Brand Innovation Graveyard

For every world-transforming innovation, history is littered with notions that promised much but delivered little. In this month’s GOOD MAGAZINE, we’re reminded of the cautionary lessons in our capacity for folly. Some ideas that never quite made it include:

The Segway: Few products could survive the hype of the Segway’s debut. And yet still the faithful persist, whizzing past with their “I’m-traveling-at-four-miles-an-hour” grins. And all along we wonder: Isn’t this what bikes are for?





Pan Am Moon Ticket: Here’s a ticket to the moon, said Pan Am. Come back to us in 50 years. Fifty years later, no flights to the moon and, more important, no more Pan Am.





Y2K: A boondoggle of the first order. Governments and companies burned $300 billion to correct a problem caused because computer geeks failed to remember that time, in fact, continues.

Dymaxion House: For all of Buckminster Fuller’s genius, he failed to account for taste. Definition of a tough sell: an aluminum house built in the manner of a grain silo, with a bathroom that shrink-wraps your waste.


Oxygen Bars: It’s hard to look cool when you’re spending a dollar a minute sucking down a tube of otherwise free air. Also, the oxygen bartender is secretly laughing at you.

Alex Rodriguez’s Contract: $175,370 per game. $47,528 per at bat. There is such a thing as too much money, but apparently this wasn’t it, since A-Rod opted out to search for an even larger windfall.

Jet Pack: In a crushing disappointment to successive generations of Popular Science–ogling boys, this one never really, er, took off. What’s so hard about thermodynamics and jet propulsion?