Get everyone salivating for glorious, apocolyptic disruption, scare the crap out of the traditional auto industry, incite a mad scramble that mobilizes billions of dollars and thousands of men, and then turn around and say 'well, actually... this is really hard, guys.'
We do things because we thought they would be easy.
https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/761656824202276864
and the JFK mashup:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer
[Edit: I worked on a couple of EU Esprit projects so I shouldn't complain too much!]
Strangely enough, a decade or so later Sony tried an exotic architecture with its PS3 only to go back to a generalist x86/x64 architecture with the PS4. Funny how the top-down approaches fail compared to bottom up 'kitchen sink' approaches almost consistently and how so many countries and companies never learn this lesson. The West didn't panic from what I can tell. AMD and Intel kept raising transistor density and clock speeds and kept giving their customers what they wanted via a competitive market approach.
On the one hand, the PS3's weird architecture made porting older PC game engines (like Bethesda's Gamebryo, which drives Skyrim and Fallout 3+) extremely difficult, and much-anticipated Skyrim DLCs were long-delayed by problems that existed on the PS3 but no other platform Gamebryo supports.
On the other hand, once Xbox 360 games started getting ported to PS3 and the graphics were compared across the two systems, the consensus was that the PS3 really wasn't much more graphically powerful at all. There was one sports game in particular (boxing? I can't recall-- it's been too many years) that was a particularly telling case because the PS3 port had had something like 6-8 months of extra optimization work, and despite that the launch-day Xbox 360 version of the same game looked and played better.
"Failure" is strong; obviously the PS3 wasn't a failure as a gaming system. But its weird architecture certainly didn't deliver the benefits Sony claimed it would, and it definitely made things more difficult on game developers.
The basic problem is it's hard to find tasks that scale out past ~8 cores really well yet can't just go to the GPU.
Not sure if the research was worth the money but we certainly did eat well.
The only thing that jumps to my mind is Google Glass?
Edit: but it only works because of the space in a PC tower. It doesn't work for laptops, and I was sort of in the same boat as you. I couldn't imagine it would work for phones. Specifically that they are so space constrained.
Now modularity in PCs is the domain of gaming PCs, plus a few speciality niches. Gamers as a market could be seen as analogous to audiophiles: a bit cranky and hard to please.
DSLR bodies go through a release cycle that is not much longer than major phone models, these days.
One reason to put up with this crap is that you can save thousands of dollars buying nice old glass for your nice new camera. But even though the glass lasts forever, once you get 50MP sensors in cameras, old glass that was designed for the best resolution of 35mm film will limit the performance of a 50MP+ image sensor. Soon, photography will be mostly computational, and big old lenses will all be museum pieces.
I don't even want to think about whether I've kept the firmware on my Sony E-mount lenses up to date.
Google has never had a successful original product. It has only been successful in slight refinements (or in the case of Android, just changes - not refinements) within already successful product categories. To be really harsh; if success means profit, it's only ever been successful with ads.
It keeps potential disruptees twitchy because they're all cognizant that they could be the next Blockbuster if they don't respond aggressively.
Google Books kicked off to a really nice start, but seems to be languishing. OTOH, much of the accessible out-of-copyright material has been scanned, and a significant amount of in-copyright material (books and articles) is being provided ... by other means. Still, the Google Ngram Viewer tops out at 2008, which is increasingly irksome.
A great many of Google's social products: Orkut, Buzz, and Wave.
Whatever those barges were supposed to have been used for.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2014/11/30/why-g...