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The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time
Khammurabi writes "PC World compiled a list of the 25 worst tech products of all time. From the article: 'At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But it's the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shriveled, and that make tech editors cry out, "What have I done to deserve this?"' Number one on the list? AOL."
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I am surprised that Packard Bell didn't make the list. They made some pretty crappy computers in the late 80s.
-Matt
Microsoft Bob continues to take a beating that I think is unfair. (I wonder how many of the people who talk about it have ever seen it.) It was pretty useless, true, but it was also an attempt to be genuinely innovative, and deserves credit for failing while trying to do something really new.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
pretty myopic and self flattering of this age - I could pick up a 1950's copy of Popular Mechanics and find lots of stupendous techno-flops. One that comes to mind is a TV set with a built in 35mm slide viewer. You guys have no idea.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I couldn't agree more. Already reading many comments on this article in other locations that are crying foul over AOL. Not that AOL was the best thing since sliced bread. But before other dial up ISPs, they were the only bread in town, unless you logged in to text services or one-at-a-time BBSs. Looking at AOL then, you see where the leap was made from online computing before 1989 and after. Color, pictures, multiuser chat, news, message boards, and email.
Strange, that's pretty similar to what we have now. If you read what they complain about, it is painfully obvious that the writer is either some 16 year old AOL basher without a clue or worse, an old elitist that wonders, "Didn't we all have private (D)Arpanet connections?"
Here's their complaints about AOL:
"How do we loathe AOL? Let us count the ways. Since America Online emerged from the belly of a BBS called Quantum "PC-Link" in 1989, users have suffered through..."
1. awful software
2. inaccessible dial-up numbers
3. rapacious marketing
4. in-your-face advertising
5. questionable billing practices
6. inexcusably poor customer service
7. enough spam to last a lifetime
8. more expensive than its major competitors
"This lethal combination earned the world's biggest ISP the top spot on our list of bottom feeders."
It goes on to say:
"AOL succeeded initially by targeting newbies, using brute-force marketing techniques. In the 90s you couldn't open a magazine (PC World included) or your mailbox without an AOL disk falling out of it. This carpet-bombing technique yielded big numbers: At its peak, AOL claimed 34 million subscribers worldwide, though it never revealed how many were just using up their free hours.
Advertisement (This is an actual paste... sorry, PC world gave me IN-YOUR-FACE advertising.)
Now, there are some valid arguments. For instance, they are notorious for screwing up your billing and not cancelling accounts properly. On the other hand, this article is targeting the original AOL. In your face advertising? Nobody but geeks knew what the net was in the early 90s. In the 90s, you couldn't exactly download the AOL client (more evidence this guy is 16). But let's go back.
Awful software: What did you expect, it ran on Windows 3.1. It was probably the only useful thing a home user ever ran on Windows 3.1
Inaccessible dial-up numbers: I had about 4 numbers locally, and most problems were because I screwed with my modem baud trying to squeeze out top speed.
Marketing: Back then, you had to convince people that they had a reason to even buy a computer, let alone get online with it.
Spam: We're placing the blame on AOL for this now?
Expensive: That's certainly true. I remember a point when they charged over $6 an hour or there abouts. Let's just say that you used your AOL time wisely (downloading all the porn you could within an hour), hehe. Yes, it would be considered highway robbery these days. Then again, so many out there are willing to pay $2 for a tv show (free to watch on your very large TV) to play on a itsy bitsy iPod screen. I'd rather pay $6 an hour for my Internet connection.
PCWorld probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars from AOL to carry their CDs for them. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
I8-D
Some of the items on the list, although we love to hate them, are things that really did help the tech world make strides forward. For example, say what you want about AOL but, if it weren't for them, I still probably wouldn't be able to send email to my mom. Zip disks? Yes, they had click-of-death but, at the time, a portable 100MB for $10? That was unreal. PointCast? PointCast was the first time where you could have your very own, customized scrolling ticker on your screen... just like the ones on the CNN screen... but it only had the stuff *you* wanted. When it first came out, it was a marvel. All of these items changed the way that people thought about what they could do with computers when they first came out.
Contrast that with some items on the list that were complete disasters from the moment they were launched: IBM PC Jr., CueCat, Microsoft Bob... THOSE belong on the list. The list probably should have included some other items that had lofty ambitions but just never "took" (like OS/2). But, like I said, some of the ones on the list, I feel, aren't getting their due. We look at them now and see how worthless they are by today's standards (you can probably get any of these items on eBay for $5, now), but that ignores the impact they had when they were first released.
Perhaps the overhyping has forever biased me but the segway has to be the most absurd tech product.
2k for a bizarre scooter that was supposed to change my life forever? huh?
1. The IBM PC. It was slower than many CP/M available at the time that cost less. It uses a brain-dead "16" bit cpu called the 8088 that was used a night mare of an addressing system. The default operating system was this bad copy of CP/M from Microsoft. And it didn't even follow the standard for the gender of the printer port or the serial port! What made it a total nightmare was that it sold in HUGE numbers and created a standard that sucked and managed to kill off better machines.
2. The IBM AT. Just when you thought their couldn't be a CPU worse then the 8088 Intel creates the an addressing system that makes the 8088 look good. Then IBM creates new standard based in this nightmare did I mention that they created an even less standard format for the RS-232 comport? But wait there is more Microsoft creates a now OS that has a bad habit of crashing hard drives and prevent you from creating any hard drive partition bigger than 33 megabytes.
And the ever popular Disk-doubler! A great program from Microsoft that they included with MS-DOS 6. Not only did it contain code stolen from Stac but it also could lost vast amount of data on your drive!
There are so many others that should be on that list.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Sure, the MacOS pre-OS X was pretty unstable, but it was almost always more stable than whatever the current shipping version of Windows was.
More to the point, in the absence of Windows, we might well have a whole bunch of computer makers still duking it out. It seems people have forgotten what an explosion of PC (in the general sense, I mean) makers there was in the 80's -- more diversity than we've ever seen since. Apple is just the only one that survived the "IBM compatible" onslaught. Imaging what the computing world would be like if DEC, Commodore, Atari, Wang, Tandy, and who knows how many others were still making their own machines. There would be more competition, more pressure for open standards, and better computers at better prices for everyone.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Compuserv with those incomprehensible usernames (12345.987@compuserv.com) was just too weird for most.
AOL invented nothing.
Neverwinter Nights in graphical format instead of text.
Anyone else notice that at one time or another PC Weak ran articles that gave good reviews to almost all of the things in the top 25???