You should watch how you spell "DivX" - you spelled it according to how the codec people spell it and they might get a bit angry about it. I believe you mean "DIVX" which is the Pay-per-use proprietary disc format.

Although the first part about having to buy a special DVD player does fit both, I don't imagine the codec people would like you referring to discs with their video format as "self-destructing".

Your list is wrong on 2 points.

1) It's DIVX not DivX -- 2 different products

2) It's SoftRAM95 that was released for Windows 95, SoftRAM was for Windows 3.1, and it wasn't a technology that "flopped" it was a fraud.

How on earth can you claim the network PC (or terminal) is a flop? Have you ever looked at citrix and terminal server?
This is pure client(network PC)/server...

Check citrix's revenue and then try to sell that off as a flop.

Also I think you have vaporware and flops confused. Speech recognition isn't a flop... it just never reached maturity (yet).

Good point on the DIVX versus DivX (especially since I like the second one). I'll see if I can get that fixed.
On the point about network PCs, despite the success of Citrix I will still argue that it is a flop because of the initial claims of the network PC, which if you remember was going to completely replace stand-alone PCs and make them an oddity of the past.

I do not think that Speech Recognition was a flop more than it is an emerging technology.

Looking past the "Dear Aunt, let's set..." incident, Windows Vista has stronger speech recognition than most software titles, and Dragon has been making a profitable business on the idea. Furthermore, the blind community has very good tools for Speech Recognition available(albeit for a high price).

E-books are another developing technology. Once the technology catches up to the market (1000 DPI screen that is readable in dark or bright environment) you will see printed books go the way of the audio tape.

When that happens, you will see a whole bunch of publishers scratching their heads, just like the music industry is doing now.

Speech recognition failure can be dropped squarely on M$ofts shoulders and it's abysmally poor resource management. Back in '95 on a PII266 I had OS/2 running with VoiceType perfectly. I could wander around my office talking to the system, dictating letters and faxes or navigate websites. M$oft was allowed to illegally force good developers out of the market killing the app base for OS/2 and OS/2 itself. By my estimate, we're about 7 to 8 years behind where we could be with computers due to M$ofts incompetence.

I rarely read Pint Books. I prefer e-books. Most of my reading now is e-books lit format on Pocket PC. MS Reader has wast array of features. People can purchase e-books online (http://www.ebooks.com/), or there are plenty of free available (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page). I don't think it is a failed technology.

It's an interesting distinction on when a product moves from emerging to flop to successful. If I had done this list a few years ago I almost certainly would have chosen Push as flop. But the rise of RSS launched a successful new interation of Push. Who knows, in a few years things like speech recogniton may no longer be on lists like this.

I can see your point about the network PC.
Though in my opinion you are comparing a vision to a product. Yes a vision would be to replace it all completely. And yes the vision was a flop.
As a product I do reckon it's a succes. Seeing that where possible and financially viable fat clients are being replaced.
If you follow your line of thinking though eBooks are a flop too. Yes the product will ship. But no they'll never replace books competely (I don't think so Stan).

I reckon it's all just in a name. Vision as a flop or product as a flop.

I like the distinction of vision as flop. I would also argue that the majority of Citrix implementations are on fully functional PCs, not on terminals or anything like the original Sun network PCs.

Regarding your list, both e-Books and speech recognition have been crucial for supporting people with disabilities. From the historical perspective, innovations have often resulted from the efforts of people working on developing assistive technology solutions. The recommendations for addressing web accessibility for the visually-impaired, to separate content from presentation, is the foundation for the ability to have web content re-purposed for different devices with varying screens.

Some of the more recent successes, such as PodCasts, may also have a major impact on the direction these technologies take. There's also the likelihood of emerging technologies having more success as they can be integrated (speech navigation of e-books).

One metric for an emerging technology being extremely sucessful would be its impact on changing standards. For intance, it will be interesting to see if the high-definition/DVD standard of 16:9 will lead to all screens based on this aspect ratio, regardless of their size.

Good stuff on the "Good Tech Goes Bad" article...for a healthcare angle, check out http://www.mdng.com/archive_issue_detail.cfm/article/55/ (free registration), which talks about voice recognition, smart cards, etc., and how those technologies never seemed to work on the healthcare side for a multitude of reasons.

Jim,

Great overall piece on 10 Emerging Technologies that flopped, but I think you really missed the mark on one of them in suggesting that speech recognition has not advanced.

I routinely use voice input to create large documents, complex formatting, and presentations (and the occasional large email), and all at a high level of accuracy and speed: I type at only about 30-40 WPM but speak at about 150 WPM. For me, this is REAL productivity.

And yes, this response was done entirely by voice. This stuff really works now.

Well, some of the speech recognition vendors are also responding to this as well. I'll test some out over the next few weeks and see how they far. Though I think if you go to the discussion above of vision as a flop than it would still qualify no matter what. (I for one still remember the claims of offices full of people dictating to their PCs rather than typing and risking carpal tunnel)