With the emerging technology trends, the tech giants keep on trying to cease any opportunity to tilt the market in their favor and launch a plethora of hardware or software products in a hurry, without proper market anticipation. The result is that such software and hardware products are rejected by the consumer markets and are labeled as a complete failure. Bloomberg gave a review of Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE)‘s biggest gadget flops.
Starting from below, the fifth biggest gadget fail by Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE) is AIBO, the robot dog. Sony Corp (ADR)(NYSE:SNE) has always been trying to launch the concept of electronic pets that can take place the traditional pet culture around the world, but unfortunately, AIBO was a failure, which was rolled back in 2006, just seven years after its launch. AIBO had a price tag of $2,500, so you can expect why it got failed.
Fourth is MILO, a Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE) product which was designed on the communicator prototype, costing $350. No games, boring MSN or AIM chatting software, bad design are some of the features that made it a fail. The rest was done by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iPod Touch which completely destroyed this gadget.
Next on the list of Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE) failures is Rolly Robot, a digital robotic music player that could move on its wheels. It was debuted in 2007 and got killed in 2009 because of the rather pathetic idea, which was to dance over the songs it played, and high cost, which was around $399.
Second is Sony’s MiniDisc, which was touted to be the “cassette successor” by Sony but immediately got crushed by MP3 players and iPods. MiniDiscs were launched in 1992.
The number one Sony failure in the field of gadgets is BetaMax, consumer-level analog videocassette magnetic tape recording format which got released in 1975. Sony refused to license the technology to other entities, which immediately pushed movie makers and professional users to choose VHS.
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