The Amazon Fire Phone was Amazon’s first and only smartphone, announced in June 2014 and discontinued roughly a year later in 2015 after a commercial failure so complete it produced one of the more memorable numbers in gadget history: a reported write-down of around $170 million on unsold inventory. Launched at $199 on a two-year AT&T contract — iPhone money — it offered two headline tricks. “Dynamic Perspective” used four front-facing cameras to track the user’s head and tilt the interface, producing a 3D-like depth effect. “Firefly” let the phone identify objects, audio, barcodes, and text in the real world — and, not coincidentally, offer to buy them on Amazon. The whole device was, in essence, a beautifully instrumented shopping cart.
Amazon entered the smartphone market years late, against entrenched giants, with a phone priced at the top of the market and an app ecosystem near the bottom. The Fire Phone ran Fire OS, Amazon’s fork of Android, which meant no Google Play, no Google apps, and a stunted app store missing much of what buyers expected a 2014 flagship to do. To pay iPhone prices for a phone that could not run the apps an iPhone ran was a proposition the market declined almost instantly. The gimmicks did not help: Dynamic Perspective was a novelty that reviewers found gave them headaches more reliably than utility, and Firefly was a clever scanner whose primary purpose was funneling purchases to Amazon.
The collapse was swift and visible in the price tags. Within about six weeks of launch, the on-contract price was slashed from $199 to $0.99, and the unlocked price tumbled from the mid-$600s toward $449, then lower still over the following year. In October 2014 Amazon disclosed a charge of roughly $170 million, largely tied to the Fire Phone and related supplier commitments, plus a large pile of surplus inventory it could not sell. By 2015 the phone was discontinued, never to be succeeded.
What the Fire Phone proved was that distribution dominance in one arena does not transfer to another. Amazon could sell almost anything, but it could not will a smartphone ecosystem into existence or persuade buyers to pay flagship prices for a device built mainly to sell them more things. The phone died; the lessons it taught Amazon — about hardware, about pricing, about playing to its actual strengths — fed directly into the cheap, content-first Fire tablets and the Echo line that succeeded enormously by doing the opposite.
The Microsoft Zune was the company’s answer to the iPod, a brown-tinged portable media player launched on November 14, 2006 at $249.95 — and on October 3, 2011 Microsoft confirmed it would build no more Zune hardware, ending a five-year campaign that never once threatened the device it was built to beat. The Zune was not a bad product. The later Zune HD, released in September 2009, was a genuinely handsome OLED touchscreen player, and the supporting software introduced ideas Apple would not match for years. It simply arrived half a decade after the iPod had already won, into a market Apple had spent those years cementing with iTunes, and it never escaped second place — or, more accurately, fourth.
Microsoft built real innovation into the thing. The Zune shipped with built-in Wi-Fi and a wireless sharing feature officially unnamed but universally called “squirt,” which let one Zune beam a full track to another nearby Zune; the recipient could play it three times over three days before it expired. There was Zune Pass, an all-you-can-eat music subscription launched November 2008 that, in a flash of foresight, let subscribers keep ten tracks a month for good — a streaming-plus-ownership hybrid that prefigured the Spotify era by years. The hardware had a tactile squircle control pad and a design language, Metro, that would go on to define Windows Phone and Windows 8.
None of it mattered. By the time the Zune launched, “iPod” was already a generic noun and iTunes was the gravitational center of digital music; Microsoft was asking people to abandon a library and an ecosystem to adopt a player whose chief novelty was beaming songs to the roughly nobody else who owned one. Its U.S. market share never climbed out of the low single digits — around 9 percent of units in its launch week, sliding to roughly 2 percent by 2009 — and it never made the list of the five best-selling players in America. Microsoft sold an estimated two million units total by 2008, against iPods sold by the hundreds of millions.
The hardware was discontinued in October 2011; the brand was folded into Microsoft’s broader media efforts as the Zune Marketplace gave way to Xbox Music in October 2012, and the music service itself was finally retired in November 2015, its users shuffled into Groove Music. The Zune’s legacy is not failure so much as mistiming: a stack of good ideas, shipped years too late, into a war that was already over.
The CueCat was a small, cat-shaped barcode scanner, given away free starting in 2000 by a Dallas company called Digital Convergence, and within roughly a year it had become one of the most thoroughly mocked gadgets in the short history of consumer technology. The premise: instead of typing a web address, a reader would drag the cat across a special barcode — a “cue” — printed in a magazine, catalog, or newspaper, and their browser would open the corresponding page. It solved the strenuous problem of typing a URL by replacing it with the simpler act of locating a wired plastic cat, plugging it into your computer, installing its software, and dragging it across a code. The company burned through roughly $185 million before folding in 2001.
The CueCat arrived at the absolute peak of dot-com confidence, when the prevailing theory held that anything connecting the physical world to the web was inevitably valuable, and that the business model could be figured out later. Digital Convergence raised enormous sums from blue-chip backers — Belo Corporation, RadioShack, Young & Rubicam, and Coca-Cola among them — and struck distribution deals that mailed the scanners out by the hundreds of thousands. Forbes sent the first 830,000 to its subscribers; Wired sent over 500,000; RadioShack stocked them on shelves. Millions of cats went out into the world, free, to do a job almost nobody wanted done.
Two things finished it. The first was that the value proposition never made sense — the company, critics noted, never managed to explain why scanning a barcode was easier than typing the link it pointed to. The second was privacy. Each CueCat carried a unique serial number, and the software phoned home; the device tracked what users scanned and tied it to their registration, and in September 2000 the situation curdled into a genuine breach when a misconfigured server exposed the names, email addresses, age ranges, genders, and zip codes of roughly 140,000 registered users. A free gadget that surveilled you while solving nothing was a hard sell even when the price was zero.
By May 2001 Digital Convergence had fired most of its 225-person workforce, and by that September Belo had written off its entire $37.5 million investment. The CueCat has since become a fixture on lists of the worst products ever made — ranked twentieth among PC World’s worst tech products in 2006, and included in Time’s “50 Worst Inventions” in 2010 — a permanent monument to the dot-com conviction that a clever bridge between print and web was worth building whether or not anyone needed to cross it.
The Nokia N-Gage was a $299 attempt to fuse a mobile phone and a handheld game console into one device, and within two years of its October 2003 launch Nokia itself declared it a failure. The pitch was logical enough on paper: Nokia owned the phone, Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance owned portable gaming, and the N-Gage would take both by carrying games and a SIM card in a single pocketable unit. What shipped instead was a device so awkward to use as a phone, so cumbersome to load with games, and so far from the Game Boy on price and library that it became a punchline before it became a product.
The N-Gage’s problems were physical and immediate. To take a call you held the thin edge of the device against your cheek, a posture instantly mocked as “sidetalking” and likened to talking into a taco — which is how it earned its lasting nickname, the taco phone. To change games you had to remove the back cover and pull out the battery to reach the memory-card slot, turning a five-second swap on a Game Boy into a small disassembly project. It cost $299 against a Game Boy Advance that sold for a fraction of that and had a vastly deeper catalog.
The sales reflected all of it. In its first weeks in the United States the N-Gage was reportedly outsold by the Game Boy Advance roughly 100 to 1, with independent tracking suggesting around 5,000 units sold in the opening fortnight against Nokia’s far larger claims. A 2004 revision, the N-Gage QD, fixed the worst ergonomic offenses but could not fix the proposition. In November 2005 Nokia’s own multimedia chief admitted the device had sold about a third of its target — roughly two to three million units against a goal of six million.
Nokia discontinued the hardware in Western markets in early 2006 and let the brand fade. It tried once more in 2008, relaunching N-Gage as a games-download platform for its Symbian smartphones rather than a dedicated device; that effort closed in 2009 without ever finding an audience. The N-Gage is now remembered as a product that was, in a sense, right about the future — phones really would become the world’s dominant game machines — and almost comically wrong about how to get there.
The Segway PT was a two-wheeled, self-balancing Personal Transporter that was supposed to change how cities were built and instead became a tourist novelty and a punchline. Inventor Dean Kamen unveiled it on December 3, 2001 on ABC’s Good Morning America, after a year of feverish speculation about a secret project codenamed “Ginger” and “IT.” On July 15, 2020, after nearly nineteen years on the market, its parent company Ninebot rolled the last unit off the production line and ended the original Segway for good.
The gap between the hype and the result is the entire story. Before anyone had seen it, the device drew claims that it would be “to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy” — a remark that captured the breathless register of the pre-launch leaks. Investor John Doerr reportedly suggested it might be bigger than the internet; Steve Jobs is said to have called it as big a deal as the PC. Cities, the prophecy went, would be redesigned around it. What actually arrived was a $5,000 contraption that topped out around 10 mph, weighed too much to carry, and looked faintly ridiculous in motion.
Reality arrived quickly and stayed. At five thousand dollars the Segway was priced like a used car for the performance of a brisk walk; it was too fast and too heavy for sidewalks, which many jurisdictions promptly banned it from, and too slow and exposed for roads. It found real customers — police departments, security teams, warehouse staff, and tour operators steering tourists in single file past landmarks — but never the mass market it had been promised to remake. The pop-culture verdict was sealed by Paul Blart: Mall Cop and a decade of comedians: the Segway was what you rode to look important while going nowhere fast.
A darker note hangs over the company’s history. In December 2009 the British entrepreneur Jimi Heselden bought Segway Inc.; on September 26, 2010 he died at 62 after riding an off-road Segway model off a cliff into the River Wharfe near his Yorkshire estate. Across roughly nineteen years the PT sold only about 140,000 units in total, and by the end accounted for around 1.5 percent of the revenue of Ninebot, the Chinese firm that had acquired Segway in 2015. The company that killed the PT did so to concentrate on the e-scooters and self-balancing gadgets the Segway’s own technology had quietly helped inspire.