I know of a few. This answer hurts me, but it is true. The one who was supposed to unite the world, change the way we worked 100% in every field imaginable. Java. Despite being incredibly successful, it is a failure. But some of the things that Java was supposed to be able to do were even bigger failures.

Java came from SUN Microsystems, my former employer.

Java was a huge success for everyone except SUN. Even Symantec made at one point the most popular IDE for Java. Java saved IBM like nothing else. It not only made Mainframe computers not die but made them very useful. Microsoft even made Java work for them with J++, but that ended differently and they had to pay SUN some money.

All the large companies in the computing industry made big on Java. Even consulting companies like Accenture became enormous multi billion dollar companies on the shoulder of Java. The country of India housed companies with probably millions of programmers, most with Java. Even companies like the infamous Arthur Andersen of the very famous Enron financial scandal was actually a huge programming consultant firm that had to change name overnight.

SUN, who made Java, the invented it, they made it popular. They advertised it. Java probably was the thing that made SUN go out of business. No one needed SUN machines when Java ran everywhere.

Something like this.

SUN did make a lot of cool development tools with Java. One such thing was Java beans. Now, take this with a little grain of salt. I never used this. But this was a tool like no other, except for the development tools at NeXT, but let us imagine it did not exist. This was probably the first “no code” tool ever. It failed completely for the same reasons all “no code” tools fail.

Java beans was a GUI directional flow development. You would program a Java bean, which was completely insulated Java program or part of a program. There you could drag it into your project. Then you added an event that said like Add customer, and you connected that event to a java bean which could add customers. This way you would be making tools that were completely independent but would work together. So you could in theory go to a market place and pick and choose components you needed to connect to databases, tables, input forms.

The idea was actually quite good. But it was so market heavy that you could read books on the subject and not have a single idea what it was all about.

Then SUN of course started to name everything they did JAVA. They had some cool technology which would be more useful today than it was in 2000 something, like single sign on managers.

The closest I can say to explain OpenDoc, think of a webpage, images, videos, sounds and text on one page. But it was apps.

Another notable technology called OpenDoc from Apple. This would allow you to make apps by encapsulating other apps, plus you would make your own apps and enclose that in a combined app. The best I could gather was that it returned nothing and despite having a cool factor, no one knew what to do with it. Like, in this video, an angry developer who has put years into OpenDoc is in a conference with Steve Jobs himself who had just cancelled OpenDoc. The programmer tells Steve that he is stupid and doesn’t know what he is doing and just goes out on Steve Jobs. Now, Steve Jobs is not a guy who runs away from a fight does the unthinkable. He calmly talks to the guy, explains this, why they had to make that decision. Brilliant move.

By the way. When the guy asks Steve to say what he has been doing for the last 7 years. That is the “go to hell loser” comment. It is loaded. Steve had started NeXT and NeXT had failed completely. Apple bought NeXT and changed NeXTSTEP the operating system into macOS, used NeXT WebObjects to sell music online. NeXTSTEP is what is running in your iPhone, iPad, Mac and everything Apple does. NeXT wasn’t a success until Apple bought it and they became the largest company in the world for a time.

But I still think Java, despite it’s success it has had, a success like nothing else. Whenever someone tells you that enterprises never use new technology, they are always waiting until things turn at least 10 years old before they think of using that technology. Tell them they are lying. All enterprises jumped on Java as soon as it came out. They went Java crazy.

I still think Java sucks, as a desktop programming language. Even today, with computers that are easily 100,000 times more powerful than a 486 cpu running at 66MHz, Java GUI apps still look ugly and they are still slow, the only notable exception is what IntelliJ does. Their IDEs are amazing.

Another notable project is the project Taligent. It was IBM, Apple and Motorola together. Making a new type of computers, new operating system. The project was extremely well funded. They basically had all drawers in the office full of blank signed checks. No limits, and that was what they aimed for, a platform where there would be NO LIMITS.

This is probably as far as they got.

After years and years of promises, nothing to show for it, at all. They turned everything into a development tool. Billions wasted, in 1995 dollars.