Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum Here. Some of the biggest, richest,
Speaker 1: and smartest companies in the world have a long track
Speaker 1: record of spectacular fails. Remember Google Glass Time magazine named
Speaker 1: the augmented reality I wear one of the best inventions
Speaker 1: of but the public strongly disagreed and decried its wearers
Speaker 1: as glass holes. And Apple, arguably the most successful technology
Speaker 1: company in the world, was also the creator of the
Speaker 1: doomed Newton clunky touchscreen PDA from the late ninety nineties,
Speaker 1: plus during the same time period, a six dollar gaming
Speaker 1: console called Pippin that absolutely no one bought before the article.
Speaker 1: This episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with
Speaker 1: Samuel West PhD, an organizational psychologist and the founder and
Speaker 1: curator of the Museum of Failure, a touring collection of
Speaker 1: product flops and fiascos. According to him, it may be
Speaker 1: easy to laugh at the misfortunes of billionaires, but it's
Speaker 1: also instructive, he said, we need to accept failure if
Speaker 1: we want progress and innovation. You can't have innovation or
Speaker 1: progress without taking meaningful risks. And as soon as you
Speaker 1: try to be innovative, there's going to be failure. There's
Speaker 1: no way around it. For every iPhone, Oculus, and Netflix,
Speaker 1: the Museum of Failure reminds us that there was an
Speaker 1: Amazon fire Phone, a Nintendo Virtual Boy, and a Blockbuster video.
Speaker 1: You can't hit a home run without taking a swing,
Speaker 1: and it's okay if some of those swings are full
Speaker 1: blown whiffs. When West launched the first Museum of Failure
Speaker 1: exhibit in Sweden, in he wanted to show corporations and
Speaker 1: organizations that failure itself isn't bad. He had noticed companies
Speaker 1: were averse to taking the kind of risks that can
Speaker 1: lead to very successful innovations. The only real failure, he notes,
Speaker 1: is failing to learn from your mistakes and adapt, a
Speaker 1: popular engineering concept known as failing forward. But what surprised
Speaker 1: West was how much the general public embraced the museum's message.
Speaker 1: He said, people felt liberated. Did see all of these big,
Speaker 1: bad multinationals with all of their resources and knowledge and realize,
Speaker 1: if they can foul up, so can I. The Museum
Speaker 1: of Failure has dug up some true technological turkeys that
Speaker 1: should never have existed. Take the Twitter Peak. This was
Speaker 1: a two d dollar device. Released in two thousand nine.
Speaker 1: That did one thing access Twitter. You might be asking,
Speaker 1: wasn't there already a Twitter app for smartphones in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine? Yep? And wasn't it free? Also yep? So
Speaker 1: why would anyone pay for a second handheld device just
Speaker 1: to read and send tweets? They didn't, as it turned out.
Speaker 1: Or take Google TV. It was ahead of it time,
Speaker 1: though not in a good way. Back in the search
Speaker 1: Giant knew that would be streaming YouTube and movies on
Speaker 1: the small screen, but Google's TV execution was clunky. The
Speaker 1: technology just wasn't ready for prime time. Exhibit A is
Speaker 1: the Sony Google TV remote, which included a staggering eighty
Speaker 1: eight buttons. The Museum of Failure features a fair share
Speaker 1: of food and beverage fails. To release of new coke
Speaker 1: was one of the most famous marketing disasters in recorded history.
Speaker 1: Even the Coca Cola company admits that it was foolish
Speaker 1: to mess with the year old formula for its flagship soda,
Speaker 1: Even if hundreds of thousands of taste testers said that
Speaker 1: they preferred the new flavor, The product only lasted a
Speaker 1: few months before Coca Cola bowed public outcry and reintroduced
Speaker 1: the classic taste. But let's not forget about some other
Speaker 1: high profile food and beverage blunders. Remember Crystal Pepsi, a
Speaker 1: Coke's rival, tried to capitalize on the year and natural
Speaker 1: craze of the nineties with a clear cola. Why did
Speaker 1: it flop? A former Pepsi CEO O David Novak said
Speaker 1: in a two thousand seven interview with Fast Company, it
Speaker 1: would have been nice if I had made sure the
Speaker 1: product tasted good. Another food fat from the nineties was olestra,
Speaker 1: the magic ingredient in fat free, low calorie versions of
Speaker 1: snack foods like Pringles, Lays, Ruffles, and Derrito's. Procter and
Speaker 1: Gambles spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars developing
Speaker 1: an artificial fact that tasted just like the real thing,
Speaker 1: but wasn't absorbed by the digestive tract. Unfortunately, the science
Speaker 1: of a lestra backfired, literally, leading to unpleasant side effects
Speaker 1: arranging from painful gas to urgent diarrhea. A West might
Speaker 1: giggle at fumbles like Google Glass and Google Wave, which
Speaker 1: was an early and overly complicated version of Slack, but
Speaker 1: says he has nothing but respect for what he calls
Speaker 1: Google's evolutionary approach to innovation, basically invest tons of resources
Speaker 1: into hundreds of new ideas and seeing what sticks. In evolution,
Speaker 1: generally only the beneficial mutations are passed on, and so
Speaker 1: it is with innovation. The bad ideas either go extinct
Speaker 1: or are folded back into the gene pool for a
Speaker 1: new and improved development later. If you want a lesson
Speaker 1: in failing forward, check out the Google Graveyard, a comprehensive
Speaker 1: list of every single Google product and service that's been
Speaker 1: killed since two thousand one, all two hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: four of them. You can find it it killed by
Speaker 1: Google dot com. So before you let your own dreams
Speaker 1: get derailed by a minor setback or a major flop,
Speaker 1: consider this quote from Alberta Alesie, an award winning product
Speaker 1: designer and favorite of West's. He said, revel in your
Speaker 1: glorious failures. Dance on the borderline between success and disaster,
Speaker 1: because that's where your next big breakthrough will come from.
Speaker 1: By the way, the Museum of Failure does not have
Speaker 1: a permanent site, but tours around the world. It's currently
Speaker 1: in Taiwan, and Samuel West welcome suggestions for other items
Speaker 1: to include. You can send your ideas to info at
Speaker 1: Museum of Failure dot com. Today's episode is based on
Speaker 1: the article The Museum of Failure Celebrates Flops and Fiascos
Speaker 1: on house to works dot com, written by Dave Rus.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership
Speaker 1: with how stuffworks dot com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang.
Speaker 1: Four more podcasts on my heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.