In the innovation industry, the glow of success often overshadows the stumbling blocks. We are seduced by the idea of a future guided by revolutionary artifacts and transformative platforms, but we rarely look at the technological ruins left along the way.
3D televisions, interactivity in digital terrestrial television (DTT), Google Glass or Facebook’s own metaverse: projects that promised to change the world, but ended up archived as episodes of overflowing enthusiasm and insufficient reality.
“To innovate is to fail until something works”
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
A romantic view of innovation suggests that progress is an arrow that only points forward.
However, as sociologist David Edgerton points out in The Shock of the Old (2006), the history of technology is not written only with new inventions, but with the actual use given to them. “Novelty does not guarantee relevance,” he wrote, and his statement is clearly reflected in the projects that, despite millionaire investments and seductive campaigns, simply did not connect with the public.
Meta’s (formerly Facebook) metaverse, for example, emerged with a bombastic narrative.
Mark Zuckerberg promised a revolution in social and work interaction, a persistent virtual environment where everything would be possible: from work meetings to concerts to travel.
However, just two years after its official presentation in 2021, the concept was deflated. The low adoption, limited technical capacity and a lack of a clear sense of usefulness made it an expensive mirage.
The story is not new. In the early 2010s, 3D TVs flooded the market as the “next great immersive experience.” But consumers didn’t get into the habit of wearing special glasses at home to watch a movie.
Eye strain, high prices and the scarce supply of content turned the promise into a bad memory.
The same happened with the interactivity promised by DTT in Latin America, which remained more as a bureaucratic desire than as a real transformation of audiovisual consumption.
“What is not used, is not technology”
Neil Postman, in his book Technopoly (1992), warned about the fetishism of innovation, a kind of blind obedience to everything new without questioning its purpose.
This vision helps to understand why certain advances, although technically possible, failed to take hold socially. The question is not whether it can be done, but what it is for, how it improves daily life and, above all, whether it responds to a real need.
Context rules: between corporate desire and user apathy
Many technological failures are not explained by technical errors, but by the disconnection with the social and cultural context of the users.
The case of the metaverse is paradigmatic.
Announced during a pandemic that evidenced the fragility of physical meetings, Meta tried to capitalize on the desire for virtuality. But, in practice, what people longed for most was to see each other again, to touch each other, to get out of confinement.
The timing, far from being opportune, was an emotional blunder.
In addition, the metaverse demanded technical resources that were not available to most.
Virtual reality headset, high-speed connection, time to interact with a still clumsy environment. Meanwhile, traditional platforms such as WhatsApp, Zoom or TikTok continued to effectively solve basic communication and entertainment needs. Why jump into the uncertain if the known worked better?
Failure is also cooked in the marketing kitchen.
When advertising promises too much and the experience does not deliver, the disappointment is immediate.
That was the history of interactivity in DTT. In countries such as Argentina, Brazil or Colombia, governments invested in systems that would allow users to vote in live programs, access extra data or even carry out procedures.
But the apps were sparse, poorly designed, and not very functional. There was no real incentive for people to adopt those uses.
In the case of 3D TVs, the context also played against it. Movie theaters achieved some initial enthusiasm, but the transfer of that experience to the home entailed a set of barriers: the discomfort of glasses, the need for synchronization, the lack of attractive titles.
The result was the same as so often happens in technological consumption: the initial enthusiasm faded at the first curve of everyday use.
“The revolutions that were not”
There is an almost poetic dimension to technological failure. Each failed attempt leaves clues about what we want as a society, but also about what we are not willing to do to achieve it.
In this sense, studying the stumbling blocks of innovation allows us to better understand the limits of digital desire.
Google Glass is another striking example.
Billed as a revolution in ubiquitous computing, its smart glasses promised to extend reality with information projected in real time. But his failure was as cultural as it was technical.
People felt uncomfortable in front of users who could record without warning, and the exorbitant price ended up sealing their fate.
In 2015, Google halted production and admitted that the market was not yet ready.
In Japan, home assistance robots also traversed a similar route.
Although the country has an aging population and a high culture of automation, many elderly people rejected the company of machines that did not offer true human interaction.
Project Paro, a seal-shaped robot designed to offer affection, worked well in some clinical settings but failed to become widespread.
And if we go further back, we can remember the failures of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy console in 1995, which tried to offer an immersive virtual reality experience ahead of time.
Headache, poor image quality and an uncomfortable design caused the console to be withdrawn from the market in less than a year.
In conclusion, the path of technology is not a paved highway to the future, but an uneven terrain where promises collide with the realities of use, context and social desire.
Every failure is a warning against the idolatry of innovation for its own sake.
As Evgeny Morozov wrote in To Save Everything, Click Here (2013), “technology is neither good nor bad, but neither is it neutral.” Perhaps for this reason, understanding why certain projects fail is as valuable as celebrating those that succeed.
The history of innovation, like all human history, is made up of both advances and forgetfulness.
References
- Edgerton, D. (2006). The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. Oxford University Press.
- Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Knopf.
- Morozov, E. (2013). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. PublicAffairs.
