People Share Which Products Failed Because They Were Ahead Of Their Time

People Share Which Products Failed Because They Were Ahead Of Their Time
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Predicting the sales market is tricky. It's kind of like training a cat: You never know which way it's going to go and you usually end up with scratches on your face. In rare occasions it's not because you had a bad product, rather you were too far ahead of the curve with what you tried to sell people.


Reddit user, u/Send_Dem_Kitties, wanted you to dig through commercial purgatory and share:

What product do you think failed because it was "too ahead of it's time"?

Pre-Facebook

After watching Valley of the Boom, some guys invented Facebook 10 years too early when not enough people were online yet.

It was called the globe.com. I'm a 90's kid and I had never heard of it.

GenXer1977

Motion Capture Before Motion Capture

Giphy

Eye Toy for PS2.

I'm not sure if it really failed as such, but it seemed to barely get utilized and they built it up as if it was gunna be a game changer at the time. Most people dont know what the hell I'm on about either when I bring it up so it seemed to have little cultural impact.

Of course then things like kinect happened which were used a lot more extensively.

RubyMowz

Parodying A Serious Topic

Police Squad. The TV show.

Cancelled after 6 episodes... years later they use the same star and the same jokes and make 3 movies, The Naked Gun series, which were hits.

Proof that the show was ahead of it's time.

PhreedomPhighter

Shopping From Home

I worked for a startup in 2000 that did online grocery shopping, for traditional brick and-mortar supermarkets in the US.

It went bust in 2001, about 15 years before online shopping in America became a sustainable business model.

thelastestgunslinger

Would We Call Them 'Black Box'?

They used to have VHS dispenser boxes just like the Redboxes you see, now.

Trouble is, no one used them, so the company moved on.

WhatsAKhatruAnyway

R.I.P. Sega

It's been mentioned in terms of individual products, but I feel overall SEGA as a company was ahead of its time in almost every regard. A lot of things that companies are doing today were first posited or tested by SEGA and met with critical or short-term success.

Throwtendo

We Want To EXPERIENCE The Wrinkles

Hi vision Laserdisc.

HD Laserdisc!

gibclay21

Star Lord Knows What's Up

I bought a Zune because their marketplace was $10 a month, and you could download any song and put it on your Zune.

You never owned the music, but it was still a better option that $.99 for one song from Itunes. Now 9 years later I'm paying for Spotify premium which is the same thing except with buggier/sh-ttier software. I have to click no!!!!! 50 times a day on that stupid "connect Waze to Spotify? Banner" that won't go the f-ck away no matter how many times I tell it to turn off!

Anyway, I don't know if the Zune marketplace was the first to do the unlimited music for a subscription, but it sure was the first one I ever came across.

Outrageous_Claims

Alexa V.0.1

Giphy

The Clapper.

Half the time I'm talking to Alexa it's to turn something on/off.

itsasecretidentity

You Know. That Thing. We Carry With Us. Every. Day.

Kodak digital camera- invented in the 1970s. Didn't think there was a market for them.

40 years later, they're built into cellphones and millions and millions are sold annually

nobodytrickedme

This is a myth; Kodak knew the digital camera would be a hit.

The problem is, Kodak didn't make hardly any money from the sale of their cameras or film; their bread & butter was selling developing chemicals. They knew the digital camera would destroy nearly all their profit, so they made the mistake of trying to bury it so that no one would think to build one, rather than try to develop it in secret and then release at the most opportune time.

iBooYourBadPuns

Exactly this. Kodak was a chemical company, not as much a camera company.

TheMasterAtSomething

People Share Unspoken First Date Rules Everyone Should Follow

Reddit user Quotedkarma asked: 'What's an unspoken rule on a first date?'

Two people having coffee
Photo by Chewy on Unsplash

Countless emotions arise when going on a first date.

Making this all the more difficult is that a first date is one of the few things that absolutely must be done solo, so bringing friends as backup simply isn't an option.

Leaving one to wish there was a handbook for navigating a first date successfully.

Of course, while there is no official guide, everyone has rules and beliefs about what to do and what to avoid on a first date.

From how to effortlessly bring out your best qualities, to a foolproof escape plan if your date is anything but the one you've dreamed your whole life of meeting.

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woman in white t-shirt looking at the window during daytime
Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash

My second college internship led me to a small content creation company. It was so small that the two editors were the only paid employees. Everyone else was an intern.

I was excited to start so I could add more to my portfolio only to realize that one of the editors replaced my name with hers every time she edited one of my articles. Not much of the content was changed, but I was too shy to question it.

I eventually found out that she did this to all the interns, and most of the interns had learned to private message their draft articles to the other editor, who did not take the bylines.

I asked one of my fellow interns if the founder of the company knew the editor took bylines. Turns out, the founder knew, but for some reason no one else could figure out, the editor never got fired.

It turns out this story isn't unique. There are lots of instances when someone does something at work that should get them fired, but they manage to hold on to their job. Redditors have plenty of stories like that and are eager to share.

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Not to startle any of you, but death stalks us.

We all have nightmares about diseases and murderers.

But what if, in the end, we just choke on a pickle we inhaled too fast?

Maybe instead of a pickle, a little coleslaw would have been the wiser choice.

We'll never know.

The most minute things can send us packing.

Redditor SuffocatedByThighs wanted to discuss the things that can extinguish our lives in the most basic ways, so they asked:

"What simple mistake has ended lives?"

Tripping over untied shoelaces.

It can break your neck.

TIE YOUR SHOES!!!

Off the Rocks

On No Falling GIF by Outside TVGiphy

"There have been too many instances of rock climbers rappelling off of the ends of their ropes, which could have been easily avoided by tying stopper knots at the ends of their ropes."

LZRDLZRD

Seconds

"I worked at a tire place for a summer and the first thing they told me was 'See that torque wrench? One mistake with this and you can kill a whole family in a matter of seconds.' I thought well, better take this thing seriously."

FrenchMicrowave

"Man for a second I was thinking 'F**k you'd have to swing that thing around fast to take out an entire family' and just bluescreened on the idea of changing a tire."

lurking_my_a**_off

How Vexing...

"THERAC-25. The world’s deadliest software error. Cost several radiation patients their lives by administering lethal amounts of radiation, and for a while, the doctors didn’t even know."

Longjumping_Event_59

"THERAC-25 suffered a particularly vexing sort of error known as a race condition. Essentially, the circuit required multiple inputs in a particular sequence, but sometimes the timing of that sequence could get thrown out of whack and it would lead to all sorts of nonsensical output."

"This is less than ideal when all you're doing is manipulating pixels, but when your software is handling radiation beams you really don't want this to happen."

"Even more vexing is that race conditions are frequently heisenbugs, which can vanish altogether when one attempts to study them. If you don't have a good idea of what's causing the error, you may never cotton on to what sort of bad input is required to test it. Under those circumstances, it's easy to write them off as imaginary, only to then find."

dancingmadkoschei

Heavy Drifting

"Leaving the stranded vehicle on the road in winter and trying to walk to get help. It happens in rural parts of our province once or twice a year and they find the body a few days later. They get disoriented and freeze."

Regina_Runner

"I got blown off a road in high winds. Heavy drifting. Less than a mile from a friend's house after I had turned around. Drifts made it impossible to complete the trip. Trying to run a mile in full blizzard conditions was a fight for my life as an in-shape 24-year-old male athlete.

"rotyag

Simple Slips

Uh Oh Omg GIF by BounceGiphy

"Almost any simple mistake can end a life if you're an anesthesiologist, that's how my grandpa died in his early 60s."

dwserps

Any second. Any moment.

Stay vigilant people.

Celibacy could be better...

Oh My Wow GIFGiphy

"Not being honest with doctors about Viagra. It has many dangerous drug interactions and can cause a lot of problems from what I’ve heard. Trust me the doctor ain’t gonna judge you guys, they have seen many more embarrassing things. And it would suck to die because you wanted to hide something just for it to be later stated in your death certificate."

The_upsetti_spagetti

Check the Numbers

"As a healthcare worker, giving the wrong amount of insulin."

UzumakiHorror

"During the first shift of my first clinical rotation in nursing school, I watched a nurse draw up insulin out of an auto-injector pen that was CLEARLY marked to specifically not do that AND she was drastically wrong about the dosage and almost killed a guy by giving him essentially like a hundred times the intended dose."

someguynamedg

Stay In

"Pulling the knife out of someone."

rcadephantom

"Yeah, I did that but it was a broken tree branch that had impaled my leg. Without even thinking I pulled it out. Blood started gushing so I pulled off my shirt and tied it into a pressure bandage. I was lucky I didn’t bleed to death."

Olddog_Newtricks2001

"Shock is an IQ reducer. I once sliced a bit off the side of my hand with a broken glass, and sort of dazedly picked off the piece of me and tried to stick it back on. It did not work."

UncannyTarotSpread

Stay Dirty

"Mixing cleaning ingredients."

Jonnysource

"My dad was trying to unclog his kitchen drain and mixed drain cleaners by adding one then adding another a few minutes later. It started bubbling and he began coughing intensely. I heard him coughing from the other room, saw what happened, and opened the nearby window to get rid of the chlorine gas he just produced."

"I forgot there was a large hive of wasps that had moved into that window and they did not appreciate this unexpected interruption. I took him to the emergency room for the gas exposure and it was tough explaining that the wasp stings were not why we were there."

CharmingTuber

Dear God

Jeff Goldblum What GIF by The Late Late Show with James CordenGiphy

"A friend’s husband locked himself out of their home. He tried to get in through a window that had security bars. While squeezing through his foot slipped and he essentially hung himself on the window sill."

Cokej01

Life is fleeting. Here is proof.

LIVE!! But live smart.

We all have foods that we like or don't like, and depending on how passionately we feel, it may be pretty hard to understand why someone likes a food that otherwise grosses us out.

But if that food is also expensive, we'll also be left wondering why they'd spend so much money on that dish.

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