Continue Reading Below Advertisement

But not to worry -- the team from Danger was going to build Microsoft a smartphone so good, it'd make Steve Jobs turn his blue jeans brown. Microsoft called their uberphone the Kin.

The Kin came. It sold a total of 8,000 units, not even one for every 10 Microsoft employees. The company lost $62,500 per phone sold.



You gotta spend money to make money! And also to lose millions, apparently.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

So what went wrong? Well, for starters, Microsoft took all the brilliant and innovative minds they'd bought from Danger and said, "Knock all that creative shit off." Half the Danger team wound up working on the Kin, and the other half got shuffled into developing Windows Phone 7. You see, giant corporations are the same as the character in every laugh track sitcom who winds up dating two women at once: They'd rather fuck up two things than focus on one and do it right. Microsoft had people who knew where the future of smartphones lay. But they also had Steve "If It's Worked Once, It'll Work Forever" Ballmer, a man who throws chairs when he gets angry.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

It was the same with tablets. Way back before the iPad launched, photos of a Microsoft project called Courier leaked out to the tech press. It appeared to be a sort of dual-screen digital notebook, and every blogger in the gadget world ejaculated in unison. But if you're wondering why there are no Courier tablets today, it's because Steve "Chair Chucker" Ballmer didn't want any hit products that weren't run off the Windows operating system.



"Fuck this noise. Tiles, the people want TILES."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

So, sure enough, the Courier was shelved in favor of Microsoft's Surface tablets, which were so innovative that nearly a billion dollars' worth of them sit unsold in warehouses right now.

Christopher Daed is a tech industry veteran and also awesome. Robert Evans is Cracked's head of Dick Joke Journalism and also writes about travel for Vagabondish. For more dirt on the tech industry, he recommends TechEye.net.

Did you know Prince was less a sexual loner and more Robin to his dad's Batman? In our latest podcast, Jack O'Brien and David Wong examine why we love underdog stories, why they are structured how they are, and how most of them are total bullshit. Go here to subscribe on iTunes or download it here. Getting your Cracked fix while driving has never been this unlikely to kill you.

Related Reading: Want more of Cracked's investigative journalism? Click here. If you need another reason to be scared of the tech industry, read about the horrors of Apple or Google. And did you know the Internet could die at any moment? Because it totally could.