Virtual tour of Museum of Failure | Hacker News Reader

Virtual tour of Museum of Failure

collection.museumoffailure.com

70 pointslaktak29 comments

Some of these entries are questionable...

Calling the Iridium network a failure is wrong. Iridium has been in consistent active use by the military and ships at sea from its inception to now and they are still launching new satellites as recently as last year.

And the blurb on No Man's Sky ends with "the game later managed a major turnaround from its disastrous launch and became a great success". Great Success is not the same as Failure.

I'd love for this site to have an entry about itself full of critiques like yours.

Lol. You know what, if that were the first entry I'd be pleased.

"All museums are inherently failures, including this one. Here are the accumulated critiques from visitors just like you..."

This is a real thing that real museums really do struggle with. Including it would be honest and introspective.

In fairness... The military bought it in a fire sale after it failed.

Totally agree on No Man's Sky.

Minidisc was questionable because it definitely found a few niches, of which I knew a bunch of people in college:

- Music Fans / Bootleggers

- Radio station DJ's

- People who thought portable CD players were too big (before MP3 players)

- Audiophiles(?)

It had some good use cases, it just didn't live up to Sony's Dream of becoming the new standard. Sony, for its part, had a few huge successes, but their past is littered with failed formats they hoped would be the Next Big Thing.

Always disappointed to see minidisc on these lists, especially as it was much more successful outside the US (I think the perception is often US centric).

But OTH, you can still buy CDs, it did fail as a replacement.

And not just them... you can still buy a lot of consumer devices, that are quite popular with people who travel to areas with spotty cell reception.

eg: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/outdoor-recreation/satellite-...

Note that this is mostly commercial failure. A lot of these entries were either too early, implemented badly or adopted by hackers, nerds, independent musicians, etc.

For example, the Roland TB-303 is listed as a commercial flop, but for some reason they omitted the TR-808, which was also a commercial flop [0]. The narrative goes that the "affordably" priced synths then got dumped into thrift stores and available at bargain basement prices that the next generation of musicians then picked up and used. I've heard Snoop Dogg did something similar with editing equipment (though I can't find the reference now).

Pets.com was a failure but Chewy.com is going strong. Cue-Cat was a financial failure but was a shot in the arm of a lot of hardware hackers at the time.

Weird to see "No Man's Sky" as I was under the impression that was a commercial success.

Of course, some were just abject failures, like Theranos.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_TR-808

"Failure is success in progress" Albert Einstein https://www.azquotes.com/author/4399-Albert_Einstein/tag/fai...

Disappointed to see Google Wave on here[1]

Google wave didn't fail, mankind failed to appreciate how amazing it was. This is a hill I'm prepared to die on

[1] https://collection.museumoffailure.com/google-wave/

The problem with Wave was that it requires a network effect to be of any use, and Google was very stingy with invites early on. Interest had died down by the time they started allowing more people to join.

Stingy invites isn't the problem. It was more it offerred nothing new or better.

I remember Google Wave! It felt more like a technology demo than a product.

You probably had a high-spec PC, and were using it with only a couple of friends at a time? Wave was cool but the performance issues from being built on XMPP killed it.

I totally agree with you that Wave was great.

But, regardless of the reason for its failure, it was ultimately a failure, as much as I liked it.

I would love to play with an iBot wheelchair! https://collection.museumoffailure.com/ibot-wheelchair/

The hulahula hawaii-chair advert video is classic: https://collection.museumoffailure.com/hawaii-chair/

The Deka iBot deserved the Nobel Prize IMHO https://newmobility.com/the-ibot-is-back/. It is a wheelchair that

* Can traverse any stairs

* Can travel on sand and gravel

* Can raise the user to standing height

At $30k it’s inaccessible to most users, but mass production could make a huge impact.

This museum also has a physical side that travels from place to place opening for a couple of months and then moving on. I saw it last summer in Washington DC where it was installed in the upper floor of a dying shopping mall, appropriately enough.

Museum of Failure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369961 - Oct 2022 (74 comments)

Museum of Failure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19188943 - Feb 2019 (26 comments)

Similar vibe, from a different perspectvie: pitch decks and presentations by failed companies.

https://www.slidebook.io/blog/article/on-the-road-to-failure...

This is cool and it reminded me of so many failures I lived through.

I half expected the Metaverse to be in there though...

A fun site indeed, but I felt that the entries were quite random. Many were successes that eventually failed (as many do) and others were failures that became successes, and everything in between. What's the real criteria for inclusion?

Very good collection but I was surprised to not see the i-Opener on there

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener

If anything it sounds like the product was too successful!

For hacker customers, yes. For the company selling it was an unmitigated disaster.

Or WebTV

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4xaqe9/why-webtvs-remote-con...

I've worked on Tablet PC, Windows Phone, and Microsoft Band.

I'm surprised all three aren't in there! (Along with WebTV, Microsoft's ebook stuff, and Microsoft Auto, all of which were good ideas attempted way too early!)

They list Google TV, but that feels unfair, as some variant of something resembling Google TV still exists.

How about Lotus Notes? Or is that just "a road we didn't go down"? I've always felt it had so much promise.

I definitely learned some lessons by reading and digging into the different items on the Museum of Failure. Thanks!

No 404?? That is a failure

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