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Museum of Failure

museumoffailure.se

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The Cube Design museum in Kerkrade, The Netherlands (near Aachen) [1] has an expo about design in general. This includes half a floor about design flaws, including products which failed. For an English page on it, see [2]. I went to there a few years ago and can recommend. Supported languages are English/Dutch/German. Not sure about French.

[1] https://www.cubedesignmuseum.nl/

[2] https://www.cubedesignmuseum.nl/en/activiteiten/intro

Tom Scott did a really good video [0] on it some time ago which includes some more examples than the website.

0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfdBTsyrqaI

For completeness sake:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6649475/US-man-Swed...

Off topic, but: is there an Adblocker-style tool that automatically removes sidebars full of shitty celebrity gossip and swimsuit pictures? It's not the only reason I almost never click a Daily Mail link, but it's the one that usually makes me wish I hadn't. Makes my head hurt trying to filter that out while figuring out if the actual story has anything intelligent or interesting to say.

Sorry, I should have found a better link. I agree with you on daily mail - I was too lazy.

In cases anyone else reads this, here's a link with less crap:

https://unv.is/dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6649475/US-man-S...

You can use µBlock Origin to manually block individual elements on the site, which seems to work fine for the Daily Mail sidebar.

Firefox reader-mode solves this problem well (most of the time).

this would be more interesting if there were more examples with a deeper description

Interestingly the website has a failure in that the top navigation links (Locations, Gallery etc) turn white and cant be read as you mouse over them...

Shouldn't the Museum of Failure actually be closed?

Only if it contains itself

It should definitely contain its own website.

I mean, horrible UI, almost no information, a non interactive gallery with four pictures on autoplay.

It still proves your point, but the gallery is interactive via clicking to the sides of the image. Interactive but not intuitive.

I thought this was an offshoot of the Library of Mistakes[0], would like to see something other than consumer product/services.

0: https://www.libraryofmistakes.com/

They need:

- :CueCat

- New Coke

- Olestra

- OS/2 WARP

- Microsoft Bob

- Betamax

- Smell-O-Vision

- Apple Newton

- Honeywell Kitchen Computer

New Coke was a wildly successful strategy by Roberto Goizueta to 1) Reignite the public's love of Coca-Cola (taking it off the shelves for three months), while at the same time 2) Reformulating "Classic" Coca-Cola to use HFCS which tastes slightly different from the sugared version. It was such a ballsy and creative move, I can hardly believe it really happened.

Betamax was technically superior to VHS, and was at the center of a Supreme Court case that ruled home recording to be fair use. It lost out to VHS in the marketplace for various reasons, so it's a good case study of a business failure for sure, but not because the product was bad or ill-conceived.

"Betamax was technically superior to VHS"

Surely that's the point of this museum. These aren't rubbish products, but they failed, and they failed for a reason, and we can learn something from that.

I find business failures of technically superior products to be absolutely fascinating and well worth studying. The Amiga and BeOS are two of my all-time favourite failures.

I have an attestation from the Goizueta family that they aren't that smart and they aren't that stupid (as the COO put it)

Last summer I took a detour to visit the exposition in Helsingborg. I remember seeing New Coke and the Newton. I think I saw MS Bob too, I could be mistaken though.

By the way, I think the collection has potential to grow a lot bigger and I would have liked to seem more in-depth information about each failure. Maybe the hacker-news community can help with that. (Surely someone here must be knowledgeable about failure :-P)

I think I also saw :Cuecat at their last show in LA.

Betamax might have been a consumer failure, but I had to use it as recently as 2009 because some TV stations would only take our commercials in a Betamax format.

Granted, it was for some local Spanish stations that just had a bunch of old equipment, but I was surprised that it popped up.

I'm still not sure what the ad was about, because I don't speak Spanish, but it was a political ad. I just did audio post-production on it.

> - OS/2 WARP

Failed to beat Windows as a desktop or server OS, but succeeded in other ways. It was widely used as an embedded OS for ATMs and distributed as a support software for IBM mainframes.

Did it fail because it is no longer around? (Cf. other operating systems such as IRIX or Solaris, which is basically dead now, but strong for a time) Or because it did not fulfill a certain purpose--though it did fulfill another?

My suggestions:

Dasani (uk launch) [1]

Sinclair C5 [2]

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/19/foodanddrink

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5

From a YouTube video, I believe, they have Apple Newton. Interesting trivia, Apple Newton supported growth of ARM: https://www.wired.com/2013/08/remembering-the-apple-newtons-...

Some more:

- Fire Phone

- HDDVD

- Google Wave

- Google+

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