3 of the funniest tech blunders of all time

Search Google for famous tech flops, and it’ll direct you to approximately one bazillion over-engineered clickbait-y articles. ‘10 tech flops that embarrassed Apple!’ You know the type.

I think a more interesting question is: which tech flops are the funniest? Which aren’t just howling mistakes in terms of design and marketing, but also are ridiculous in themselves?

The tech world has been *the* industry of the past few decades. But it’s worth remembering that it’s essentially just a bunch of computer nerds who are as human and error-prone as anyone else.

While you might have heard of them before, here are some products that are all the funnier if you take just a moment to consider them from a distance.

Without further ado…

Amazon shopping buttons

Ah, the Internet of Things. It’s got potential for sure. But a lot of the time, when it says “I know! Let’s put a chip in that thing,” it’s talking about a thing that really doesn’t need a chip.

Amazon Dash is perhaps the best example of poorly-used chips — if you discount big tech’s attempts to put cameras into… literally everything.

Anyway, if you’ve forgotten, Amazon released small buttons that could be stuck around the house. If you ran out of something, you simply just pressed it, Amazon would be notified and send you a replacement. Clever, right?

Except, the parodies were brutal. A cartoon of a bloke sitting on the toilet, pressing his Dash button for some more bog roll (“but I can’t wait two days, I need it now!”) being a personal favourite.

And then technical issues cropped their heads. A German court ruled that the devices broke consumer rules because users couldn’t see how much the products ordered with Dash would cost. Finally, Alexa came along, made ordering even easier, and the Dash’s days were done.

Segway

Segway promised to revolutionise the way we all got around. The name was pretty smart — a homophone for segue (a smooth transition). And the marketing was bold; “Segway will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy", claimed the founder in 2002. Someone even predicted they’d be the fastest company to reach $1bn in sales.

6 years later, they’d shifted a meek 30,000 units. Segway never overcame issues with random, unintentional reversing. It was a big, dangerous problem. President George Bush and Usain Bolt were victims to the infernal things toppling over at random. And yes, the slow-motion shots were brilliant.

Sure, they’d landed a place in pop culture via crappy sci-fi movies. You’ve probably even seen police officers in European capitals zooming around on them now and then. But mostly, the Segway was a gimmick.

E-scooters have now booted them out of the market pretty much completely. Last year, the factory making them was closed for good. But not before we all had a good chuckle at the failings of a supposedly futuristic technology.

3D TVs

Nothing is funnier than when the business world coalesces around a new idea, but the consumer just will not budge. They don’t need it, they don’t want it, and they just won’t buy it.

3D is a great example. Movie franchises were made (Avatar!) with the not-so-secret purpose of mainstreaming 3D — and giving James Cameron something to do aside from stare at the Mariana Trench.

And then the 3D TVs arrived in the late 2000s. Broadcasters showed football matches in the new format! Even Strictly Come Dancing! And guess what? Nobody cared!

The big bosses listened, and by 2015 3D was being seen as a fad. James Cameron was beside himself, but for the rest of us, it meant fewer headaches while in front of the box and the end of having to ask, “Oh cool, you’ve got a 3D TV, is it good?” at social gatherings. What a relief.

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Don’t get me wrong; I have the utmost respect for innovators. And failing is 100% part of moving forward. I just find some of the methods used by tech-types to get consumers on board highly amusing. The persistent banging of the drum for the new *thing* is what marketing is all about — and sometimes it’s entertaining when it doesn’t work at all.