38 Failed Products From the Past That Were Not Successful

Here’s a blast from the past: in case you don’t remember, the CueCat was a barcode scanner created by the Digital Convergence Corporation. Their goal was to develop a product that could connect the Internet to the world of print media. It was the late 1990s, and consumers were looking for ways to link the more traditional world with technology’s latest advances.

Users would plug the CueCat into their computer and scan printed barcodes to go to different websites on the internet. But customers considered the CueCat useless, arguing that they could simply type a web address into the browser rather than struggling to scan in the barcode.