Every time there’s some new ~technological advance~ we simply can’t believe it. We are shocked time and time again that we live in this world that keeps coming out with all of these programs, gadgets, medicines, and more than somehow make day-to-day life even easier, medical conditions curable, or music simply sound better. But for every successful advance, there have been a handful of big fails, and today, we’re looking at the major flops. Here are a few of the biggest technology fails throughout history.
AOL
(image via: ny daily news)
This was a big oof because AOL arguably set the stage for every other instant messaging and email service. While AOL was the OG, people began changing from AOL to Microsoft and Google providers about as fast as they had originally signed up for AOL. It came down to other providers perfecting these services and making them significantly faster and easier to use, but we have AOL to thank for being there for us when we had no one.
MySpace
Okay, this one hurts. First of all, if you are too young to remember this social networking platform, MySpace was where ordinary people became stars, you knew exactly where you stood with your friends because they literally ranked their top eight friends, and this is where we all learned coding as pre-teens. MySpace fizzled out as Facebook began to pick up momentum; it was also a perfect storm of being bought out by NewsCorp and Facebook not shying away from changing to keep up with what the people wanted. Nevertheless, we hold our MySpace days near and dear to our My Chemical Romance loving hearts.
MapQuest
(image via: tech crunch)
In a world… With no Google Maps… We used to have to look up maps to look at and read. And we know what you’re thinking and yes, we had to somehow attempt to drive and also read a map complete with directions on the side. Yes, it was a catastrophe, and yes, it’s much easier for our phones to simply tell us where to go. Printing these maps with their directions became obsolete once all of our phones doubled as GPS’.
TiVo
Okay, back in the day this was how you knew your friends had money. TiVo was really just a modern-day DVR. Sometime between the moment TiVos first came out and cable companies discovering they could charge people more for an extra service, the company could have played dirty, but decided to instead attempt to work with cable companies, and well, that didn’t go well.