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10 Failed Technology Trends of 2005
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech's Loyd Case muses on ten trends of 2005 that never panned out. He points the finger at analysts like himself for waxing glowy-eyed at technologies like the BTX form factor and the 64-bit version of Windows XP. On DRM and the Sony rootkit fiasco: 'Hint to the music publishers: It's not going to work. There have been easy workarounds to every system that's been tried, and the more stringent the copy protection, the greater the risk of having angry customers who won't buy CDs. I suggest you start investigating new business models, as the old ones ride off into the sunset.'"
Take iTunes for instance. Wildly successful in the face of its predecessors and competitors. The RIAA doesn't like it because it undercuts their old business model (and these people have worked that one a long time to their great profit) Apple's frisky little model says, "give it to them on a flashy little toy and keep it cheap." CD sales plummet. (RIAA biz model sez: Any flattening of growth or dip in sales is due to piracy!) Reminds me of when Detroit, back in the 70's thought they could continue to do business as usual as those japanese cars started to sell particularly well ("after the price of oil drops again we'll go right back to 454 blown dual carb thingamajigs") Funny they repeated the same erroneous reasoning with 4WD's in the late 90's and into the next century and are now closing plants left and right.
High def video and audio. What's funny is people are fine with the crap we have now. Heck, there's people driving around town with self-installed audio systems in their cars which not only sound awful, but bring Lo-Fi to an all new low -- and they're actually happy with it.64 bit OS, only when you've got apps or a killer must-have game will 64 bit OS be all the rage, even drivers will follow. Until then, like hi-def video and hi-fi audio, it's only in the realm of those who really must have for practical or fashionable reasons.
Digital home: Right. When I was a kid we had this great intercom system that came with our new house, all rooms connected to one main spot, could pipe radio into any room or page anyone. That lasted about a month. After that it was mom shouting up the stairs that supper was ready, someone at the door, etc. Evolution of technology doesn't guarantee it will be any more necessary, but it looks flash and shiny if you've never seen before and might impress the uninitiated. Up to me, I'd worry more about noisy water pipes and insulation in the walls.
"it even comes with high definition squirrels in the attic!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
From TFA: Consumers don't want multiple standards. DVD was successful because there was only one standard.
One standard? What about +R, -R, DVDRAM etc? Manufacturers love competing standards. They get to sell to early adopters, then sell another unit with identical functions to the poor sods who jumped on to the wrong standard.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
this year it became possible for independent film makers to make high quality 16:9 films for the first time... economically
yes, the sony hdr-fx1 and jvc's offering came out in 2004/ 2003, but dual core became economical this year (really necessary for the editting environment and importing the mpeg stream) and sony introduced it's low cost cmos hdv camcorder
i'm talking economical in something a middle class high school kid could set up with a little help from his parents and some after school jobs: under $5K
that really means something for 2005
the author gripes about hdv content distribution and the big cable and studio players wary of rights management, but that's not really where the story is in hdv: it's in creation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That may be true, one can't even attach an Access database because of "security reasons," but the article doesn't just focus on that aspect of Gmail. He focuses on Gmail helping free email by offering 2GB of storage. In my opinion, that is the very least that Gmail has done. The interface is simplistic and lovely (IMHO, as opposed to his "sleek outlike like" yahoo mail, which I avoid since Outlook bothers me like no other), the conversation threading has made me not use regular email clients, the search features are fast and effecient (faster than Thunderbird), and the labels and filters are easy to setup. Am i a gmail fanboy? Probably, but to call gmail a failure is ludicrous. I'd guess that he used gmail to send a hello world email, then tried attaching something, and then hasn't signed on since.
I have to say I'm glad to see BTX on this list. It seems like it was developed soley to make up for the stupid amounts of heat generated by the P4, with no regard for making anything else better than ATX. How about standardizing all those case connectors into one block of plugs, or consolidating the 3 power connectors I have to hook to my motherboard. If I'm going to switch form factors, I want these obvious things taken into account.
Non gratis rodentus anus
- The BTX Form Factor
...maybe on the MacIntosh New Year in two weeks
I'm writing this on a powermac now with the same sort of cooling system...
- High-Definition Video on the PC
this one looks like it's only delayed... the content is now showing up on iTunes... and since it looks like it's going to be very successful, it's only
a matter of time before they offer HD too.
- Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Tiger has been a huge success. (it's 64-bit)
- iPod Competitors Emerge
What's so wrong with the iPod that they're wishing for competitors. None of the competitors really care about mac users, so why should I care about their products? And why do we want WMV to win the DRM battle? And why is the iPod entry level?
ExtremeTech my ass. more like WhatTheGuysWorkingAtBestBuyThinkIsExtremeTech
Shit I wanna see the Mac user list of top ten disappointments....
10. Market share still sucks
9. iPod still can't do bluetooth
8. Market share is what 3% or something now
7. Turns out the G5 wasn't a supercomputer on a chip
6. No Civ IV
5. Have to wait more than 3 months for 10.5
4. Mac mini turned out not do have anything to do with Tivo
3. Damn, that market share sucks
2. OS X still can't read minds
1. Fucking market share
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Why do you need to send an EXE attachment? Seems like a sane thing to forbid.
.EXEs for a living. GMail is worthless to those people.
.EXE files, but not so easy when the OS vendor chooses to hide the suffix from her, provides easy ways to disguise the suffix, adds support for some arbitrarily-large number of additional executable file types, and ships a macro engine designed to run the content automatically without asking first.
.ZIP file containing an .EXE. This is a case where Microsoft did some stupid things and Google responded with a hearty, "Hey, wait for me, guys!"
Some people actually work with
Before Microsoft started allowing email to execute code, email viruses were impossible.
You don't have to prohibit executable attachments to disallow automatically-executing content. Google has thrown out the baby, bathtub, and half of the house's indoor plumbing.
Microsoft's dumbass move was making everything executable. It's easy enough to tell Grandma not to click on
It's not appropriate to fix any of those problems by preventing me from sending my customers a
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Writing "beta" on something doesn't make it a beta test version. The term "beta test" has a pretty specific meaning in software development, though sadly few people remember what it is and why it's important these days.
If you release a piece of software to the general public and charge for it (as in Microsoft) then it's not a beta, it's a product. If you advertise a web service widely and get loads of people to use it routinely (as in Google) then it's not a beta, it's a live service.
The use of "beta" on everything, even things you're treating as a real product in all other respects, is just the latest meaningless buzzword, and a pathetic attempt to avoid taking responsibility for the quality of your product or service. It will sting Microsoft and Google alike soon enough, as neither customer opinion nor (if applicable) commercial partners or courts ruling on disagreements will give it much weight.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I agree with you to a certain degree — I mean, the music industry is actually attempting to fix their product by crippling it for the paying consumer (while having little or no effect on the illegitimate distribution of files). But while there are artists who are embracing new business models, it is presently completely unclear what the new business models for artists will be, and artists who are already stuck (being treated terribly, in many cases) with the existing giants are in danger of being treated even worse by these companies, while having no immediately obvious way out.
I feel guilty if I pirate music because the artists aren't being paid. I don't buy into music which is DRMed in any way, because I refuse to buy a crippled product for what is typically a completely ridiculous price. But when I can buy a traditional CD, I buy it. I mean to start using an online service which does not implement DRM, but still many artists are left out here, and often by no fault of their own — they're musicians, not businessmen, and this is not something they'd ordinarly be able to get particularly good advice on.
Never stop feeling guilty about pirating music, unless you are still buying it from fairer systems. The fact that some companies use unfair means does not give one free reign over media. The artist deserves to be paid for their work in some way, and there is always fantastic music to find at terms you agree with if you're willing to look.
This guy mentions twice in the article that he's a big fan of losless audio compression. That's all the proof I need that he's a hype-driven goofball who really has no clue.
I've been a musician for over 20 years. I can easily hear the difference between single coil and humbucking pickups, and between a fuzz pedal that uses germanium trasistors and one that uses silicon. Those are subtle differences that the vast majority of people can't hear. What I can't hear is the difference between a properly done 192kbps/44khz mp3 rip and one made with FLAC. Now, I'm not saying that means that no one on earth can. I'm sure there are golden-eared freaks out there. But I would seriously crap out a brick if this dillhole Case could.
And before you let me know what a moron I am, be sure to conduct a blind A/B test yourself. It has to be blind, or it's just not scientific. Have a friend play two different versions for you, one a high quality mp3, and one FLAC, and see if you can tell. Since the odds of guessing correctly are 50/50, you need to repeat the experiment several times to be sure that you weren't just lucky. I'm here to tell you, it's a rare, rare person who can choose correctly ten times in a row.
And yet this guy is surprised that hardware makers haven't put these lossless codecs into their players? Most people are happy with FM audio quality, let alone FLAC. Case is useless, as proven by the fact that he hyped so many technologies that went nowhere. Extremetech, indeed - extremely stupid.
Now that's something that should definately be on the list. Remember all those articles how the cell was going to be the biggest competitior for PCs and how we were going to have cell processors in everything and link them and do all sorts of cool and weird things? Well, suddenly, nobody talks about it anymore...
"People's problem is not that they are mortal, but that they are suddenly mortal" Terry Pratchett