Or, Hawkins’ Folly Redux Redux?
5 years ago, I wrote about a product so profoundly stupid, it sank a promising and innovative company.
The company in question was Palm, and the product was the Palm Foleo.
The What What?
The Palm Foleo, folks.
The Palm Foleo.
The Palm Foleo
What, exactly, was the Palm Foleo?
It was a phone companion that required tethering to a Palm phone in order to work..
Suffice it to say, it died a merciless death.
I’d like to think that my blog post on NetworkWorld.com no doubt contributed greatly to sparing our race the embarrassment of having to explain to otherworldly sentient aliens just what the fu’k we were thinking!
We dodged a bullet on that one.
Fast forward to 2011.
RIM, the purveyors of the BlackBerry, decided that the only way to compete against the double-barreled onslaught of iPhone and Android devices was to create a tablet computer that would provide a lock-in against them by requiring tethering to a BlackBerry .
I’ll wait until your guffaws subside.
I am NOT making this up!
Seriously, I am not!
The device in question, named the BlackBerry PlayBook, was doomed from the start.
The BlackBerry PlayBook
As soon as the swooning cattle in the mainstream media exited the no-doubt hallucinogenic atmosphere in the auditorium where the PlayBook announcement was made, they realized that there wasn’t enough perfume on Terra to nice up that pig.
Like the Foleo before it, the PlayBook failed.
In fact, even when prices were reduced, people didn’t bite.
For, unlike the late and unlamented HP TouchPad, the PlayBook required a BlackBerry to do shi’t!
I serenaded the PlayBook in a post here, bidding it “adieu” as it boarded the boat of Charon to sail on the Styx on its way to IT Hades.
I thought, “Finally, this shit is over! 2-in-a-row tethered device fails would be enough to make even the most shortsighted of corporate numbskulls see that this dream is a lead balloon!”
Pollyanna me!
I was wrong.
The Google Nexus Q
On June 27, in the Year Of Our Lord 2012, the smart guys at Google showed us that they too, like Palm and RIM before them, could be so smitten by the bug of customer lock-in, that they actually, just a few months after the abject failure of the RIM PlayBook, could come up with an equally dastardly device to take its place.
Enter the Google Nexus Q from Stage Left.
Every time a company wants to serve us entrails, it tries to dress up the offal in purtied-up enclosures, hoping to fool us into looking at the superficiality of the proffered solution.
Seriously, to paraphrase, a billion orangutans, typing away on the weirdly-complex keyboards of the mercifully-dead Google TV remote control, couldn’t – in a billion Earth years - have developed a more stupid device!
While Apple might come to some people’s minds based on my words in the prior sentence, it shouldn’t.
Apple always delivers a complete solution. The holistic nature of their solutions are a symphony of joy for their proletariat, and deservedly so.
Apple products just work.
Even if it is just for the lowered expectations of their fanboi base.
Most of the time. (The fanbois who chopped off two of their fingers in order to improve the reception of their phones might beg to differ. Hence my use of the phrase, “most of the time”.)
Coming back to the Nexus Q, even the sorta cool design of the orb couldn’t save the device once people saw it for what it was: a stupid, ill-conceived pile of excrement!
On Stardate 2012-07-30 (Monday), came reports that Google was delaying the device in order to add features.
Yeah. Riight!
Erhh, where have we heard and seen this before?
Without a doubt, the happiest people on this planet the past 48 hours have been the mindless drones behind the HP TouchPad!
This is because the time interval between the announcement of the Nexus Q, and the soft announcement of the cancellation delay in shipping the Nexus Q beats the time lapse between the availability of the TouchPad and its withdrawal from the market by a whole day.
That firmly places the HP Palm people in a number 2 position when it concerns product boneheadness!
Personally, I don’t see the Nexus Q ever coming back to the market.
However, I would like Google to try and prove me wrong by throwing lotsa moola down the drain in order to make this abominable device kinda work.
Where do we go from here?
If someone had told me, even on June 1st of this year, that a device mimicking the Palm Foleo would be delivered in such a short period after the abject failure of the PlayBook, I would have said impossible.
Now, I am just numb.
Why?
It WILL happen AGAIN!
* Stupefyingly, a TouchPad page STILL exists at HP.com. Wow. Beauty may only be skin deep, but stupid, like layers of an onion, goes all the way to the bone!
Related, I think
© 2005-2012, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited
