The software is amazing. It can make you a better writer, a faster artist, or a more efficient worker. It can help you create beautiful documents, presentations and websites. It is important because it helps to do things better and faster: with the help of software, we can focus on our work instead of on the mechanisms to get it done. We can spend our time creating instead of clicking and typing.
But with great power comes great responsibility, and with software there is also the potential for great harm. Too often, companies create software without understanding the consequences of using it, and when the software flops, the company can quickly collapse.
There are companies creating software that was supposed to make our lives easier, but which actually had the opposite effect. Do you want a small list of the most incredible flops in chronological order from first to last? I got it :)
First Flop – ET (1982)
When video games were invented, software was very expensive because it came in cartridge form. However, unlike cheaper diskettes, companies like Atari also had to pay for chips and cases for every game they produced.
Whereas the company had produced 5 million copies of a game based on NA , Steven Spielberg's incredible success, the blow was very heavy. The ridiculous game was produced in just four weeks by the veteran producer Howard Scott Warshaw. And it produced a collapse from which Atari would take years to recover.
For future reference, a cartridge of this obrobrio is kept none other than in the Smithsonian Museum. Another 14 trucks from this flop were dumped in 1983 (there's a recent documentary called Atari: Game Over about it) in a New Mexico landfill.
BeOs (1995-1999)
It may seem incredible to younger people, but I swear: in the 90s Apple was in really bad shape. Very bad, indeed. Other companies produced clones of Macintosh computers, capitalizing on the good names of Jobs and Wozniak. But these clones needed an operating system to run on, and many of them chose that BeOS.
Be was a company founded by former Apple and Cray employees in 1990 and designed to compete with the Big Two, specifically through an operating system written in the then relatively new C++. But writing an operating system from scratch is hard work, and BeOS, while it had some strengths, had problems as big as mountains. With just 1.800 units sold, the company tried to convince Apple to adopt BeOS as the basis for its OSX. Apple instead chose to acquire NeXT (once again, Steve. Do it one more time) and Be ultimately ended up selling its assets to Palm.
Netscape 6 (2000-2002)
It was the dawn of the web, and a furious war was causing victims everywhere: it was the war of browsers. The two main contenders? Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. In an attempt to give themselves the final blow and win, companies tried everything.
When Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4 in 1997 and installed it directly on Windows, the world waited for Netscape's response. Maybe he's still waiting.
Netscape actually released its browser core as open-source, and it would eventually become Firefox. But that didn't help the company get a new version. It took three years to get Netscape Navigator 6 out (skipping 5.0, I'll never understand why). And it was a flop, indeed: a depressing stuff. A mess full of bugs. War lost, and very soon Netscape would be thrown away too.
Windows Vista (2007-2016)
Microsoft and Apple have devoted immense time and effort to every detail of each successive version of their operating systems: Windows and macOS respectively. As a result, it was particularly unexpected that Windows Vista would be a colossal SHIFT.
Compared to the success of Windows XP, Vista was a real flop from every point of view, receiving harsh criticism from users and developers upon release. It was bloated with 50 million lines of code, 10 million more than its predecessor, and riddled with flaws; many popular applications at the time were incompatible
Above all, people simply did not see why it was necessary. XP had an installed base of around 800 million systems, and those users were still quite happy with it. Why, Bill? Because?
Latest flop – Google+ (2011-2019)
There's something spectacular here. After the browser war, the social media war raged from 2010 onwards. Silicon Valley was full of tech companies starting their own social media platforms, and Google was no stranger to the feat. The company had already tried and failed several times to establish a social media presence. Well, Google+ was another failure. It felt more like an extension of Google Drive, Blogger, and YouTube than an independent social media platform.
After launching with great fanfare in 2011, Google Plus never took off as Google hoped. To be successful, any social media platform needs a critical mass of users, and while Google Plus experienced some initial growth, those numbers were eventually blown up by anyone who signed up for any of Google's other services.
With user engagement lasting just minutes or even seconds, Google realized it needed to make some substantial changes, redesigning Google+ as an “interest-based social experience.” Nobody used it. Flop. Goodbye.
