compatible juice pouches. If the Juice eoe Press first
Speaker 1: has to scan a code before it can squeeze out
Speaker 1: some juice, then it could effectively be a form of
Speaker 1: digital rights management. That QR code is DRM. It prevents
Speaker 1: anyone else from making their own pouches, and that a
Speaker 1: juicer row the monopoly or at least opened up the
Speaker 1: opportunity for Juice Road to have like licensing deals so
Speaker 1: no one can make pouches without the company's permission. By
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen, the company was calling it quits with
Speaker 1: the press. They were calling the sold units and refunding customers,
Speaker 1: and it became a symbol for the excesses of startup
Speaker 1: culture in general and Silicon Valley in particular. I mean literally,
Speaker 1: this machine was not necessary. You could just take those
Speaker 1: pouches and squeeze them yourself and get the same, you
Speaker 1: know result, And you could do that, you know, it
Speaker 1: was far cheaper to just go and buy pouches of
Speaker 1: fruit juice. Like doing the subscription didn't make much sense.
Speaker 1: I think the juice pouches were somewhere of it between
Speaker 1: five dollars and eight dollars a pop. It's very expensive,
Speaker 1: definitely access. Sticking with two seventeen, that's when Apple announced
Speaker 1: a product called air Power, and it was meant to
Speaker 1: be a new kind of wireless charger capable of charging
Speaker 1: up to three Apple devices simultaneously. So wireless charging was
Speaker 1: already a thing, of course, using you know, inductive coils
Speaker 1: to recharge nearby tech. Typically you nestle the tech on
Speaker 1: a dock or you lay it down on a pad,
Speaker 1: but Apple's goal was to create a charging pad large
Speaker 1: enough to have say, an iPhone and Apple Watch and
Speaker 1: some air pods all charging on it at the same time,
Speaker 1: and all without having to find the specific you know,
Speaker 1: hot spots on the pad where charging could occur. The
Speaker 1: idea being like, you just lay your tech on this pad,
Speaker 1: You're good to go. You don't have to fuss with it.
Speaker 1: Apple unveiled this idea while revealing the iPhone eight and
Speaker 1: the iPhone ten. Again we skip over nines, and they
Speaker 1: said that the air Power would come to the market
Speaker 1: in two thousand eighteen. But then two thousand eighteen happened
Speaker 1: and air Power didn't. In the spring of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: tech journalists reported that Apple had quietly canceled the project.
Speaker 1: So what happened Well, Reportedly, the engineers at Apple discovered
Speaker 1: that their goal was harder to achieve than they first thought.
Speaker 1: It was tough to create a working pad that didn't
Speaker 1: have issues with interference or overheating and offered for you know,
Speaker 1: charging across the entire pad so you didn't have to
Speaker 1: worry about where things go. So after several failed attempts
Speaker 1: to actually create a reliable and working and safe product,
Speaker 1: the company pulled the plug, so to speak. Recently, mac
Speaker 1: rumors reported that Apple is actually still investigating the possibility
Speaker 1: of creating a wireless charging pads similar to what the
Speaker 1: air Power was meant to be. And also, according to
Speaker 1: those same rumors, Apple is also looking into alternatives for
Speaker 1: charging pads, seeking out solutions that could allow for wireless
Speaker 1: charging over greater distances. Now, typically that's pretty tricky. He
Speaker 1: usually requires you supply more power to the charging device
Speaker 1: in order to reach these greater distances, and at some
Speaker 1: point you reach a stage where it's just inefficient and
Speaker 1: expensive to do that. Now, some fails don't look like
Speaker 1: fails right away. They can stick around for a good
Speaker 1: long while. And that's the case for our final one.
Speaker 1: And it's a shame because this company made some really
Speaker 1: neat stuff. And I'm talking about Ankie or on Key
Speaker 1: a n k I, and I'm talking specifically about the
Speaker 1: hardware company that specialized in robotics and AI in toys.
Speaker 1: Founded in twenty ten. The company first got attention in
Speaker 1: when it unveiled the Onky drive product. And this was
Speaker 1: a really cool idea. So imagine your typical toy race
Speaker 1: car racetrack in the old days. You would have a
Speaker 1: handheld controller with a trigger on it and that would
Speaker 1: just let you, you know, control the speed of your
Speaker 1: vehicle as you raced it along your designated lane in
Speaker 1: a pre built track. You know, maybe there's two lanes,
Speaker 1: but there's like a little divide or there, so your
Speaker 1: cars in one and your opponent's cars and the other. Well,
Speaker 1: Anki took this idea and brought it into the future.
Speaker 1: The tracks and Anchi drive are wider than your typical
Speaker 1: toy race car track with no dividers, and there are
Speaker 1: multiple lanes on these tracks. The toy cars had AI
Speaker 1: incorporated into them and would connect to your smartphone via
Speaker 1: an app, and they could actually change lanes so they
Speaker 1: weren't stuck in one specific pathway on this track. You could,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of like in a highway. You could
Speaker 1: change lanes that way. So you would build out a
Speaker 1: race track using some pretty darn expensive pieces. Then you
Speaker 1: would put your vehicles down the track to travel the
Speaker 1: entire length of the track in AI mode. This would
Speaker 1: let the AI learn the tracks layout, kind of mapping
Speaker 1: it out. After doing that, you could race against an
Speaker 1: AI controlled car, so AI would control one vehicle and
Speaker 1: you would control the other, or you could race against
Speaker 1: friends who are controlling one or more other vehicles. In
Speaker 1: addition to speed control, you would tilt your smartphone to
Speaker 1: the left or to the right to trigger the accelerometer.
Speaker 1: That would cause your car to switch into a different lane,
Speaker 1: so your toy car wasn't stuck in that same lane
Speaker 1: all the way around. You could change lanes to pass
Speaker 1: someone else or to avoid an obstacle, and the app
Speaker 1: also had a couple of features that let you use
Speaker 1: quote unquote weapons against other players on the track. Uh,
Speaker 1: if you got close enough to an opponent and you
Speaker 1: activated a weapon, then a little signal would pass between
Speaker 1: the two cars and it would cause your opponent to
Speaker 1: maybe slow down or even spin out. It was pretty neat,
Speaker 1: and if you wanted a set, you also needed a
Speaker 1: really nice, big place to set everything up because these
Speaker 1: tracks took up a lot of space, and you would
Speaker 1: also be spending around a hundred fifty dollars just for
Speaker 1: the basic set. If you wanted any additional vehicles, each
Speaker 1: one would cost you another fifty bucks, and I think
Speaker 1: it was sixty dollars to buy an expansion set of track,
Speaker 1: So if you didn't have all you needed when you
Speaker 1: were setting up at first, you would have to shall
Speaker 1: out even more money. So yeah, it was a large
Speaker 1: and very expensive toy, but it had some genuinely neat
Speaker 1: features that I thought were pretty cool. A few years later,
Speaker 1: and Ki released a robot called Cosmo Robot that kind
Speaker 1: of made me think a lot of Wally and Wally
Speaker 1: to be clear, was a movie that came out eight
Speaker 1: years before Cosmo launched. It looks a bit like a
Speaker 1: little bulldozer. It's got a little digital screen for a
Speaker 1: face and very expressive digital eyes. You could interact with
Speaker 1: Cosmo using an app, and you could play with it
Speaker 1: as it moves around, you know, it picks up blocks
Speaker 1: and stacks the blocks, or turns them around, or or
Speaker 1: just explores its environment on its own. And the app
Speaker 1: included several games that you could play with or against Cosmo.
Speaker 1: And I've watched videos of this thing. It's really super
Speaker 1: duper cute. If you ever want to watch a video
Speaker 1: of it, it's Cosmos spelled c o z m o
Speaker 1: Aki released a different robot that had a very similar
Speaker 1: form factor to Cosmo, called the Vector. Vector had some
Speaker 1: virtual assistant features incorporated into it. It connected via WiFi
Speaker 1: to home networks and used four microphones to pick up
Speaker 1: sound and voice commands, and it also had an integrated
Speaker 1: camera it could help the robot navigated, also allowed it
Speaker 1: to take photos. But in twenty nineteen, Andy found itself
Speaker 1: running out of money. The company had been selling robotic
Speaker 1: toy products for about six years. It raised nearly two
Speaker 1: million dollars in funding, but the bottom line was that
Speaker 1: despite having sold more than a million and a half
Speaker 1: robot products, it just was not bringing in enough revenue
Speaker 1: to stay in business. A company called Digital Dream Labs
Speaker 1: acquired ankees I p including the Vector robot, which they
Speaker 1: the Labs said it would continue to support and develop. Now,
Speaker 1: because the Vector relies on the cloud for much of
Speaker 1: its functionality, to get the most out of it, you
Speaker 1: need a persistent Internet connection, and now you need a
Speaker 1: monthly subscription to connect the Vector to cloud services. That
Speaker 1: subscription is seven dollars per month or forty seven dollars
Speaker 1: per year. That more than upset a few Vector owners
Speaker 1: who had already spent a couple of hundred dollars just
Speaker 1: buying the robot, and they were saying, why do I
Speaker 1: have to keep paying to make the thing I bought
Speaker 1: keep working? But the reality was that Ankie was gone,
Speaker 1: that company no longer existed. Their servers were going to
Speaker 1: be offline without some other companies stepping in. So no
Speaker 1: matter what, the Vector was going to change. Right if
Speaker 1: Ankie was just gone and the servers would be offline
Speaker 1: and all that functionality would disappear. It does stink to
Speaker 1: have purchased something and then have to pay an ongoing
Speaker 1: fee to have it continue to work. But these are
Speaker 1: the risks we encounter in the world that is increasingly
Speaker 1: dependent upon cloud based services. And that's just a few
Speaker 1: examples of some big tech fails. I might do another
Speaker 1: episode about this and get another collection to include up here,
Speaker 1: just to illustrate how different pathways can lead to failure.
Speaker 1: And again, it might be a poor design, it might
Speaker 1: be a bad business plan. It maybe because there was
Speaker 1: some external change, maybe like a change in the market
Speaker 1: that affects you. Or it could be that the original
Speaker 1: idea was just no good. Uh So keep any year out.
Speaker 1: I might do another one of these and play around
Speaker 1: with some more failures and talk about those, because we
Speaker 1: do learn a lot in the process. Hopefully when we
Speaker 1: talk about these failures, no one like lost their shirt
Speaker 1: or anything in the pros says and learned something along
Speaker 1: the way. But you know, failure is no fun. I've
Speaker 1: failed plenty of times and I've never enjoyed it, but
Speaker 1: I can at least appreciate what I learned as a
Speaker 1: process of failing. If you have thoughts about things I
Speaker 1: should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, do not
Speaker 1: fail to send me a message. Do so on Twitter.
Speaker 1: The handle for the show is tech Stuff h S.
Speaker 1: W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.