Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? So obviously I love talking about technology.
Speaker 1: It's a good thing, considering more than two thousand episodes
Speaker 1: of tech stuff to my name at this point, and
Speaker 1: as the episode on Libra and dem indicates, I also
Speaker 1: love talking about tech products that never actually made it
Speaker 1: to market. With Libra slash dm that was a cryptocurrency
Speaker 1: initially spearheaded by Facebook, but a skeptical regulatory environment sealed
Speaker 1: that project's fate within a couple of years of it
Speaker 1: having been announced. So I thought we could look into
Speaker 1: other technologies that died before consumers could actually decide if,
Speaker 1: you know, they were good products or not. You know,
Speaker 1: the market didn't even get a chance to make a
Speaker 1: decision in these cases. So let's start with a product
Speaker 1: concept that I thought was a really cool idea in
Speaker 1: the first decade of the two thousands, as that was
Speaker 1: coming to an end, I remember seeing the news on
Speaker 1: this and thinking it was pretty cool. I don't even
Speaker 1: remember if Chris and I talked about that on tech
Speaker 1: stuff we might have because it's in that era, the
Speaker 1: early tech stuff days. So I'm talking about the Microsoft Courier.
Speaker 1: So this was at least the concept was a double
Speaker 1: screened tablet device, so it opened up like a book
Speaker 1: or a journal. And you already know this device never
Speaker 1: came out. I mean, that's the title of the episode.
Speaker 1: But Microsoft had abandoned the project before mid twenty ten.
Speaker 1: So sometime in spring of twenty ten, that's when Microsoft
Speaker 1: at least acknowledged that it wasn't working on the project
Speaker 1: any more. They never really announced it. This was not
Speaker 1: something that was announced to the public. It was an
Speaker 1: internal project. Now, considering that the iPad came out at
Speaker 1: the beginning of twenty ten, you could say the Courier
Speaker 1: was kind of Microsoft's attempt to make the tablet form
Speaker 1: factor a compelling consumer item. Like this was a time
Speaker 1: when different companies were trying to take another swing at
Speaker 1: tablet computers. Now that's not to say that there were
Speaker 1: not tablet computers before the iPad came out in January
Speaker 1: twenty ten. There were. Apple is mostly known as a
Speaker 1: company that innovates on existing form factors and often can
Speaker 1: create a market where none existed before, right, because like
Speaker 1: smartphones before the iPhone, they were pretty much the domain
Speaker 1: of executives and maybe a few, like bleeding edge technology,
Speaker 1: early adopter types, but otherwise we were all just coping
Speaker 1: with cell phones. I didn't know anyone who had a smartphone.
Speaker 1: I knew a couple of people who had PDAs personal
Speaker 1: Digital assistance, but that was it. But then the iPhone
Speaker 1: came out and changed everything. People suddenly said, oh, that's
Speaker 1: a really cool piece of technology. It combines a lot
Speaker 1: of things that I find really intriguing. I'm going to
Speaker 1: make that my next phone. And Apple has done that
Speaker 1: over and over again. You know, I'm not the world's
Speaker 1: biggest Apple fan, but I acknowledge that's a company that
Speaker 1: has an amazing track record for convincing people to buy
Speaker 1: into technologies that previously they had dismissed. But before the
Speaker 1: iPad came out, there were tablet computers. They just weren't
Speaker 1: really adopted by the mainstream. They were more commonly found
Speaker 1: in specific occupations like someone who worked on construction sites,
Speaker 1: or you know, land surveyors, or you know, a medical
Speaker 1: staff in a hospital. These were people who were not
Speaker 1: working from a set location. Each day right, Like, they
Speaker 1: weren't sitting at a desk all day. They were moving
Speaker 1: from place to place, and they might need some sort
Speaker 1: of computational device, maybe not one as robust as a
Speaker 1: full computer, but something would be handy, and laptops, even
Speaker 1: by twenty ten, laptops were pretty hefty. They were not
Speaker 1: slims things that you easily carried around. So having a
Speaker 1: tablet made sense for specific kinds of tasks, but for
Speaker 1: the rest of us, tablet computers just seemed like they
Speaker 1: weren't a good fit. Right. They couldn't do everything that
Speaker 1: a computer could do, They couldn't do enough unique things
Speaker 1: for the form factor the limitations just seemed like that
Speaker 1: was a non starter, and often they lacked a user
Speaker 1: interface that was intuitive and easy to use, like a
Speaker 1: lot of these tablet computers had interfaces that had been
Speaker 1: intended for laptop or desktop computers. Converting that over to
Speaker 1: something that's using like say a touchscreen interface that doesn't
Speaker 1: always work out so well. But then came the iPad
Speaker 1: and it really changed things, and I had doubts that
Speaker 1: Apple would succeed where others had failed, but that was again,
Speaker 1: was very shortsighted of me to the extreme really. After all, again,
Speaker 1: Apple had proven with the UI for the iPhone that
Speaker 1: it could create an operating environment that was so intuitive
Speaker 1: that a young child can master it in a matter
Speaker 1: of minutes. It was a responsive user interface, It was attractive,
Speaker 1: it worked, probably the most important part. So Apple saw
Speaker 1: great success in a market that previously had only been
Speaker 1: the very definition of niche. Now I should also mention
Speaker 1: that the Courier reportedly never got so far along the
Speaker 1: process that it was actually on the way to becoming
Speaker 1: a consumer product. It didn't get that far in development.
Speaker 1: It was kind of inn a nebulous phase in which
Speaker 1: a company is exploring possibilities without fully committing to them. So,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, there was never a
Speaker 1: point in the Courier's development where Microsoft was actually seriously
Speaker 1: considering putting it into production. So in some ways, the
Speaker 1: Courier doesn't quite qualify for a canceled product because Microsoft
Speaker 1: never actually called it a potential product to begin with,
Speaker 1: at least not publicly. The world first heard about the
Speaker 1: Courier not from a Microsoft representative, but rather from a
Speaker 1: media outlet, specifically Gizmodo. They got their greedy little hands
Speaker 1: on some information about this tablet that was in development,
Speaker 1: including some images of what it might look like in
Speaker 1: its final form factor, and they published this. They showed
Speaker 1: off this concept, you know, this dual screened foldable tablet,
Speaker 1: each of the screens measuring around seven inches on the diagonal.
Speaker 1: It would obviously be a touch sensitive device where you
Speaker 1: would interact with the screen itself. You would be able
Speaker 1: to use a stylus with it to write and select things.
Speaker 1: And it was clearly something that was really interesting. And
Speaker 1: this article comes out before Apple had even announced the iPad,
Speaker 1: But everyone in the world knew that Apple was developing
Speaker 1: its own tablet. It was kind of like a worst
Speaker 1: kept secret sort of thing. The Courier seemed to stand out, however,
Speaker 1: even knowing that Apple was coming out with this tablet device.
Speaker 1: So in a world that was still skeptical that tablet
Speaker 1: computers could become viable consumer products, the Courier actually looked
Speaker 1: like it could stand a chance because it just it
Speaker 1: seemed compelling. The design looked neat. A team in Microsoft
Speaker 1: that ultimately included around one hundred and thirty people were
Speaker 1: hoping to be the ones to succeed where other tablet
Speaker 1: designers had fallen short but that team faced opposition within
Speaker 1: the company itself. Jay Allard, the head of Entertainment and
Speaker 1: Devices at Microsoft, was leading this project, and he had
Speaker 1: also been the leader responsible for the original Xbox as
Speaker 1: well as the Xbox three sixty, so he already had
Speaker 1: success in launching non computer products at Microsoft. Not only
Speaker 1: just success at that he was successful in pushing out
Speaker 1: a product that was not directly linked to Windows, which
Speaker 1: was kind of seen as like the lynchpin for Microsoft
Speaker 1: right the crux of all of Microsoft's products. Xbox was
Speaker 1: outside of that, and it was a huge success. His
Speaker 1: team was building this dual screen tablet device while using
Speaker 1: a modified version of Windows, so in this case he
Speaker 1: wasn't creating an all new operating system. He was, however,
Speaker 1: relying on a I don't know how heavily modified it was.
Speaker 1: I imagined it had to be significantly modified because this
Speaker 1: is before the era of Microsoft building in touch screen
Speaker 1: capabilities within its operating systems. But then there was Steven Sinofsky,
Speaker 1: president of the Windows Division in Microsoft. So Sinofsky's division
Speaker 1: was hard at work on an upcoming version of Windows
Speaker 1: that was meant to be more tablet and touch screen friendly.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't ready. It was in the early stages
Speaker 1: of development, so Snofsky had already shown his worth with
Speaker 1: a launch of Windows seven a Windows seven helped improve
Speaker 1: consumer opinions of the Windows operating system because the previous
Speaker 1: version of Windows, which was Windows Vista, was not met
Speaker 1: with very much approval, which is putting it lightly. Windows
Speaker 1: Vista was heavily criticized for lots of reasons, and the
Speaker 1: generation before that was Windows XP, which a lot of
Speaker 1: people really liked, or at least they found to be
Speaker 1: very useful. I don't know how many people loved Windows XP,
Speaker 1: but they found it to be understandable, like they could
Speaker 1: navigate it. They felt that the changes that Windows Vista
Speaker 1: introduced were confusing and counterproductive. So Sinofsky had helped repair
Speaker 1: Microsoft's reputation with the launch of Windows seven, and he
Speaker 1: had big plans for Windows eight. Those plans, however, were
Speaker 1: for the future. They were a couple of years off,
Speaker 1: so Snofsky had concerns that a touchscreen device running on
Speaker 1: a modified version of an earlier Windows build would ultimately
Speaker 1: hurt Microsoft because if it didn't work, then that was
Speaker 1: going to be a big hit to the reputation there
Speaker 1: had been other tablet devices that had failed in the market,
Speaker 1: and they had become something of a joke. In fact,
Speaker 1: if you go back to the PDA days, the Apple
Speaker 1: Newton is a notable example of this, as it would
Speaker 1: turn out Windows eight had enough flaws to disappoint people
Speaker 1: all by itself. But that's a different story. The fact
Speaker 1: that Windows eight was in development meant that the Courier
Speaker 1: team didn't have access to a UI that was from
Speaker 1: the get go designed to work on different kinds of devices.
Speaker 1: The Courier team also saw the device as a compliment
Speaker 1: to a PC, rather than a replacement for a PC,
Speaker 1: so you wouldn't use a courier instead of a computer.
Speaker 1: You would use a courier in addition to a computer.
Speaker 1: The courier would let you do things like work with
Speaker 1: electronic documents, and it would have handwriting recognitions so that
Speaker 1: you could use a stylus and you could write down
Speaker 1: notes on your screen, which the courier would then transcribe
Speaker 1: into text. You could integrate pictures and sketches into your work.
Speaker 1: You could make sketches for your work, and it could
Speaker 1: be really useful for people like our artists and architects
Speaker 1: and other folks who work closely with mixed media. It
Speaker 1: was kind of envisioned as a creator tool in that regard,
Speaker 1: but it would not be designed to integrate fully with
Speaker 1: other Microsoft products, kind of like the Xbox. The Xbox
Speaker 1: was a departure. The Courier was thought to be a
Speaker 1: departure as well. So, for example, email, while the concept
Speaker 1: of the Courier would allow you to check email through
Speaker 1: like a web based application, the Courier wasn't intended to
Speaker 1: provide full support for something like Microsoft Outlook, and this
Speaker 1: lack of integration with core Microsoft products ended up being
Speaker 1: another strike against the Courier. Not only would the Courier
Speaker 1: need to cluge together a version of Windows that would
Speaker 1: work on a touchscreen device, it would also not directly
Speaker 1: provide a feedback loop into the other Microsoft ecosystem of software.
Speaker 1: And Microsoft has always been about integration, sometimes to the
Speaker 1: point that it has brought legal action against the company
Speaker 1: because Microsoft has stood accused of anti competitive behavior on
Speaker 1: more than one occasion for how the company has integrated
Speaker 1: various applications very deeply into the operating system, thus making
Speaker 1: it challenging for any competitor to actually create a working
Speaker 1: tool on a platform that maintains a dominant market share
Speaker 1: in the PC world. You got to remember that the
Speaker 1: Windows operating system to this day remains an incredibly dominant
Speaker 1: OS for desktop and laptop computers. Now, had these two
Speaker 1: teams united with the idea that the Courier would remain
Speaker 1: in development until the release of Windows eight, whereupon it
Speaker 1: could be a flagship product featuring the new operating system, well,
Speaker 1: Microsoft might be able to compete, but it would still
Speaker 1: be well behind Apple because Windows eight launched in the
Speaker 1: summer of twenty twelve, while by the summer of twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: Apple was already on its third generation iPad. It had
Speaker 1: already kind of established an anchor in that market. And
Speaker 1: to this day, Apple remains dominant in the tablet market.
Speaker 1: There are lots of other tablets out there, but Apple
Speaker 1: has more than a third of the entire market share,
Speaker 1: and the next closest competitor is Samsung, and it's down
Speaker 1: closer to like twenty percent. That's according to Statista dot com.
Speaker 1: By the way, if Microsoft had been able to launch
Speaker 1: the Courier in twenty ten, you know, the same year
Speaker 1: that the original iPad came out, maybe Apple wouldn't have
Speaker 1: had such a huge headstart in the tablet space. Maybe
Speaker 1: the dual screen format of the Courier would have been
Speaker 1: enough to entice consumers to adopt the Windows based tablet,
Speaker 1: or maybe they would be frustrated with that lack of integration.
Speaker 1: Maybe they would think that this is a device that
Speaker 1: almost does what they need, but not quite. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure about that last part. The original iPad was by
Speaker 1: no means a replacement for computers, and it did just fine,
Speaker 1: but that lack of integration may have been really what
Speaker 1: sealed the fate of the Microsoft Courier. Because Microsoft's CEO
Speaker 1: at the time Steve developers, developers, developers, bomber. If you
Speaker 1: don't know what I mean when I'm saying developers over
Speaker 1: and over, go to YouTube search Steve balmert developers and
Speaker 1: get ready to be amazed. Anyway, he was unsure about
Speaker 1: which way to go with the Courier, so he called
Speaker 1: in Bill Gates, co founder of Microsoft, former CEO and chairman,
Speaker 1: to come in and advise him on the matter. And
Speaker 1: Gates thought that the Courier's lack of integration with other
Speaker 1: Microsoft products was a non starter. He didn't see the
Speaker 1: value of a gadget that did not lean heavily on
Speaker 1: Microsoft's existing suite of productivity software, and ultimately Microsoft pulled
Speaker 1: the plug on the project. While the company never officially
Speaker 1: announced the Courier, it did go so far as to
Speaker 1: confirm that development on the product had ended. Considering some
Speaker 1: of the other products that did come out around this time,
Speaker 1: like the Windows Phone or Microsoft Zoom. Maybe it's all
Speaker 1: for the best because those products ultimately got shut down
Speaker 1: when they too failed to compete against Apple and other
Speaker 1: competitors on the market. Maybe the Courier would have met
Speaker 1: the same fate. We'll just never know for sure. Well,
Speaker 1: we've got a lot more to talk about with products
Speaker 1: that never made it to market, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break to think our sponsors welcome back. We
Speaker 1: now turned to a couple of tech projects that were
Speaker 1: canceled quite some time ago, and I'll start with one
Speaker 1: that I wasn't familiar with. That's because it was a
Speaker 1: project that was done by Sinclair Research, So the company
Speaker 1: Sinclair didn't get much traction over here in the United States. However,
Speaker 1: listeners from the UK might very well be familiar with Sinclair.
Speaker 1: It was an electronics company that started in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: It was responsible for the production of personal computers for
Speaker 1: the UK market in the nineteen eighties that didn't stick
Speaker 1: around that long. Sinclair ended up selling its PC assets
Speaker 1: to another company called Armstrad or Armstrad rather in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six. Sadly, the founder of Sinclair, Clive Sinclair, passed
Speaker 1: away a few years ago. But back in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, when Sinclair was still a thing, engineers at
Speaker 1: the company were brainstorming about creating different types of PCs,
Speaker 1: and there were a couple of different lines of development.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like this was all unified under one project.
Speaker 1: It was more like a bunch of different people working
Speaker 1: on kind of similar ideas all around the same time.
Speaker 1: This particular one I wanted to talk about was meant
Speaker 1: to be a PC that could go toe to toe
Speaker 1: with a couple of other machines that were debuting around
Speaker 1: this same time. Those machines include the Atari st computer
Speaker 1: and more notably the Commodore Amiga, which would eventually just
Speaker 1: become the Amiga. So the code name for Sinclair's project
Speaker 1: was Loki. That would not have been the market name
Speaker 1: for the product like once it hit the market. If
Speaker 1: it had gone that far, it would not have been
Speaker 1: called the Loki. I think that is missing a trick,
Speaker 1: so to speak. I would actually love to have a
Speaker 1: computer called a Loki. In fact, I might even rename
Speaker 1: my personal machine because I just loved that idea, because
Speaker 1: it does feel like I'm working on a trickster God
Speaker 1: some days, particularly when I am getting ready to record
Speaker 1: and then my computer tells me, Hey, don't worry, I'm
Speaker 1: going to reload and update. It's only going to take
Speaker 1: forty five minutes. Meanwhile, I'm just ready to start recording.
Speaker 1: Good times. Anyway, the Sinclair low Key project didn't really
Speaker 1: have enough time to coalesce into anything definitive. According to
Speaker 1: Martin Brennan, an engineer who spoke with The Register about
Speaker 1: the low Key project, it never got so far where
Speaker 1: someone even made conceptual drawings of what the computer would
Speaker 1: look like. So low Ki was only in the earliest
Speaker 1: stages of ideation before the whole rug got pulled out
Speaker 1: from underneath the project. So it was more like a
Speaker 1: collection of ideas that were intended to achieve a particular goal.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't just for bragging rights. It wasn't just hey,
Speaker 1: let's make a computer that can go toe to toe
Speaker 1: with the Amiga. It could really appeal to, say gamers,
Speaker 1: because the Amiga was known as a machine that was
Speaker 1: phenomenal when it came to graphics and sound. I mean
Speaker 1: when you compared the Amiga against other computers of that era,
Speaker 1: Amiga's performance for sound and graphics it was just a
Speaker 1: head and shoulders above all the competition. So it wasn't
Speaker 1: just to say, hey, we can make a computer that
Speaker 1: can do that too, And it wasn't really a market
Speaker 1: demand issue in the UK necessarily. Rather it came down
Speaker 1: to a matter of taxes, and then later on the
Speaker 1: conclusion of the story is due to Amstrad's acquisition of Sinclair.
Speaker 1: But the taxes thing is a little bit bonkers to me.
Speaker 1: It's also it's outside my wheelhouse. But according to the Register,
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen eighties, like around nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: the government in Spain created rules that would place taxes
Speaker 1: on computers sold in Spain if those computers sported up
Speaker 1: to sixty four kilobytes of memory or less. If you
Speaker 1: were to offer computers that had more than sixty four
Speaker 1: kilobytes of memory, the taxes didn't apply. There was like
Speaker 1: a loophole you could create. As long as you were
Speaker 1: selling computers with more memory than sixty four kilobytes, you
Speaker 1: were not going to be hit by those taxes. So
Speaker 1: now all these computer companies have an incentive to develop
Speaker 1: computers with more memory in order to be able to
Speaker 1: sell them without having to deal with these higher tax rates.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that was the intent of the
Speaker 1: tax law, Like, was this something that Spain was passing
Speaker 1: to push computer companies to put out more advanced machines,
Speaker 1: or was this a matter where Spanish legislators were looking
Speaker 1: to tax businesses and didn't think enough ahead to allow
Speaker 1: for higher amounts of memory to be considered under the
Speaker 1: same tax law. I don't know the answer to that question,
Speaker 1: but it did end up being a financial incentive to
Speaker 1: create machines that had one hundred and twenty eight kilobytes
Speaker 1: of memory or more. And LOKI was Sinclaire's approach to
Speaker 1: fill that niche or one of their approaches, I should say,
Speaker 1: because like I said, there were multiple projects that were
Speaker 1: in development around this time. In addition, the idea was
Speaker 1: to have a machine capable of generating superior graphics and
Speaker 1: audio to other computers that were found in the Sinclair line.
Speaker 1: So the low Key was intended to have a MIDI
Speaker 1: interface that would give the capabilities of a commercial synthesizer.
Speaker 1: The graphics hardware would quote allow better animation effects than
Speaker 1: any existing home computer and will allow cartoon quality graphics
Speaker 1: end quote. That's from that piece in the register. And
Speaker 1: it was intended to be compatible with CD systems from
Speaker 1: one a read, which is kind of a novelty. In
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen eighties, CDs were not yet widely accepted,
Speaker 1: and so that was kind of a really advanced concept.
Speaker 1: It was also meant to facilitate stuff like home video production,
Speaker 1: so that you could do things like create more advanced
Speaker 1: home videos, including the ability to do stuff like insert
Speaker 1: captions into video. That was something that you know, unless
Speaker 1: you were working at a television broadcast editing station, you
Speaker 1: typically didn't have access to that kind of thing. It
Speaker 1: was also meant to be a pretty affordable computer, selling
Speaker 1: for quote less than two hundred pounds end quote. All
Speaker 1: of this, by the way, is according to a paper
Speaker 1: titled the Specification of this Super Spectrum Entertainment Engine. Now,
Speaker 1: not everything about this computer was bleeding edge technology. For example,
Speaker 1: the low Key design also integrated a cassette deck. This
Speaker 1: was for saving and retrieving data, so rather than a
Speaker 1: floppy disk drive, perhaps in addition to one, you would
Speaker 1: have a cassette drive. And that wasn't unique to Sinclair
Speaker 1: by any means, but it does seem a little strange
Speaker 1: to talk about cassette drives once we're into the era
Speaker 1: of the mid nineteen eighties. In my experience, most of
Speaker 1: the home computers, at least here in the States had
Speaker 1: already moved on to floppy drives. At that point, you
Speaker 1: didn't really see a lot of computers that used cassette drives.
Speaker 1: Some of the ones in the nineteen seventies did, but
Speaker 1: by the nineteen eighties, floppy drives were pretty much standard. Portunately,
Speaker 1: Sinclair would never really get the chance to develop Loki. Further,
Speaker 1: the sale of assets to Amstrad would kill not just Loki,
Speaker 1: but other projects that were in development that various Sinclair
Speaker 1: engineers had been working on, so Loki never emerged from
Speaker 1: that ideation stage. The Register article about the abandoned Sinclair
Speaker 1: projects mentions that it was at least a year out
Speaker 1: from even hitting a prototype phase, so it was still
Speaker 1: fairly early on in development. But hearing about it, I
Speaker 1: really wish it had become a thing. One because I
Speaker 1: think it would have been interesting to see another computer
Speaker 1: kind of going head to head against Amiga in the
Speaker 1: performance department in graphics and sound, and partly because I mean,
Speaker 1: I love the idea of a computer that, at least
Speaker 1: at one point was called Loki. Our next abandoned tech
Speaker 1: product was announced back in January twenty eleven at that
Speaker 1: year's CEES aka the Consumer Electronics Showcase. I was actually
Speaker 1: present at that CEES, but I have did this particular
Speaker 1: press announcement because I already knew a little bit about it.
Speaker 1: I knew that the person who had been booked to
Speaker 1: make this press announcement was Lady Gaga, and y'all, I
Speaker 1: love me some Lady Gaga. I think she's an incredibly
Speaker 1: talented performer. I think she's an amazing entertainer. But the
Speaker 1: exhibit hall of CEES is already full of monsters, little
Speaker 1: and otherwise, and I didn't want to subject myself to
Speaker 1: more of that, so I skipped this particular announcement. But
Speaker 1: it was with Polaroid. So Polaroid had named Lady Gaga
Speaker 1: the creative director for the company. And a year earlier
Speaker 1: in twenty ten, the company was eager to forge a
Speaker 1: viable path forward in a world where digital cameras were
Speaker 1: now everywhere. Right, digital cameras were already on the rise
Speaker 1: before smartphones started to incorporate digital cameras. But then once
Speaker 1: smartphones did do that, it really meant that companies that
Speaker 1: were more mired in film based cameras were getting left
Speaker 1: in the dust. They had moved too slowly. Some of
Speaker 1: them didn't adopt digital camera technologies because there was a
Speaker 1: fear that doing so would undercut their own business, like
Speaker 1: this incredibly lucrative business they had created that was film based.
Speaker 1: The problem is if the rest of the world moves
Speaker 1: on from film, then yeah, you might be a definitive
Speaker 1: name in the market, but no one's going to that
Speaker 1: market anymore. And companies like Kodak and Polaroid, I would argue,
Speaker 1: were trying to catch back up. They had given ground
Speaker 1: to the digital landscape, and now we're trying to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to become relevant again. Not that I
Speaker 1: think that their products were bad, not that I thought
Speaker 1: film had no use. I still think film is amazing,
Speaker 1: but that's not where the majority of the market was going, so,
Speaker 1: how does a company known for film cameras survive in
Speaker 1: this rapidly changing environment. Well, one way might be to
Speaker 1: bring on someone who is known for being a risk
Speaker 1: taking artist, someone who's associated with avant garde fashion, someone
Speaker 1: with a ridiculously huge fan base supporting them. So in
Speaker 1: that regard, Lady Gaga was an obvious choice. Now, what
Speaker 1: I would have seen if I had gone to this
Speaker 1: press release was Lady Gaga going up on stage and
Speaker 1: unveiling her first official collaborations with Polaroid as its creative director.
Speaker 1: One of the items revealed was a pair of real
Speaker 1: Chonky sunglasses and it was the centerpiece of a suite
Speaker 1: of new products. The suite was called Gray Label, so
Speaker 1: this was one of the Gray Label products. Another one
Speaker 1: was like a printer. So these sunglasses had a video
Speaker 1: camera and it also had small LED displays incorporated into them,
Speaker 1: so essentially it was a head mounted camera and display system. Allegedly,
Speaker 1: Lady Gaga was heavily involved in the design. That could
Speaker 1: very well be true. Way back in twenty twelve, Steam
Speaker 1: Meltzer of Cnet was pretty skeptical about that. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: the sunglasses themselves look like they were designed by a
Speaker 1: Polaroid accountant for his brother in law, the Invisible Man
Speaker 1: end quote. Sick Burn Meltzer, Polaroid's own publicity reps said
Speaker 1: nothing could be further from the truth. A Fast Company
Speaker 1: article quotes Robert Brunner, who said that Lady Gaga was
Speaker 1: quote fairly involved with the process end quote, and also
Speaker 1: that she quote has ideas coming from her ethos and perspective.
Speaker 1: So how do we turn that into a strong, viable
Speaker 1: product design end quote. Well, it seems like Polaroid never
Speaker 1: actually found the answer to that last question. A year
Speaker 1: after the announcement and there still was no Polaroid camera
Speaker 1: glasses to be found. Lady Gaga and Polaroid actually parted
Speaker 1: ways at some point between her appearance at CEES twenty
Speaker 1: eleven and the year twenty fourteen. Exactly when the two
Speaker 1: parted ways I don't think was publicly disclosed. Polaroid reps
Speaker 1: did acknowledge that the two parties were no longer collaborating
Speaker 1: officially by twenty fourteen, so we do know that. We
Speaker 1: just don't know at what point did they decide, you
Speaker 1: know what, this isn't working out anyway? The glasses would
Speaker 1: let you take photos and videos, and then you could
Speaker 1: plug one of the arm pieces into a USB port
Speaker 1: on a computer in order to transfer files from the
Speaker 1: glasses to the computer. You also, if you wanted to,
Speaker 1: apparently could transfer pictures and video from your computer to
Speaker 1: your glasses. So if you just want to take a
Speaker 1: real close look at some photographs or video, you could
Speaker 1: use your glasses as a display. That way, I guess
Speaker 1: you could take photos manually, or you could also have
Speaker 1: the glasses set to take pictures at specific intervals of ten, thirty,
Speaker 1: or sixty seconds each, which starts to get into some
Speaker 1: potentially creepy territory when you think about it, Like if
Speaker 1: you have your your glasses taking images every ten seconds
Speaker 1: without you having to manually do it yourself, people might
Speaker 1: start thinking that you're a bit of a creep. So
Speaker 1: why was this project abandoned? Well, it's not official, but
Speaker 1: I think it's because Lady Gaga found the glasses to
Speaker 1: be really uncomfortable to wear, Like every time she would
Speaker 1: put them on, they would poke, poke Pope poke her face, poke,
Speaker 1: Pope poke her face. Or you know, maybe Polaroid just
Speaker 1: couldn't reach a point where the product made any sense.
Speaker 1: It could have been issues with the battery life, could
Speaker 1: have been issues with storage capacity, the weight of the glasses,
Speaker 1: the heat it would generate while in operation. The cost
Speaker 1: might have been a problem. It was probably a combination
Speaker 1: of some of these things. But whatever the reason, we
Speaker 1: never actually got them. So if the sun seems too
Speaker 1: bright in your life, it's probably because Polaroid never came
Speaker 1: out with those Lady Gagaa glasses. Okay, we've got some
Speaker 1: more to talk about before we get to some other
Speaker 1: abandoned tech projects. Let's take another quick break. You know,
Speaker 1: sometimes a product fails to emerge from development, not because
Speaker 1: of technical issues or because of internal disagreements within a company,
Speaker 1: but because there's a backlash from the public after the
Speaker 1: company announces the product. That's largely the case around Mattel's
Speaker 1: planned smart speaker for kids, which was called the Aristotle.
Speaker 1: So the idea was that parents would put this smart
Speaker 1: speaker in their kids room and the smart speaker would
Speaker 1: be the kid's companion from cradle to I don't know,
Speaker 1: adolescens or thereabouts, and it was meant to be an
Speaker 1: all in one voice controlled smart baby monitor. As James
Speaker 1: Vincent of The Verge put it way back in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: That's the same year that Mattel first announced this technology.
Speaker 1: January twenty seventeen, that's when Mattel unveiled this product with
Speaker 1: the plan of having it come out than the year.
Speaker 1: The device was intended to serve as your typical baby monitor,
Speaker 1: so you know, alerting parents if something is amiss in
Speaker 1: the kids room, whether that's a fussy baby or I
Speaker 1: don't know, a baba duke or something. I don't have
Speaker 1: kids and it shows. But of course, this device could
Speaker 1: do so much more than just monitor your bebe. Not
Speaker 1: only could it listen in on your kids to make
Speaker 1: sure all is well, or you know, to check to
Speaker 1: see if your infant is committing state crimes if that's
Speaker 1: your thing. Again, I don't have kids, I don't know
Speaker 1: how this works. But it could also do things like
Speaker 1: recite bedtime stories to the children. It could play soothing
Speaker 1: music if it detected, you know, a crying child late
Speaker 1: at night. It could play games with the goal of
Speaker 1: teaching kids their numbers or the alphabet. It was intended
Speaker 1: to be almost like an infotainment device, with the added
Speaker 1: benefit of being able to do things like e commerce
Speaker 1: transactions like you could use this smart speaker in order
Speaker 1: to place an order for diapers just by talking to it.
Speaker 1: So what could possibly go wrong? Well, if you're like
Speaker 1: a lot of people who heard about this, your response
Speaker 1: might immediately be, Hey, what about privacy? Because these are
Speaker 1: kids we're talking about, right? The kids didn't consent to this.
Speaker 1: They can't, they're not the age to grant consent for
Speaker 1: this sort of thing. And a company potentially making use
Speaker 1: of information to advertise to parents or to the kids directly,
Speaker 1: that of course, seems wildly inappropriate. I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 1: that there are a lot of parents out there who
Speaker 1: would be really upset if one day they just got
Speaker 1: an email from Mattel saying, Hey, your kid is crying
Speaker 1: a lot every night at eight pm, Maybe try this
Speaker 1: product to see if that helps. Like nosey printing, advice
Speaker 1: rarely goes down, well, it certainly wouldn't go down well
Speaker 1: if it was from a corporation that knew when your
Speaker 1: kids were unhappy. Right. Plus, then there's the added issue
Speaker 1: of well, if it allows for e commerce, what stops
Speaker 1: kids from being able to exploit that, either on purpose
Speaker 1: or by accident could be every day is when you
Speaker 1: ask Santa for your new Christmas wish list, right, So
Speaker 1: there were lots of issues here. The reaction was swift,
Speaker 1: it was considerable. One advocacy group launched an online petition
Speaker 1: that was asking Mattel to not release this product that
Speaker 1: reached more than seventeen thousand signatures. There were US legislators
Speaker 1: who were getting involved. They were expressing concerns not just
Speaker 1: about the privacy and security issues, which were considerable, but
Speaker 1: they were also worried about parents leaning too hard on
Speaker 1: technology in order to raise their kids. Were already in
Speaker 1: an era where increased amounts of screen time is a
Speaker 1: pretty big concern. I mean, I've had experiences with children
Speaker 1: who were absolutely addicted to their screens and wouldn't even
Speaker 1: bother lifting their head up or merging out of their
Speaker 1: room if it meant that they had to put their
Speaker 1: kindle down or whatever. So the idea of parents checking
Speaker 1: out and letting a robot do all the parenting was
Speaker 1: a sobering thought. Mattel paid attention and pulled the project
Speaker 1: before it could go to market. Now, the reason that
Speaker 1: the company said it changed course was that the Aristotle
Speaker 1: speaker quote didn't fully align with Mattel's new technology strategy
Speaker 1: end quote, which is a non committal kind of answer, right, like, oh,
Speaker 1: it doesn't fit with our strategy anymore. It was certainly
Speaker 1: not admitting to the criticisms that had been leveled at
Speaker 1: the speaker. It wasn't like Mattel was saying, you know,
Speaker 1: consumers and critics brought up valid concerns and we have reconsidered. No,
Speaker 1: Mattel's like, oh, this just doesn't fit with our strategy.
Speaker 1: I think we can all read between the lines. I
Speaker 1: guess it's that thing where companies can't really admit fault
Speaker 1: because I don't know, well, in this case, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be opening themselves up to litigation. That's usually the reason
Speaker 1: that companies do not admit fault because if they do
Speaker 1: admit fault, then they're going to have to start compensating,
Speaker 1: you know, hurt parties. But in this case, it wasn't
Speaker 1: even a product, like it never went out, So I
Speaker 1: guess you don't admit fault because that's a sign of weakness.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Anyway, Aristotle went the way of Socrates,
Speaker 1: as in it had to drink the hemlock and then
Speaker 1: go away. Now I'll wrap up with a product that
Speaker 1: dates back to my childhood. That never came out. It
Speaker 1: was aiming to be a really kind of innovative gaming
Speaker 1: technology and it was a quasi holographic portable tabletop game system,
Speaker 1: which is a lot of word salad. It was the
Speaker 1: Atari Cosmos. So Atari, of course, had really made a
Speaker 1: name in the video game space, both the arcade space
Speaker 1: and home video games. The company famously released the Atari
Speaker 1: twenty six hundred back in nineteen seventy seven, and that
Speaker 1: would steadily grow to be a huge hit for the
Speaker 1: home video game market. So in nineteen seventy eight, a
Speaker 1: group of engineers at Atari began to work on a
Speaker 1: new game system concept called the Cosmos. So it was
Speaker 1: intended to bring holography into the gaming space, a tabletop
Speaker 1: game system that used holograms. So it'd be a console
Speaker 1: that would fit on a table, it would not attach
Speaker 1: to a television or anything. It would be fully integrated.
Speaker 1: It would have its own screen, and it would have
Speaker 1: holograms integrated into the video games. How futuristic can you get? Well,
Speaker 1: pump the brakes, because when I say holograms, I don't
Speaker 1: mean moving images or even the illusion of moving images. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about still images that are created through holography.
Speaker 1: So the images seem to have three dimensions to them, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you can change your point of view and view different
Speaker 1: angles of this image. But it is a still image.
Speaker 1: It's not video. It doesn't actually move. The moving element,
Speaker 1: if you can even call it a moving element, was
Speaker 1: a grid of LEDs behind the holographic image, so they
Speaker 1: would project light through the holographic images. And by grid,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about a seven by six grid of red LEDs.
Speaker 1: A resolution of seven by six not high resolution at all, right,
Speaker 1: you're talking about little blocks of light. That would be
Speaker 1: all that would make up the games apart from these
Speaker 1: holographic still photos. So the game, each game would involve
Speaker 1: these little red dots potentially making shapes together and appearing
Speaker 1: to move in a very primitive, animated way through a
Speaker 1: holographic environment created by this still image. At least that
Speaker 1: was the thought. The controls in this device were on
Speaker 1: the face of the device itself, so again integrated, so
Speaker 1: that it's just in front of where the screen is.
Speaker 1: The controls were pretty limited. You had four direction buttons,
Speaker 1: so up, down, left, and right, you had a fire button,
Speaker 1: and then your other controls were kind of like for
Speaker 1: settings and stuff like. There was a start button, there
Speaker 1: was a button to select either one or two players,
Speaker 1: and another one I believe it was a skill button,
Speaker 1: so that you can set the level of difficulty for
Speaker 1: specific titles. And you would have to push down these
Speaker 1: buttons while looking at the screen. All on this tabletop.
Speaker 1: There was no separate controller or anything like that. It
Speaker 1: was all integrated into one form. More than that, the
Speaker 1: system was designed to have all the games pre installed
Speaker 1: on the system itself. By all the games, I mean
Speaker 1: nine different games. Now, you wouldn't be able to play
Speaker 1: all nine of these games right out of the box
Speaker 1: because it was also a cartridge based system. And you
Speaker 1: might say, well, wait a minute, Jonathan, how can it
Speaker 1: be cartridge based if all the games are hardwired onto
Speaker 1: the system itself. Well, that's because the cartridges did not
Speaker 1: have the games programmed on them. The cartridges had the
Speaker 1: holographic still image that you would slide as almost like
Speaker 1: an overlay for this grid of red LEDs. Plus this
Speaker 1: image on the frame of it on the side would
Speaker 1: have a notch. That notch would indicate to the system
Speaker 1: which game had been inserted into the cartridge slot, so
Speaker 1: that you would be playing the appropriate game for whatever
Speaker 1: holographic card you had slid into the system. But technically,
Speaker 1: at least theoretically, you could play all nine games right
Speaker 1: out of the box if you were just able to
Speaker 1: activate that notch. But if you didn't have the holographic background,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that it would be that compelling. But honestly,
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure it's that compelling even with the
Speaker 1: holographic image, because obviously the system never came out. Atari
Speaker 1: showed off the Cosmos at the New York Toy Fair
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy eight, so it had been in development
Speaker 1: for like three years and they show it off, but
Speaker 1: it didn't exactly set everyone's imaginations on fire. A lot
Speaker 1: of people who had time to look at it said,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting idea, but this execution lacks a compelling
Speaker 1: reason to get it so. Allegedly, However, even with this,
Speaker 1: the company had received thousands of pre orders. Now I
Speaker 1: imagine those pre orders were coming from retailers, not from
Speaker 1: end consumers. So when you're talking about thousands of pre orders,
Speaker 1: this isn't like the current era where people will pre
Speaker 1: order a video game without having a chance to play it.
Speaker 1: This was retailers putting in pre orders to potentially carry
Speaker 1: this game in their stores. So even with the lackluster
Speaker 1: response of the toy Fair, Atari was getting a lot
Speaker 1: of interest. However, from what I can tell, those units
Speaker 1: were never made. Now, some units of the Atari Cosmos
Speaker 1: were undoubtedly manufactured, you know, maybe quite a few, like
Speaker 1: fewer than two hundred and fifty, but maybe more than
Speaker 1: just like three or four. However, I think only three
Speaker 1: have ever been verified in existence, So yeah, a fraction
Speaker 1: of what was expected to be. To be sure, Atari
Speaker 1: dedicated its resources instead toward producing more Atari twenty six
Speaker 1: hundred units because those were selling really well and demand
Speaker 1: had outpaced the supply. So the general thought is that
Speaker 1: Atari saw the writing on the wall with the Cosmos,
Speaker 1: and instead of pushing out anyway, they decided to redirect
Speaker 1: all that effort toward producing more of what was already
Speaker 1: selling well and would continue to sell well for a
Speaker 1: couple more years until the video game crash in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three. Now a couple of Atari Cosmos game systems
Speaker 1: have made it out of the vaults over the years.
Speaker 1: One is owned by a former Atari employee. One is
Speaker 1: now owned by someone who operates like an Atari museum.
Speaker 1: One of them sold for around five hundred dollars on eBay.
Speaker 1: If you thought that the PlayStation five or Xbox Series
Speaker 1: X was expensive, it's not seven five hundred dollars expensive,
Speaker 1: and you can play more than nine games on those Also,
Speaker 1: the one that sold on eBay was only in partial
Speaker 1: working condition. It was missing some buttons and stuff. Apparently
Speaker 1: the holographic cards that slot into the Atari Cosmos are
Speaker 1: a little less rare like those that already kind of
Speaker 1: started to be produced by the time Atari decided to
Speaker 1: switch gears. I have never actually seen an Atari Cosmo
Speaker 1: holographic card in person, but apparently they're not nearly as
Speaker 1: uncommon as the systems themselves. Honestly, it looks to me
Speaker 1: like Cosmos. Isn't that different from the very early handheld
Speaker 1: electronic games that were out, like the Tiger Ones or whatever,
Speaker 1: where you would push buttons to make different LEDs light
Speaker 1: up on screen, supposedly as part of a game. I
Speaker 1: remember having a football game that was like that. It
Speaker 1: was American football, that is not soccer, and I can
Speaker 1: never tell if what I was doing was working or not,
Speaker 1: because I was just looking at little dots of light
Speaker 1: on a screen, and when you can't tell the difference
Speaker 1: between what is a player and what's a ball, you
Speaker 1: got a problem. Anyway, while the idea of integrated holography
Speaker 1: into video games was really neat, I think this was
Speaker 1: an example of trying to build a product before the
Speaker 1: tech is actually mature enough to do that. So again,
Speaker 1: Atari Cosmos never meant to be. That's just a small
Speaker 1: selection of some products that were in various stages of
Speaker 1: develop some of which had been announced to the public,
Speaker 1: and others that just got leaked at some point, but
Speaker 1: they never actually became a real thing. There are plenty
Speaker 1: of other examples, and I'll probably do more episodes along
Speaker 1: this line in the future, but I thought this would
Speaker 1: be kind of just a fun way to talk about
Speaker 1: tech projects that could have been, but for one reason
Speaker 1: or another, never actually made it. For every product that
Speaker 1: you do get your hands on, there are a countless
Speaker 1: number of products that at some stage just ended up
Speaker 1: being thrown into the garbage can. So a moment of
Speaker 1: silence for the tech that never was. Okay, that's long enough.
Speaker 1: I hope you are all well, and I will talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Tech stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.