40 Products That Were Thought To Be Life-Changing, But Were Utter Flops Instead
Remember the Segway craze of the early 2000s? Mall cops were zooming down walkways with them, and guided Segway tours became a hit in popular tourist destinations. But then, seemingly overnight, they disappeared. And now they’re nowhere to be found, as electric scooters have quickly become the preferred mode of transit for pedestrians who don’t feel like walking.
There’s a new “next big thing” every year, but unfortunately, they don’t all live up to their own expectations. Redditors have recently been discussing “next big things” that massively flopped, so below, you can look back on products and companies that, in hindsight, probably received too much hype. Enjoy scrolling through, and be sure to upvote the things you had completely forgotten about!
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Not entirely relevant, but I liked the trend where everybody wanted the smallest cell phone possible. For 20 years cell phones got smaller and smaller. Often being the main selling point of the phone.
Then all of sudden you could watch videos on your phone, and almost overnight the trend reversed to “larger is better”.
The “[pandemic] baby boom” People thought that during lockdowns we’d see a bunch of pregnancies because couples would essentially have nothing else to do. Instead we saw people isolate more even after the lockdowns ended and fewer people are dating at all now let alone having kids. When inflation started to increase you also saw more people choose to delay having kids due to increased costs and some residual effects of shortages (like the baby formula shortage we had in the US last year)
Those chips that were “fat free”, except they made you have violent diarrhea and a**l leakage because of the Olestra used in them.
An*l leakage and explosive diarrhea is a sure fire weight loss regimen.
Internet of Things.
I'm an engineer, and while I was in college people in my field have been banging that drum.
Turns out we just need a good enough refrigerator, not an internet connected one.
When the Windows Phone was unveiled, Microsoft held a genuine funeral procession for the iPhone.
Blockchain. I couldn’t stop hearing about it in grad school. I got pushed into studying data analytics and had to do a course on it. In the end I wrote my paper on the usefulness of it and basically said “it’s not without its uses, but there doesn’t seem to be a pressing need for it.” I read later a much better assessment of “a solution looking for a problem” and that basically nailed it.
Blockchain is an excellent choice for many things but its main commercial use (cryptocurrency) isn't one of them. Its wasting resources to create an artificial scarcity that has no real value. The strength or weakness of a currency is user belief. Almost the entire world looked at it and decided my one dollar or one yen bill works just fine and it won't go away if I forget a password.
I’m still very distraught we never got the modular phone revolution I was promised back in the early 2010s. Now it’s wildly exciting to have a replaceable battery. My heart weeps
The DCEU. I mean, they started a franchise finally showing Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman together on the big screen, and yet they somehow managed to botch it so spectacularly, so early on.
I've watched all those movies and couldn't tell you what happened in any of them except the first Wonder Woman movie.
Amazon’s shopping buttons. They pushed really hard for those and I never saw the point.
You put it near, say, the washing machine and when you're low on detergent you press the button and Amazon orders you some more. You could set different buttons for different products and put them around the house. It's a perfect example of a solution looking for a problem.
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I understood the point Amazon was pushing for, but didn't see the cost worth what they were pushing for the convenience. It's not like it's such an inconvenience to pop on my account and quickly order what I need. I say this with my shopping being almost 100% online because of a chronic illness.
They forgot that all countries over the world have rules concerning legal contracts that include you have to be made aware of the costs before you enter a contract. Every single time you accept the contract. Buying something is still a contract. Even just buying some fries at McDonald's. If a company doesn't properly disclose the price at the moment of purchase. As in, you have to see the price while pressing the button, the contract is void. In many European countries those laws are so strict, that the dash buttons couldn't be sold at all. They were completely illegal and the whole concept was considered fraudulent. In the US they had to deal with the first people tried to contest the purchases, so the stopped the whole shebang pretty quickly, realising that there was indeed an opening for massive lawsuits is someone tried to exploit them.
I remember being at a friend's house who had one of these on her fridge for gum. I didn't know what it was so I pressed it! She had to go on Amazon and cancel the order! Such a strange concept!
Imagine children pressing the buttons again and again for fun.
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It's like single-click purchasing on your phone, only with buttons your two-year-old can press relentlessly to order you 300 bottles of detergent. What would be more useful would be a shopping app on your phone that reordered the product when you scanned the barcode, or added it to your weekly click-and-collect grocery order.
In a way it's kinda funny if you look at it nihilistically. Big business (ex; Walmart) came in and essentially put the mom & pop format on the sidelines and always struggling for every customer. Capitalism, right? Walmart found a space and filled it is all. Only now, big internet shopping has finally and *firmly* found its footing, and is eating directly away at *those* businesses. It's like a capitalistic kaleidoscope of business entropy.
I mean, anyone with an Echo can just ask Alexa to order some more of something, so they're concept of immediate ordering didn't totally die out.
*their, sorry can't edit on the app, which is infuriating
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My granddaughters had fun going around pushing the buttons on all the ones they had in the house. They'd push them a dozen times each. They were well stocked...lol
I loved the shopping buttons. To be fair, I prefer Alexa now since it's so much more general, but I had a shopping button for trash bags, toilet paper, and coffee.
This was pre Echo (Alexa) … I think that was a large factor in them dying out. However I used them at the time because my 90 yr old mum lived with us and she was not too savvy on “popping into the account” to order basics like toilet paper and laundry stuff. It was very useful to have these in the right spots and she just used to press the button when the item got low. She loved it. Had she still been with us when Echo/Alexa appeared, she probably would have used that though.
I have 3 of them (got for free if I remember correctly) sitting in the back of my junk drawer. Used the laundry detergent only once to see if it actually worked, which it did. However that was it and they are even still in their original little boxes.
Lol! I just found my Glad button recently. I haven't used it in forever and don't know if it's still working.
People need to start paying attention to the high prices charged by Amazon.
Yet people say they don’t like Tesla’s because they want more buttons on their dashboards 🤷🏼♂️
That’s why they invented subscribe and save at Amazon. Much easier to control.
The Metaverse.
Curved TV's.
Is that trend "dead"? Just thought it's not cheap enough yet to be massively expanded.. saw several high end curved TV's on display in my local electronics store, when I visited to get my new, cheap QLED tv.
Motion controls in video games. They have not disappeared completely but they are nowhere as popular as they were back in the late 2000s.
Minidisc
Oh yes, I went with that.... just a better way to mixtape than the old tape format. But noone else jumped on board it seemed:)
Kinect was a full body motion control thing for the Xbox 360. It was supposed to change the gaming industry. It had maybe a dozen games made for it, most of which barely worked. And it silently went away after about 2 or 3 years.
How is that tesla cybertruck, it was announced years ago but not available yet, or is it?
The litany of film adaptations of young adult novels that happened in the wake of Hunger Games' success. Aside from Divergent, which eventually ran out of gas, and Maze Runner all of them flopped and didn't get sequels.
Fyre festival
The future when you were young😂
"When I was young I was poor. But after decades of hard work, I'm no longer young."
Clear Pepsi. If I remember correctly they even used a Van Halen song for the commercials
They just came out with clear ketchup did they learn nothing from the crazy colors of the 90s
How has NOBODY posted about the Firephone???
Whole teams of people were fired after that debacle.
Wii U was unfortunate. The Switch is just a very refined Wii U.
One of the funniest I remember was solar roads. Solar panels that you drive on. Without damaging them, somehow. With your operating room tires.
HD DVD
Still remember half the movies being blue and the others red.
And they say DVD and Blu-ray are becoming popular again because they're more permanent than the digital downloads you bought.
Dippin Dots has been the ice cream of the future for a while now. You'd think that future would have come to pass by now.
Emu meat!
For a while there in the late 80s & early 90s it was a thing that doctors & lawyers who wanted the ranch lifestyle would invest in. There was enough awareness of it that emus getting killed by the monster was even played for a gag in *8 Legged Freaks* & one of the *Tremors* movies.
No wonder they got into wars. They didn't want to be dinner.
Disney's Atlantis. They had a whole park planned around it. Unfortunately they released it in a year saturated by insanely good movies.
Zune
Zune was just as functional, easy to upload to, use and manage as an iPod, it was just in the right place at the wrong time. It just couldn't compete with the product that got there first.
Gonna tentatively suggest this, Apple's Vision Pro headset thing.
A VR headset with a separate battery that you have to carry, creepy eye vision screen on the front, and all for only $3500+. How could it fail?
Also, now that I think of it. Apple's Ping social networking thing.
Fusion power is always 10 years away
No, it didn't flop: https://fusionforenergy.europa.eu/news/jt-60sa-is-officially-the-most-powerful-tokamak/
Threads
My threads hold my clothing together. Believe me when I say this is a very good thing for the world.
KONY 2012
i guess the fact that i dont know half of these things means its true :-D
Me too! -but as a wise man once sang; ♫ "Too much monkey business for me to be involved in"♫
Load More Replies... At one time there was the laser disc. A bigger version of cd and super expensive
I remember my elementary school's gifted program was given a laser disk player. The school was so proud of that thing. We had one laser disk for it... a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Or maybe it was the Smithsonian? It's been a while. Late 80s.
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People are equating 'trends' with 'life-changing' by saying "these things are still around". This article isn't about whether a trend fell out of favor, it's whether something touted as 'life-changing' ended up being so. It's irrelevant if they're still around, what matters is that they didn't affect society in the way they were sold they would. Motion control was supposed to change gaming. It didn't. The fact that VR and some games still use it doesn't change the fact that it didn't change the gaming industry.
Remember ruby chocolate? It was everywhere for a while then it kind of vanished overnight.
Humans. We have had great potential for years but individually most of us squander our evolutionary advantage, as for a whole idk if we'll ever be truly civil, humanity seems to be regressing instead of progressing
Capacitance Electronic Disc - Right before VCRs were a household staple, and before laser disks, was the CED. I haven’t met a person yet that remembers them, but our local video store rented the disks and the machines for awhile in the 80’s. I still have a copy of Star Wars on CED as a conversion piece.
Real life earnings in Video Games. Remember when Diablo 3 came out and it was super hyped that it has an auction house where you can pay in real money to other players? And people might make money out of it? People were saying it will change the entire industry. Spoiler alert: It didn't and even that game cut it out eventually.
why would they? am stereo radio exists and people who want to listen to it can. The problem with terrestrial radio in general is that its not profitable anymore.
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i guess the fact that i dont know half of these things means its true :-D
Me too! -but as a wise man once sang; ♫ "Too much monkey business for me to be involved in"♫
Load More Replies... At one time there was the laser disc. A bigger version of cd and super expensive
I remember my elementary school's gifted program was given a laser disk player. The school was so proud of that thing. We had one laser disk for it... a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Or maybe it was the Smithsonian? It's been a while. Late 80s.
Load More Replies... People are equating 'trends' with 'life-changing' by saying "these things are still around". This article isn't about whether a trend fell out of favor, it's whether something touted as 'life-changing' ended up being so. It's irrelevant if they're still around, what matters is that they didn't affect society in the way they were sold they would. Motion control was supposed to change gaming. It didn't. The fact that VR and some games still use it doesn't change the fact that it didn't change the gaming industry.
Remember ruby chocolate? It was everywhere for a while then it kind of vanished overnight.
Humans. We have had great potential for years but individually most of us squander our evolutionary advantage, as for a whole idk if we'll ever be truly civil, humanity seems to be regressing instead of progressing
Capacitance Electronic Disc - Right before VCRs were a household staple, and before laser disks, was the CED. I haven’t met a person yet that remembers them, but our local video store rented the disks and the machines for awhile in the 80’s. I still have a copy of Star Wars on CED as a conversion piece.
Real life earnings in Video Games. Remember when Diablo 3 came out and it was super hyped that it has an auction house where you can pay in real money to other players? And people might make money out of it? People were saying it will change the entire industry. Spoiler alert: It didn't and even that game cut it out eventually.
why would they? am stereo radio exists and people who want to listen to it can. The problem with terrestrial radio in general is that its not profitable anymore.
Load More Replies...