Products that were superior but were unsuccessful...

[TheGreenGoblin]

I was looking at the site known as TOP and came across some of the posts made by arch-curmudgeon, windup merchant come late lamented L-1011 Captain 411A and was apt to think that the Tr-Star was definitely the betamax format and player of the air. So much better in so many ways but yet ultimately unsuccessful.

What other products of any kind can people here think of that should have been successful and yet failed or simply disappeared!

[603DX]

Perhaps the recently cancelled Dyson electric car project, which if their other products are anything to go by, should have been efficient, innovative and desirable compared with other competitors, but would probably have proved far too expensive to sell in sufficient numbers. We bought one of their early vacuum cleaners (DC01?) which was about twice the price of other brands at the time, and neither performed as hoped, nor lasted as long as its cost led us to expect. In the knockabout life of domestic appliances in the typical household, other much cheaper brands did the job to an acceptable standard, and treating them as expendable items seemed a better bet.

[Pontius Navigator]

HP Calculator, reverse Polish notation, gold plated pins, gold plated price.

Philips video 2000 lost out to VHS. You could actually program it by setting start and stop times, each with its own button and instructions in English.

Hoover Keymatic washing machine.

VC10

[Woody]

Concorde

[Pontius Navigator]

Bismarck - quantity overcame quality.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Bismarck - quantity overcame quality.

Too many Nazis on board you mean? Too many dummkopfs!

Bigger is not always better as you say.

[Capetonian]

Women. Fine until they were given vocal cords.