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 a love of all things tech, and one of
Speaker 1: my favorite topics in tech centers on projects that just
Speaker 1: didn't work out. Not to be clear, this isn't all
Speaker 1: about schadenfreude, which, for those who don't know, is a
Speaker 1: German word that essentially means the feeling of pleasure you
Speaker 1: get when you see someone else fail. Now there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of that going on sometimes, but really, to me,
Speaker 1: the interesting thing about failure is that you can learn
Speaker 1: from it. By learning what doesn't work, you can refine
Speaker 1: your approach and find ways that do work. Or sometimes
Speaker 1: you figure out the thing you wanted to do isn't
Speaker 1: necessarily possible. So in this episode, I'm going to look
Speaker 1: at some projects, gadgets and campaigns that didn't succeed for
Speaker 1: various reasons. Because for every iPhone success story, there's a
Speaker 1: massive flop that hardly anyone remembers today. Long time listeners
Speaker 1: know that once upon a time, I very confidently predicted
Speaker 1: that Apple's iPad would be a failure. Obviously I was
Speaker 1: as wrong as wrong can be about that. So there's
Speaker 1: our first fail. It was mine. But at the time
Speaker 1: I felt pretty sure of myself. After all, no one
Speaker 1: had really made a successful consumer tablet computer at that point.
Speaker 1: There were tablets on the market, or slate computers they
Speaker 1: were sometimes called, but for the most part, the only
Speaker 1: place you found them were in certain occupations or specific
Speaker 1: use cases. No one had really hit it big with
Speaker 1: a general use tablet computer. Q Michael Arrington, co founder
Speaker 1: of tech Crunch, he wanted to create a useful tablet
Speaker 1: or slate computer. He also wanted it to be affordable.
Speaker 1: He really wanted to aim for a two dollar price tag,
Speaker 1: which was pretty darn ambitious really. He and his team
Speaker 1: got started in two thousand and eight on the concept,
Speaker 1: and they were able to build a couple of prototypes,
Speaker 1: and it turned out that making a tablet was really hard,
Speaker 1: particularly getting the capacity of touchscreen just right so that
Speaker 1: there was a good input method for the user. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously there's no keyboard or mouse. You have to have
Speaker 1: a way to interact with the device. And after those
Speaker 1: first couple of prototypes, Errington's team partnered unofficially it turns
Speaker 1: out with a company called Fusion Garage, and that really
Speaker 1: ended up being a bad choice. Now. At first, everything
Speaker 1: was going okay, but then on November two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: Errington got a message from the CEO of Fusion Garage,
Speaker 1: and the message said that Fusion Garages shareholders felt that
Speaker 1: Errington's team was superfluous and that their company, Fusion Garage,
Speaker 1: should just move forward with this device on their own,
Speaker 1: cutting Errington out entirely to make matters worse. This was
Speaker 1: just days before Errington was going to show off the
Speaker 1: working prototype at a live event. He had already talked
Speaker 1: about the crunch Pad publicly and people were eager to
Speaker 1: see what it was that his team had been working on.
Speaker 1: It was supposed to be the launch of the product,
Speaker 1: and the plan was to even take pre orders for
Speaker 1: up to a thousand units, and boom, Errington gets this message. Now,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, that didn't go down well. Fusion
Speaker 1: Garage announced that the tablet, now renamed Juju that's j
Speaker 1: o O j o O, would go on pre sale
Speaker 1: in December for five hundred dollars, more than twice the
Speaker 1: price Errington wanted to aim for when he had started
Speaker 1: working on the project. A couple of years earlier, Errington
Speaker 1: sued Fusion Garage, but because there was no formal contract
Speaker 1: about their agreement, a judge dismissed a lot of the
Speaker 1: arguments that Errington's legal team made against Fusion Garage. But
Speaker 1: it seemed like the whole thing would end up being
Speaker 1: a moot point anyway, because during the court case, it
Speaker 1: was revealed that the Juju device had only received ninety
Speaker 1: that's nine zero pre orders before it finally began shipping
Speaker 1: in March of The tablet was absolutely hamstrung by the
Speaker 1: Apple iPad, which we first learned about in January and
Speaker 1: which began shipping in April of that year. So a
Speaker 1: lot of people were saying, well, if I want a tablet,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna wait for the iPad. While I don't
Speaker 1: know how those court cases ultimately played out, I couldn't
Speaker 1: find that when I was researching this episode, I can
Speaker 1: tell you that the Juju Tablet didn't last very long.
Speaker 1: Fusion Garage decided to stop supporting it before ten was
Speaker 1: even over, So we're only talking about half a year
Speaker 1: from the point it launched to the point that Fusion
Speaker 1: Garage stopped supporting it, and Fusion Garage itself didn't last
Speaker 1: a whole lot longer. That company went into liquidation in
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. I think there's some real lessons to learn
Speaker 1: from that story. One is that making a particular form
Speaker 1: factor consumer friendly is really hard, and while Apple made
Speaker 1: it work, countless other companies have made slates or tablets
Speaker 1: that saw very little traction in the general tech consumer
Speaker 1: market before and since the introduction of the iPad. Another
Speaker 1: is that you always get those business agreements in writing always. Now,
Speaker 1: let's take a leap, In fact, let's call it a
Speaker 1: Magic Leap, a decade ahead. The company Magic Leap started
Speaker 1: in two though it kept a pretty low profile for
Speaker 1: the first few years. We would later learn that the
Speaker 1: primary focus of the company was the development of an
Speaker 1: augmented reality headset. Now, just in case you're not familiar
Speaker 1: with that, term, augmented reality or a R refers to
Speaker 1: using digital information to enhance a real environment in some way.
Speaker 1: Typically we experience this digital enhancement through a screen or
Speaker 1: a headset, though you could do it with audio like
Speaker 1: with headphones, or even other methods of sensory input. But
Speaker 1: the technology interprets what we are focusing on within our
Speaker 1: environment and then enhances our experience in some way. So
Speaker 1: a super simple implementation are the various filters on phone
Speaker 1: apps that let you, you know, take pictures of yourself
Speaker 1: with bunny ears, or you can turn into a dragon
Speaker 1: or whatever. Magic Leap was working on a headset that
Speaker 1: could overlay digital information on your view of the world,
Speaker 1: and the applications for this technology are practically limitless, from
Speaker 1: entertainment to productivity. And obviously there are other examples of
Speaker 1: this technology on the market, such as micros offs hollow lens,
Speaker 1: but Magic Leap had a sense of mystery and well
Speaker 1: magic about it, and it attracted a lot of attention
Speaker 1: and a lot of investors, who poured around two billion
Speaker 1: dollars in the company years before it had a product
Speaker 1: to even show off. In two thousand eighteen, Magic Leap
Speaker 1: introduced its first headset, fittingly named the Magic Leap. One
Speaker 1: had a steep price tag two thousand, three hundred dollars
Speaker 1: per headset. The CEO's original hope was that the company
Speaker 1: would sell one million headsets in its first year, but
Speaker 1: in the official company projections that got reduced down by
Speaker 1: an order of magnitude, down to one thousand units, but
Speaker 1: reality was far more harsh. After the first six months,
Speaker 1: the company had only sold around six thousand units, according
Speaker 1: to Alex Heath of The Information. The Information Is a website.
Speaker 1: By the way, Addie Robertson of The Verge got to
Speaker 1: try out the Magic Leap and fell that the experience
Speaker 1: was interesting but fell far short of expectations. Given all
Speaker 1: the hype around the Magic Leap one for years, the
Speaker 1: tech world had been teased with hints at what was
Speaker 1: to come and lots of conceptual videos that really made
Speaker 1: it seem phenomenal, and the anticipation was really high. But
Speaker 1: by the time it finally came out, after the hollow
Speaker 1: lens had already been demonstrated, the Magic Leap one just
Speaker 1: didn't quite live up to its reputation. Magic Leap chose
Speaker 1: to pivot towards catering to enterprise clients, meaning instead of
Speaker 1: offering a consumer electronics product, the company was aiming at
Speaker 1: something for other businesses to purchase, and the rocky launch
Speaker 1: had some pretty big consequences, including massive layoffs like a
Speaker 1: thousand people laid off at the company and the CEO
Speaker 1: and founder of the company stepping down. Today, Magic Leap
Speaker 1: is planning the release of their second headset. This one
Speaker 1: is lighter, and the company says it will have a
Speaker 1: larger few old of view, but there aren't many details
Speaker 1: beyond some general statements about the physical specs of the
Speaker 1: the high tech specs. It may be that the experience
Speaker 1: of using them will match more closely with the perception
Speaker 1: of what it was going to be like, but we'll
Speaker 1: have to see. I personally get the feeling that a
Speaker 1: R is kind of going through what VR went through
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen nineties, which is when the actual
Speaker 1: experience of VR ended up being a pale imitation of
Speaker 1: what everyone thought it would be and then interest dropped
Speaker 1: like like a stone as a result. But I hope
Speaker 1: that they're successful. I would actually love to see more
Speaker 1: innovation in the a R space. So while I have reservations,
Speaker 1: my hope is that they make it work. Meanwhile, Magically
Speaker 1: has some other challenges. It seems like a lot of
Speaker 1: the planned partnerships that the company had with other big
Speaker 1: companies have sort of stalled out, and in Florida, the
Speaker 1: company has asked for an extension on a promise it
Speaker 1: made to the Broward County Commission. Magic Leap had promised
Speaker 1: to create seven jobs with an average salary of one
Speaker 1: thousand dollars per year, and in return they got some
Speaker 1: pretty sweet incentives to set up shop in Florida. But
Speaker 1: due to the fallout of the Magic Leap one release
Speaker 1: not going as planned and the subsequent layoffs and the
Speaker 1: pandemic on top of everything else, the company needs more
Speaker 1: time to make good on that promise. I'll keep my
Speaker 1: eye on Magic Leap and I'll continue to hope that
Speaker 1: the team is able to rebound. Let us now turn
Speaker 1: our sights to Microsoft. Now, Microsoft has tons of candidates
Speaker 1: I could choose from when it comes to failures. Years ago,
Speaker 1: I did an episode on Microsoft Bob, arguably one of
Speaker 1: the biggest flops in tech history. Also, it's the flop
Speaker 1: that introduced the world to comic Sands. I could also
Speaker 1: talk about Windows Vista or Windows eight, but instead let's
Speaker 1: chat about the Zoom. The Zoon wasly a suite of
Speaker 1: technologies centered around a portable media player called the Zoon.
Speaker 1: It was kind of Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPod. Microsoft
Speaker 1: launched the Zoo on November two thousand six. The original
Speaker 1: Zoom device had thirty gigabytes of storage space built in
Speaker 1: FM radio and a three inch screen, but two thousand
Speaker 1: six was pretty late to get into the portable media
Speaker 1: player game. Apple had introduced the first iPod in two
Speaker 1: thousand one and had worked to create an ecosystem with iTunes.
Speaker 1: An ecosystem I should add that worked okay if you
Speaker 1: were on a Mac, but I maintained it was a
Speaker 1: nightmare to use it on PC, at least in my experience.
Speaker 1: Microsoft was trying to make up for some lost time
Speaker 1: and lost ground, and it didn't go so well. When
Speaker 1: it came to market share, the Zoon was never able
Speaker 1: to get as high as ten percent of the whole market.
Speaker 1: It was always in the single digits. The company stuck
Speaker 1: with the product line for a file, including the introduction
Speaker 1: of a touch screen Zoom in two thousand nine that
Speaker 1: was the Zoom hd UH. Some first generation Zoom thirties failed.
Speaker 1: They froze entirely. Microsoft later said that the reason for
Speaker 1: the Zoom's freezing was because of a third party internal
Speaker 1: clock that failed to account for a leap year the
Speaker 1: host pesky clocks. One capability the Zoom players had that
Speaker 1: got a lot of snark was that you could wirelessly
Speaker 1: share a song from your library with a friend who
Speaker 1: also happened to have a Zoom. Also, you could actually
Speaker 1: send that song to any nearby Zoom device. If your
Speaker 1: Zoom detected another Zoom within thirty feet, you could send
Speaker 1: a song you know, or other piece of media like
Speaker 1: a podcast their way, and the recipient would get a
Speaker 1: little notification and they could choose to either accept or
Speaker 1: deny that offer, and then if they accepted it, they
Speaker 1: would have three days to you know, listen to the
Speaker 1: media before it disappeared from their vice, and they also
Speaker 1: had a limit of listening to it three times. And
Speaker 1: hearing that you might think, well, was there to be
Speaker 1: snarky about. Well, the snark wasn't about the capability, It
Speaker 1: was the name that Microsoft gave to it. Microsoft called
Speaker 1: it squirting. The lackluster sales of the Zoom ultimately led
Speaker 1: to Microsoft deciding to stop development and production on the
Speaker 1: Zoo in the company continued to support the Zoom software service,
Speaker 1: which allowed you know, existing Zoom users to listen to
Speaker 1: songs they had purchased through Microsoft and Stuff, or they
Speaker 1: could listen to a catalog of streaming music for a
Speaker 1: monthly fee, but all of that got shut down in
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen and while Microsoft would you know, move
Speaker 1: users over from their service to a new service, the
Speaker 1: Groove Music Service, not all the copyright licenses made that shift.
Speaker 1: The the library of the zooon uh universe was different
Speaker 1: from the Groove universe, so that wasn't great. It meant
Speaker 1: a lot of Zoom users found themselves unable to listen
Speaker 1: to music that they had previously purchased on the Zoom platform.
Speaker 1: And it was also a reminder that the media model
Speaker 1: we have these days where we don't really have copies
Speaker 1: of media. Typically we normally access the media through streaming services.
Speaker 1: That means that there can come a time where we
Speaker 1: can't access that stuff anymore because of licensing issues that
Speaker 1: are on the back end. So bye bye Zooon. We
Speaker 1: hardly squirted d. On a related note, there was the Panto,
Speaker 1: famous for its association with musician Neil Young. The bitch
Speaker 1: for Panto is pretty simple. Most digital music we encounter
Speaker 1: these days has been compressed, and in that compression process
Speaker 1: you can lose fidelity, the quality of the audio, the
Speaker 1: dynamic range of the music. That's the range between the
Speaker 1: softest and the loudest bits of a piece that gets reduced.
Speaker 1: So it makes the music more flat right, The softer
Speaker 1: parts get boosted a little bit in volume, the loudest
Speaker 1: parts get reduced in volume, and you have less variation.
Speaker 1: You might also lose some harmonics because compression algorithms typically
Speaker 1: determine if a sound is within the range of human hearing,
Speaker 1: and if it figures that the sound is outside the
Speaker 1: range of human hearing, it drops that information, thinking that's
Speaker 1: not really important, but that can help shape the sound
Speaker 1: a little bit, so that's also an issue. The Panto
Speaker 1: would let you listen to uncompressed digital music. Ideally, you
Speaker 1: would experience music as if you had been in the
Speaker 1: recording studio when the artists were laying down the tracks
Speaker 1: for the first time, or maybe more realistically, you would
Speaker 1: be in the studio after audio engineers had worked on
Speaker 1: a track to sweeten it up a little bit before
Speaker 1: recording it to a master. Neil Young first started talking
Speaker 1: about Panto back in two thousand twelve. A Kickstarter campaign
Speaker 1: helped fund the project initially, though the company called Ponto
Speaker 1: Music reportedly had industry backing as well. Despite all this,
Speaker 1: the project dragged on and it bled money, with the
Speaker 1: company having to launch a crowdfunder campaign later to raise
Speaker 1: even more money, so it had two different crowdfunding campaigns
Speaker 1: in the company released the Panto music player device. The
Speaker 1: sales must have been pretty lackluster. The Travel Insider blog
Speaker 1: estimates that perhaps around fifteen thousand Pantos were sold as
Speaker 1: part of the crowdfunding campaign, sort of pre sales. It
Speaker 1: was an expensive piece of technology. It started at four
Speaker 1: hundred dollars and ultimately I think Ponto failed because when
Speaker 1: it comes to considerations people give for portable music, the
Speaker 1: convenience factor typically rates much higher than fidelity. Plus, we
Speaker 1: were starting to shift from downloads to streams around this
Speaker 1: time too, And besides, there's a diminishing returns issue when
Speaker 1: it comes to fidelity. Yes, you can from a nickel
Speaker 1: level see an improvement in audio, like you can look
Speaker 1: at the different meters and say, okay, we detect more
Speaker 1: precisely that this recording is more uh accurate a representation
Speaker 1: of the original sound than this other recording. You can
Speaker 1: do that from a technical perspective, but a lot of
Speaker 1: us have trouble telling the difference between a good music
Speaker 1: playback session and an excellent music playback session. It's very
Speaker 1: easy to tell bad from good. But once you get
Speaker 1: up to good things, get a bit more subjective. The
Speaker 1: Pano players stuck around for two whole years before it
Speaker 1: faded away after various partners had already gone bankrupt. There
Speaker 1: was talk of Pano leading to another service, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of evolving into something else, but so far nothing
Speaker 1: has come of that. Now when we come back, we're
Speaker 1: gonna get all googly up in here, But first let's
Speaker 1: take a break. Well, I've already spoiled it. But one
Speaker 1: company that has had a very long history of abandoned
Speaker 1: projects is Google, and that shouldn't be a surprise because
Speaker 1: for more than a decade the company encouraged its employees
Speaker 1: to experiment and think outside the box. Until about the
Speaker 1: general policy at Google was that Googlers could spend twenty
Speaker 1: of their time working on their own projects that could
Speaker 1: potentially benefit Google down the line, but they weren't part
Speaker 1: of the employee's normal work. So that could mean that
Speaker 1: Monday through Thursday you work on your official projects, and
Speaker 1: then on Fridays you just kind of experiment and build
Speaker 1: stuff that might or might not ever see the light
Speaker 1: of day. This was Google's way of encouraging innovation within
Speaker 1: the company, and a lot of elements of Google products
Speaker 1: emerged because of this policy, but we also saw stuff
Speaker 1: that would get a launch or get incorporated into something
Speaker 1: else and over time and Google would just step back
Speaker 1: from it. Sometimes I think the problem was that Google
Speaker 1: didn't really know how to launch and promote some of
Speaker 1: these products. But in other cases it really was more
Speaker 1: that the products just didn't appeal to non Google engineer types,
Speaker 1: or that you were looking at something that was questionably useful,
Speaker 1: or it just wasn't very user friendly in general. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of Google products we could talk about
Speaker 1: that didn't go very far, and a few that never
Speaker 1: emerged beyond an announcement. Oh and before I forget, you
Speaker 1: might wonder why Google abandoned that you know, employees get
Speaker 1: time to pursue their own projects policy. Sometimes around it's
Speaker 1: not because the company changed course on innovation, but because
Speaker 1: of managers. See, managers at Google are accountable for the
Speaker 1: productivity of the teams they manage, and that time really
Speaker 1: eats into the number of hours teams can dedicate to
Speaker 1: official Google projects, and that hits the managers when it
Speaker 1: comes to review time. So there was a shift within
Speaker 1: the company to eliminate the loosey goosey time component to
Speaker 1: boost productivity and go with a more top down approach
Speaker 1: to innovation. Anyway, let's talk about some Google products, some
Speaker 1: which may have been spawned from that time policy that
Speaker 1: ultimately flopped. And this is just a sampling. I could
Speaker 1: do multiple episodes about all the different products from Google
Speaker 1: that ultimately got the AX. So consider this more of
Speaker 1: a sampler platter, arranged in no particular order. And we'll
Speaker 1: start with a Google product that lasted all of one
Speaker 1: whole day. I'm talking about Google X. Now, this is
Speaker 1: not the moonshot Google X. That's a division inside Google
Speaker 1: that focuses on bleeding edge R and D. It's kind
Speaker 1: of Google's version of Lockheed's skunk Works. No. No, the
Speaker 1: Google X i'm talking about was a different approach to
Speaker 1: Google Search, and it was only available on March six,
Speaker 1: two thousand five. Back in two thousand and five, the
Speaker 1: basic Google search bar allows you to indicate what sort
Speaker 1: of results you wanted to look for before you hit
Speaker 1: search or I'm feeling lucky. The I'm feeling lucky button
Speaker 1: would just take you to whatever the top search result
Speaker 1: was for your query. You could search the web for
Speaker 1: pages related to your query. You could search images, you
Speaker 1: could search for news articles and so on. That stuff
Speaker 1: still exists, by the way, but now it's after the jump,
Speaker 1: after you've done that initial search. But in the old
Speaker 1: days you could do it before you actually hit the
Speaker 1: search button. Anyway, Google X was a new layout for search,
Speaker 1: with icons replacing the text above the search bar. So
Speaker 1: there was a portrait in a frame icon that represented
Speaker 1: image search, there was a newspaper icon that represented news,
Speaker 1: and so on. It looked a lot like Apple's Mac
Speaker 1: os ten or os x doc like a lot a
Speaker 1: lot like it. Chakai O Haasama, the software engineer presumably
Speaker 1: behind the redesign, acknowledge the connection to Mac os ten.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. There are certain companies that have
Speaker 1: a reputation for really jealously guarding their I p. Apple
Speaker 1: is one of those companies. In fact, the company has
Speaker 1: been known to send legal teams after other companies that
Speaker 1: looked like they were kind of copying Apple style. This,
Speaker 1: by the way, is pretty rich if you know the
Speaker 1: history of Apple's graphic user interface and how Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: himself was famous for stealing other ideas and making them
Speaker 1: Apple's own approach. Anyway, while neither Apple nor Google said
Speaker 1: anything about it, the OS ten like layout of Google
Speaker 1: Search was gone by March two five. Next is Google Lively,
Speaker 1: which I honestly don't remember being a thing. Now. It's
Speaker 1: possible I heard about it at the time, but Google
Speaker 1: launched this back in two thousand and eight. That is
Speaker 1: the same year we paunched tech Stuff, So it's also
Speaker 1: entirely possible that it just completely escaped my attention. It
Speaker 1: wasn't around for very long, so it's not like I
Speaker 1: had a lot of opportunities to get familiar with it.
Speaker 1: So what the heck was Google Lively? We'll simply put
Speaker 1: Google Lively was a way of creating online three D
Speaker 1: spaces that kind of served as a sort of chat room.
Speaker 1: You can think of something like Second Life but for Google,
Speaker 1: or something that's kind of like an M M O RPG,
Speaker 1: just without the overt game elements. It all fit inside
Speaker 1: the web browser experience, so you didn't have to download
Speaker 1: a program or anything. When it launched. It worked only
Speaker 1: with PCs running Windows, specifically either Windows XP or Windows
Speaker 1: Vista anyone remember those, and it was also compatible with
Speaker 1: Internet Explorer or Firefox. I don't think It was even
Speaker 1: compatible with Google Chrome, though to be fair, Chrome did
Speaker 1: not launch until September two eight, so the same year
Speaker 1: that Ly came out. The company planned future versions that
Speaker 1: we're supposed to work on Mac and Linux computers as well.
Speaker 1: Rooms within Google Lively had their own u r l s,
Speaker 1: so you could link them together within Google Lively, and
Speaker 1: moving from one virtual room to another was essentially the
Speaker 1: same thing as clicking on a link and going to
Speaker 1: a new web page. Google Lively could be embedded into
Speaker 1: other websites, so a web administrator for a big brand
Speaker 1: could incorporate Google Lively into the brand's own web presence
Speaker 1: and allow visitors to wander around a virtual space. You
Speaker 1: could have some limited interactions with virtual objects and with
Speaker 1: other visitors to the three D room, you could chat.
Speaker 1: Your messages would appear in a little word balloons above
Speaker 1: your avatar's head. You could also open up a separate
Speaker 1: chat window if you preferred, which made it a lot
Speaker 1: easier to follow a conversation, and several actions were also
Speaker 1: included as animations for your avatar, so rather than just
Speaker 1: typing in something like hugs, you could have your avatar hug.
Speaker 1: Another one Google Lively was one of those projects that
Speaker 1: grew out of the twenty percent employee time policy. But
Speaker 1: one thing it didn't have was a way to generate revenue.
Speaker 1: There was no plan on how to use Google Lively
Speaker 1: to make money, and so while it was kind of interesting,
Speaker 1: it also didn't serve much of a business purpose, and
Speaker 1: a lot of tech journals of the time pretty much
Speaker 1: dismissed Google Lively, calling it more lame than Second Life.
Speaker 1: That's their words, not mine. At the time, the world
Speaker 1: was also sliding into a recession, which was affecting the
Speaker 1: ad revenue business kind of like what we saw in
Speaker 1: and since AD revenue is the way that Google makes
Speaker 1: the vast majority of its money, leaders within the company
Speaker 1: decided that Google Lively was a distraction and that really
Speaker 1: all hands were needed on deck to deal with the
Speaker 1: lagging AD dollars. It launched in July two and Google
Speaker 1: killed it at the end of that year, so it
Speaker 1: wasn't around for very long. Moving up to two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine, we get to Google Wave, which was a
Speaker 1: real time online collaborative editing tool. You had create a
Speaker 1: document called a wave, then you could invite other people
Speaker 1: to join it, and then together you could all make
Speaker 1: changes all at the same time, and you could see
Speaker 1: people making changes to stuff in real time, and you
Speaker 1: could chat or leave comments about it. Now. At the
Speaker 1: time it came out, I was preparing to launch a
Speaker 1: tech Stuff video series with my original co host, Chris Palette.
Speaker 1: We used Google Wave to help plan out our episodes.
Speaker 1: We would build our show in Google Wave and we
Speaker 1: had tech news segments. We also had some goofy stuff
Speaker 1: in there. We had a tweet of the week segment. Gosh,
Speaker 1: those were fun days. Anyway. Google Wave lasted only slightly
Speaker 1: longer than our video series did. While some features would
Speaker 1: find their way into other Google products, Google Wave itself
Speaker 1: was washed out by when Google said it would no
Speaker 1: longer support development for the platform, and Google a Fish
Speaker 1: deleted everything that was on Google Wave in April of
Speaker 1: tw Some of the features from Google Wave would find
Speaker 1: their way into another failed Google product called Google Buzz,
Speaker 1: which launched in two just a couple of months after
Speaker 1: the company said it wasn't going to support Wave anymore.
Speaker 1: Google Buzz was kind of a bridge between Google Wave
Speaker 1: and Google Plus, and here's a news flash, none of
Speaker 1: those products are around anymore. Google Buzz was all about
Speaker 1: adding social features to Gmail, and Buzz was itself incorporated
Speaker 1: directly into Gmail. That in itself would become a pretty
Speaker 1: big problem for the company. But here's how Google described
Speaker 1: it in their initial blog post announcing the service. Back
Speaker 1: in quote, Google, Buzz is a new way to start
Speaker 1: conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right
Speaker 1: into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an
Speaker 1: entirely new set of friends from scratch. It just works.
Speaker 1: If you think about it, There's always been a big
Speaker 1: social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings the network to the
Speaker 1: service by automatically setting you up to follow the people
Speaker 1: you email and chat with the most. We focused on
Speaker 1: building an easy to use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos,
Speaker 1: and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately,
Speaker 1: so you don't have to use different tools to share
Speaker 1: with different audiences. Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing
Speaker 1: Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that
Speaker 1: matters most as it happens in real time. End quote.
Speaker 1: Buzz would let users or force them, depending upon your
Speaker 1: point of view, aggregate feeds from their various social circles
Speaker 1: into one place, so for example, you could see tweets
Speaker 1: posted by your friends pop up and Google Buzz, assuming
Speaker 1: you had those friends listed as contacts and Gmail. And
Speaker 1: it wasn't just Twitter. You could aggregate stuff from other
Speaker 1: services like Flicker because a friend, feed, Blogger, and YouTube
Speaker 1: and I'm sure a couple of those names were blasts
Speaker 1: from the past for some of you out there. You
Speaker 1: can also post to Google Buzz directly, similar to making
Speaker 1: a post on Facebook or Twitter. You could include pictures
Speaker 1: or links, and friends could comment on those posts and
Speaker 1: create a threaded conversation. Nothing groundbreaking, you know, but it
Speaker 1: was all nested within Gmail. And then came the problems. See,
Speaker 1: by incorporating Buzz into Gmail, it turned all Gmail users
Speaker 1: into Buzz users, and that wasn't necessarily something that Gmail
Speaker 1: folks wanted, and they weren't too terribly keen on their
Speaker 1: contact lists becoming public or that stuff they thought they
Speaker 1: had been posting to a small group of friends was
Speaker 1: now circulating among much larger groups thanks to the fact
Speaker 1: that Buzz would helpfully point out friends of friends that
Speaker 1: you might know to expand your circle. In short, the
Speaker 1: implementation was a pretty big min as far as privacy
Speaker 1: and trust are concerned. Google was actually taken to court
Speaker 1: and lost over the matter, and they paid out more
Speaker 1: than eight million dollars As a result. Buzz got a
Speaker 1: couple of changes to make it less intrusive, but it
Speaker 1: just wasn't meant to be. It would be phased out
Speaker 1: to make way for Google Plus, though the two services
Speaker 1: did exist side by side for a short while. And
Speaker 1: of course now Google Plus is gone too. But I
Speaker 1: do have one last Google product I want to mention,
Speaker 1: and it's not Google Plus. As I said earlier, I
Speaker 1: could do a whole episode on all the different Google
Speaker 1: products that came and went, with some of them having
Speaker 1: features that found their way into other stuff. And one
Speaker 1: of those gadgets is the Nexus Q. Now, the Nexus
Speaker 1: QUE is special because it never actually came out as
Speaker 1: a consumer product. It was announced Google unveiled it at
Speaker 1: the company's Io conference for developers in twenty twelve. In fact,
Speaker 1: people who were attending that conference actually got a Nexus Q,
Speaker 1: which I guess makes it a special kind of collector's
Speaker 1: item since Google pushed back the release date of the
Speaker 1: consumer version until the whole thing just got canned. So
Speaker 1: what was the Nexus Q simply? But it was a
Speaker 1: media streaming device you would connect it to speakers or
Speaker 1: to a television, and you used an app to control
Speaker 1: the Nexus Q. You could send content to it that
Speaker 1: then would play out either on the TV screen or
Speaker 1: on the stereo speakers or whatever it was connected to.
Speaker 1: The design of the gadget was very striking. It was
Speaker 1: spherical with a flat section, so it could sit steady
Speaker 1: on a table or on the floor, wouldn't just roll around.
Speaker 1: It also had a circle of tiny led lights going
Speaker 1: around it, kind of like an equator, but at a
Speaker 1: forty five degree angle relative to the sphere. It weighed
Speaker 1: about two pounds or not quite a kilogram, and it
Speaker 1: looked pretty darn nifty. But that's sort of where the
Speaker 1: positive remarks end. See The Nexus q was limited to
Speaker 1: streaming content from Google server says like YouTube or what
Speaker 1: was then Google Play. There was no support for any
Speaker 1: other streaming services. The control scheme was somewhat confusing, according
Speaker 1: to multiple reviews, and on top of everything else, it
Speaker 1: was expensive. The projected price was two dollars, which also
Speaker 1: didn't include stuff like speakers if you wanted to make
Speaker 1: it a sound system, so this wasn't like the later
Speaker 1: Google Home smart speakers or anything like that. It wasn't
Speaker 1: as robust as the chrome Cast devices that would come later,
Speaker 1: which allow you to stream all sorts of content to
Speaker 1: a television using a connected phone or computer. It was
Speaker 1: a limited media streaming device at a premium cost in
Speaker 1: a world that already had stuff like Apple TV, Roku
Speaker 1: and so Nose devices. Ultimately, Google chose not to release
Speaker 1: the Nexus Queue. Instead, many of those features would go
Speaker 1: into devices like the aforementioned chrome Cast and smart speakers.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't be quite as striking from a stylistic standpoint
Speaker 1: is the NEXTUS queue, but they did prove to be
Speaker 1: more versatile. And that's our Google section for this episode.
Speaker 1: Like I said, I can talk about tons more. Let's
Speaker 1: say about Google Fiber, which I'm still waiting for here
Speaker 1: in Atlanta. There's a Google Fiber office near our studios downtown.
Speaker 1: I signed up years ago to connect to Google Fiber,
Speaker 1: but never built out to my neighborhood, which actually sits
Speaker 1: between two major points in the Google Fiber infrastructure in
Speaker 1: our city. But that story would require a whole episode
Speaker 1: on its own. And I'll just go to break so
Speaker 1: I can be bitter for a bit. I'll be better
Speaker 1: not bitter when we come back and I'll talk about
Speaker 1: a few more flops, but first let's take another break.
Speaker 1: In a recent Text of News episode, I talked about
Speaker 1: an Apple TV Plus series about the not really a
Speaker 1: tech many called we Work, and I figured we should
Speaker 1: probably do a brief overview of we Work, because while
Speaker 1: it isn't really a tech company, it consistently positioned itself
Speaker 1: as if it were a tech company. And while this
Speaker 1: story isn't over yet, it has had a massive fall
Speaker 1: from grace so sky high overview. We Work as a
Speaker 1: company that secures spaces and buildings and then leases or
Speaker 1: subleases those spaces out to other professionals. So that can
Speaker 1: include freelancers who just need a workspace of their own,
Speaker 1: or companies that don't have their own offices yet. So
Speaker 1: if you're launching a startup and you don't have the
Speaker 1: cash on hand to get a space of your own,
Speaker 1: you could rent some space from we Work. And it
Speaker 1: came with some perks, like an internet infrastructure, so you
Speaker 1: could just connect to the we Work offices internet. They
Speaker 1: also had some goodies like free beer, no kidding. For
Speaker 1: a while, that was one of the perks of a
Speaker 1: wee Work in environment a breake area stocked with free beer,
Speaker 1: oh and also wine. But the days of wine and
Speaker 1: Bruskis were not to last. The company was leading up
Speaker 1: to holding an i p O, or initial public offering
Speaker 1: in two thousand nineteen. That's when a privately owned company
Speaker 1: makes the transition to a publicly traded company and joins
Speaker 1: the stock market. We works i p O was highly anticipated.
Speaker 1: Investors had been pouring a lot of money into the
Speaker 1: startup and it had reached a peak valuation of almost
Speaker 1: fifty billion dollars that's billion with a B, a princely sum.
Speaker 1: But then things went pear shaped. Well really, the pear
Speaker 1: shaped stuff was kind of in the works for a while,
Speaker 1: but it really came to a head at the i
Speaker 1: p O when the company filed the i p O
Speaker 1: S one registration document with the SEC. Because that document
Speaker 1: seemed to belong to another universe. This is a document
Speaker 1: that lay is a lot of information about a company
Speaker 1: before it goes public, so stuff like the corporate structure
Speaker 1: and succession planning. But this one didn't seem to belong
Speaker 1: to our universe. It seemed to belong to a cartoon universe.
Speaker 1: It included a corporate hierarchy in which you had at
Speaker 1: the top the WE Company. Underneath that was the WE
Speaker 1: Company m C l l C. Then under that you
Speaker 1: had the WE Company Partnership, under which was the We
Speaker 1: Work Company's ll C. So it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: Russian nesting doll more than an organizational chart. Moreover, the
Speaker 1: company had some massive expenses in there, like a private
Speaker 1: jet for the CEO and co founder Adam Neuman, and
Speaker 1: there were questions about the fact that Neiman had been
Speaker 1: purchasing real estate on his own then leasing that real
Speaker 1: estate to we Work, which would suble sit down to customers.
Speaker 1: If you're the CEO of a company that is funded
Speaker 1: by investors, it seems to me like it's a little
Speaker 1: bit of a conflict of interest if you take the
Speaker 1: money of the company to least real estate from yourself,
Speaker 1: using essentially investor money to fund your pockets. But it
Speaker 1: gets stranger the deeper you go. Another co founder of
Speaker 1: We Work is Adam's wife, Rebecca, who is first cousins
Speaker 1: with Gwyneth Paltrow. Now I mentioned that because I detect
Speaker 1: a similar sort of magical thinking in Rebecca as I
Speaker 1: see in Gwyneth, And that's not a compliment. Magical thinking
Speaker 1: means you tend to believe that unrelated events have some
Speaker 1: sort of causal link to them, you know, like if
Speaker 1: you step on a crack, you will in fact break
Speaker 1: your mama's back kind of thing. It's the opposite of
Speaker 1: critical thinking. Anyway. Elements of that were in the I
Speaker 1: p O filing as well, which is unusual to say
Speaker 1: the least. The I p O prospectus gave current and
Speaker 1: potential future investors pause. Maybe that fifty billion dollar valuation
Speaker 1: mostly thanks to major investors SoftBank, maybe that was a
Speaker 1: little bit off the mark, and everything then began to
Speaker 1: crumble under criticism. The company withdrew its IBO filing and
Speaker 1: postponed the offering, which to this day is still postponed.
Speaker 1: A bit later, the board of directors demanded that Neuman
Speaker 1: resign as CEO. But don't worry about him. He got
Speaker 1: to leave with about one point seven billion dollars worth
Speaker 1: of wealth because of a soft Bank buy out. Soft
Speaker 1: Bank took over we Work as majority shareholder and controlled
Speaker 1: the company. The value of the company at that point
Speaker 1: had plunged by around nine percent. SoftBank divested we Work
Speaker 1: of some side businesses that really had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with office space. Like it owned a wave pool company
Speaker 1: at one point. A report in October twenty from the
Speaker 1: company stated that it might be profitable by the end
Speaker 1: of one and that it's going to explore as for
Speaker 1: an I p O again. More recently, there have been
Speaker 1: rumors that We Work might go public through a special
Speaker 1: purpose Acquisition company or sp a C. Now these are
Speaker 1: shell companies that have their own i p O. So
Speaker 1: it's a company that doesn't own anything, doesn't do anything,
Speaker 1: but it goes public. Then it uses the money that's
Speaker 1: raised by that i p O to buy a private company,
Speaker 1: and the private company, now owned by a public company,
Speaker 1: becomes a public company itself. So in other words, this
Speaker 1: process bypasses the I p O process for that private company.
Speaker 1: And you might think that sounds fishy, but this is
Speaker 1: actually legal and accepted, though it can also be risky.
Speaker 1: As I record this, We Work hasn't gone through with
Speaker 1: the sp a C approach, nor has it announced formal
Speaker 1: plans to hold its own I p O. I think
Speaker 1: that we Work team are weighing their options, and we're
Speaker 1: getting to the end of this episode. And as I said,
Speaker 1: there are tons of companies and products that we could
Speaker 1: talk about and not just from Google. So, like I said,
Speaker 1: there's no shortage of those either, Like we could talk
Speaker 1: about the Windows Phone story or the Facebook Phone or
Speaker 1: movie Pass, but I'll save some of those for a
Speaker 1: future installment of what I'm sure will be an endless series.
Speaker 1: For this episode, I thought I would end with a
Speaker 1: notable flop that brings another F word into the mix.
Speaker 1: But not that one, not the dirty one. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about the Samsung Galaxy Notes seven, which brings the word
Speaker 1: fire to our a literate mix of failures, flops, and
Speaker 1: falls from grace. On August, tech reviewers received the first
Speaker 1: round of the Galaxy Note seven smartphone from Samsung, and
Speaker 1: the initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The phone had a
Speaker 1: really nice design, apparently felt great to use, had an
Speaker 1: amaze in display, and the early consensus was that the
Speaker 1: phone was just really well designed and potentially the best
Speaker 1: smartphone of the year. And then they started to explode,
Speaker 1: and yeah, that's what some of them did. Less than
Speaker 1: a month after those review models went out, there were
Speaker 1: reports of thirty five exploding Galaxy Notes sevens. The company
Speaker 1: rushed to recall the Notes sevens that were still on
Speaker 1: the market and tried to suss out where the problem was.
Speaker 1: The company's engineers in Korea tried to replicate the issues,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't get any of them to explode, and
Speaker 1: the company was eager to fix these problems and get
Speaker 1: the handsets back on the market after this, you know,
Speaker 1: little hiccup, perhaps limiting the damage of that initial crisis.
Speaker 1: After all, the phone received such great critical praise when
Speaker 1: it was reviewed, it could still be a big seller
Speaker 1: if the company could just make sure that none of
Speaker 1: the other ones would blow up. Samsung stated that the
Speaker 1: problem was likely due to the batteries that the company
Speaker 1: had installed in these handsets, and those batteries came from
Speaker 1: one of the company's suppliers. In fact, the company's supplier
Speaker 1: being itself Samsung SDI or you know, a subsidiary company
Speaker 1: of Samsung, and so they decided they would go with
Speaker 1: a different supplier. They chose a Chinese company to produce
Speaker 1: the batteries, and thus they began to install them into
Speaker 1: the handsets and get those handsets back out on the market. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the reports of exploding phones didn't stop with these new batteries,
Speaker 1: indicating that either two different suppliers had the same faulty
Speaker 1: batteries or there was some other issue at play. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, Samsung recalled the phones again, and airlines began
Speaker 1: to issue official statements banning passengers from carrying the Galaxy
Speaker 1: Notes seven on board a plane. That's not a good look,
Speaker 1: and there was a real danger of this crisis spreading
Speaker 1: to other devices that might be perfectly safe, but without
Speaker 1: knowing for sure the would be too high. Samsung kept
Speaker 1: trying to get to the bottom of the issue. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: after two recalls, the company halted production of the Note
Speaker 1: seven and then scrapped the phone model entirely, a really
Speaker 1: costly decision, but probably not as expensive as dealing with
Speaker 1: numerous lawsuits should future phones continue the explosive trend. Three
Speaker 1: months after discontinuing the Notes seven, Samsung issued a release
Speaker 1: explaining the company's findings in an investigation as to what
Speaker 1: caused these fires, and Samsung reps said that the first
Speaker 1: battery had a flaw in the design. At the upper
Speaker 1: right corner. The battery had a flaw where the negative
Speaker 1: and positive terminals of the battery can make contact with
Speaker 1: one another, which would cause a short circuit. Instead of
Speaker 1: the electricity flowing through the circuit try of the phone,
Speaker 1: it was going straight from one terminal to the other
Speaker 1: terminal in the battery. That would make the batteries start
Speaker 1: to heat up very very quickly, to the point where
Speaker 1: it would catch fire and then explode. As for the
Speaker 1: second battery, Samsung said there was a welding defect in
Speaker 1: the production of some of those batteries, which led to
Speaker 1: another short circuit issue and subsequent pyrotechnics. Apparently, the Chinese
Speaker 1: company was really rushing these batteries into production in order
Speaker 1: to meet these sudden demand and some corners might have
Speaker 1: been cut in the process. So, in other words, according
Speaker 1: to Samsung, the reason the Notes seven exploded was due
Speaker 1: to two separate problems with two different batteries. Now I'll
Speaker 1: likely do several more episodes about flops and failures, which, again,
Speaker 1: these are not always tragedies. Sometimes we learn valuable lessons
Speaker 1: from them. And on Wednesday's episode, we're going to follow
Speaker 1: the career of a particular entrepreneur who has been associated
Speaker 1: with some very high profile, very flashy failures. Hell's that
Speaker 1: for a tease, And if any of you out there
Speaker 1: have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes
Speaker 1: of Tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a person ality
Speaker 1: in tech, a specific technology. Maybe it's a trend in technology.
Speaker 1: Any of those things let me know. Reach out to
Speaker 1: me on Twitter. The handle 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.