A friend who sells drugs for Merck is all in a rankle over the recent Vioxx flap.
“Our stock has dropped by a third since September,” he complained. “I should’ve followed you into computers. Nothing ever backfires on you guys.”
“You’re joking, lad,” I replied. “Sit down and I’ll tell you the story of the three little computer flops.”

Once upon a time, way back in the mid-1990s, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison decided for about the hundredth time that he was tired of being the second-richest computer geek in America. Determined to take on Microsoft at its own game, he had one of his infamous brainstorms and sunk tens of millions of dollars into something called a “network computer,” NC for short. Ellison gambled that computing would become more centralized and that we would all want to tap in to services that would handle all of our processing and storage needs, instead of messing with those problematic CPUs and hard drives on traditional desktop PCs. In the September 1996 issue of SunWorld, Ellison predicted that “there will be 100 million NCs in use by the year 2000.” He went on to say that “the first six months will be rocky, but once we have a mature product, which will be six months to a year from now, I think this will be explosive.”

Implosive is more like it. Turned out the world was not much interested in a desktop unit that had no floppy disk or hard drive, and the NC came up about 99 million units short of Ellison’s prediction. It remains one of the biggest flops in computer history, making people almost forget about another flop, the Apple Newton.

In 1993, Steve Jobs had long left Apple and, under the leadership of John Sculley, Apple released the Newton Message Pad. I remember seeing a picture of one in InfoWorld and thinking, “Sweet fancy Moses, I want one of those.” Not because I liked Apples, but because I could see the value in a small, pad-like computer device. “I could use that thing for taking meeting notes, doing my checkbook, all kinds of things.” Good thing I couldn’t afford one. Despite being a prototypical PDA, the Newton never got off the ground. Less than five years later, Jobs returned to Apple and personally killed the Newton. The problems with Newtons included poor handwriting recognition and a small word list. Just last year, Jobs essentially said there were no plans to resurrect the Newton, or even to create another Apple PDA or tablet-like device. And why should they? Who wants to compete with the overstuffed PDA market when you’ve got iPods on back order? One thing you can say for Steve Jobs: he’s as good as anyone at identifying a need and filling it.

Which brings me to my own company, who invented a brilliant operating system called Microsoft Bob that was supposed to be a godsend for millions of novice users who were intimidated by Windows 3.1. Bob was released to much fanfare in 1995 and featured an interface that looked like a living room, complete with easy chair and fireplace, which was supposed to make you feel at home as you did your computing. Clicking on decorative objects in the room enabled you to perform common tasks such as adding something, deleting something, or opening a program. Nice concept. Solid market research. Big flop. Folks around Redmond still talk about it. Seems that Bob required a minimum of a 486 processor with 8 megs of ram and 30 megs of free disk space. If you recall, most PCs in 1995 weren’t quite that powerful. Also, Bob just wasn’t useful enough to justify its $100 sticker price. But the biggest nail in Bob’s coffin came from – believe it or not – another Microsoft product. Windows 95, which was released later that year, and which contained the new Windows Explorer interface that cleaned Bob’s clocks and sealed his fate.

“So you see,” I concluded. “Just because something doesn’t work out doesn’t mean it was a bad idea or that you shouldn’t have tried it. If it wasn’t for the Newton, we might not have PDAs today. Oracle lost tons of money on the NC, but the concept is seen today in thin clients everywhere.”
“And Bob?”
“Excuse me?”
“What about Bob?”
“Oh, uh… great movie.”