Top 10 Tech Failures of the Decade. YouTube...Really?

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1898610_1898625_1898631,00.html

by taylor • 17 years ago

12 16 17 years ago

The New York Times recently wrote that "while YouTube, along with other new media properties like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, is seen as leading the challenge against traditional media companies, the company itself is struggling to profit from its digital popularity."

mahmud• 17 years ago

Gateway (the Acer of American PC vendors.)

HD DVD (acronym overload, no differentiation from Blu-Ray.)

Vonage (like Skype, but with an AT&T syntax)

Youtube (low definition format, low comment intelligence, low interest cellphone videos.)

Sirius XM (financiers of Howard Stern lost to the Chinese $5 FM transmitter makers.)

Microsoft Zune (the portable version of Windows Media Player but only browner.)

Palm (HTML5 based "OS" might help you now, but I will never forgive you for that Pilot API.)

Iridium (never heard of them before Miami Vice, the movie, and never since. Lost to regional sat services)

Segway (a wheel-chair for the able-bodied; early adopters considerably dorkier than rest of population. Way too much of a "tourism office" gimmick toy than anything nowadays.)

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

All of them belong to that list, except youtube

mikeryan• 17 years ago

Depends on your criteria for success, For the founders of Youtube it was an unqualified success. For Google trying to make a business out of it it's so far been frustrating to say the least.

That being said by this measure, Digg, Facebook and Twitter are in the same boat (or worse, since they haven't been acquired)

gojomo• 17 years ago

Thanks for the summary. They also listed Microsoft Vista (making 10).

And they left off: AOL Time Warner.

padmanabhan01• 17 years ago

On a monetary basis, Yes.

jpwagner2• 17 years ago

<sarcasm> biggest failure of the 1890s: the automobile.

More costly than a horse, less accessible than a train. How will there ever be a positive return on investment when it comes to the horseless carriage...

that and more when we return. </sarcasm>

bena3• 17 years ago

But when they sold a car, they made a profit. When YouTube serves a video, they lose money.

Scriptor• 17 years ago

The original car makers did not have the problem of how to make cars profitable, theirs' was a problem of sales and marketing. Once a car was improved enough to make it affordable they received more sales.

Youtube certainly doesn't have a sales/marketing problem. It has a ton of traffic every day. Here the problem is that of figuring out how to make money in the first place.

It's easy to find examples of things that struggled at first only to become popular later, but at the same time there have also been products that struggled at first and still failed later.

Dilpil• 17 years ago

Yet another rehashing of the (inaccurate) Credit Suisse story.

vaksel• 17 years ago

the real story here, is that when you hit print, it doesn't show the entire article.

jgilliam• 17 years ago

When are we going to stop defining "success" by whether something makes lots of money?

zimbabwe2• 17 years ago

If the article is saying something stupid, why submit it here? Better to ignore it than post it and get no feedback beyond us calling Time stupid. That's not a valuable use of time.

Top 10 Tech Failures of the Decade. YouTube...Really?

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