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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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Good list... where's X10?
And, if you include Windows ME, where's Windows 3.1? Actually, it might not be a bad idea to have an honorable mention "collection" entry and include all of the horrible Windows versions.... (95, CE, ME, NT)
Windows ME
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
I had a zip drive and at the time it filled a large gap between the floppy and CD rewriteable (which was very costly).
It was good in my opinion, it just never developed fast enough in terms of capacity.
But the "chiclet" keyboard should've been listed separately. When I saw the new MacBook laptops having a similiar design, I freaked out until I tried it out at the Apple store. You can count on Steve Jobs to re-invent an old technology dog.
You're just saying that because I signed up with AOL under you, and you got 10 free hours.
I am surprised that Packard Bell didn't make the list. They made some pretty crappy computers in the late 80s.
-Matt
The Apple laptop that boasted about its internal wirless card but was made of titanium and so there was no signal?
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...
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Soon MS bashing will be 3rd or 4th post on every thread...then where will Slashdot be?
I always look for the "Printer Friendly" link when I run into an article like that. It generally renders the whole article as one continuous chunk, but it doesn't print it. That's a tip kids. Write it down.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
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 was tired of the old amber screen too, but CGA was just not what I thought of when I thought of a "color monitor"
I mean look at this crap.
I grew up playing King's Quest and think he was just sunburned, or embarrased all the time.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Ahh, the Apple puck mouse. What a pity it didn't make the top 25. I used one for a day. Instant RSI that thing will give you. Kudos to the person who designed that; you have to be really good to design a mouse that is SO bad.
-- Cheers!
The reason? It has trained at least one, and probably two, generations of computer users to expect the computer to be fragile. It has made those people afraid to simply experiment with the computer because they might do something to "break" it.
This is a big reason there are so many people who don't want to learn how the computer works. By training at least one generation of people that computers are fragile, Microsoft has in a single stroke managed to limit people's willingness to learn about the computer they use every day, and thus limited their effectiveness with it.
That Microsoft also tends to (or has tended to) write their software in such a way as to hide the details of errors that occur only exacerbates the problem. And the constant stream of critical security flaws only serves to hammer in the final nail in the coffin.
Hence, I have to nominate Windows as the worst tech product of all time.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Seriously, AOL shouldn't be #1... They just got in really good with the 90% of non-tech savy Internet users from the beginning, and gave them a nice little interface to the Internet, making it easier for them to move around.
Doesn't matter if it costs 2x as much as any other ISP, or that the interface is so kludgy that you need to upgrade your video card, or that they censor the Internet to conform to it's mass majority of users' tastes, or that the "You've got mail" sound that hasn't changed...(ever?) makes most people want to wretch all over their keyboards, or that their spyware/virus "protection" is a miserable failure and should be uninstalled, or that their "Here's your 20th CD-ROM this month" ad campaign is probably the worst landfill culprit since the pet rock, or.....
Yeah, I guess they deserve it. =p
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I would say that the (seemingly) years of hype and vapor leading up to the release of such a so-so product is what clinched it's spot.
Kind of like your first sexual experience...oh, sorry, this is slashdot...well, let me just say - don't set your expectations too high.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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
As for DRM, well that is still around and doing a brisk trade. Expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
I think you and the article author mean two different things. He means tech that was a failure. Not tech that is hated.
Big difference.
Yes on a list of most hated tech DRM and popups would be serious contenders but that is a list for another time. Granted, IE would again be high on the list. Bill Gates must be so proud.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I use AOL. It's great! I also own a Packard Bell PC computer running Windows ME with 64MB RAM. I'm l337 as well and oh...I work for Radio Shack.
The advance of cd burners (and later usb drives) coupled with the click of death and the high cost of zip disks and their small capacity just made them obsolete.
It wasn't bad tech. Just had a very limited lifespan.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
And if it's a site from which you read content more than a couple of times, there's a better solution than manually clicking on the printer version each time: use the uri transmogrifier of your choice (I love Pith Helmet.) to automatically turn urls into their printer-version form.
The original Zip drives were really pretty nice. The SCSI and IDE 100 meg drives were relatively fast too (for the time). People remember those drives as being painfully slow because many people had the external versions that connected via the *parallel port* (shudder). They managed to get a lot of Zip drives pre-installed in to machines but then they came out with a Zip 250 meg drive and several other variations. Of course the newer media didn't work on the older drives, but the worst part was the old 100 meg disks worked slow as heck in the newer drives because it had to do something special to write to them properly. What I think really killed them eventually was that the Zip disks were very expensive and the prices never went down!
They really could have replaced the 1.44 floppy disk if they had tried hard enough. I still have my old blue iomega 100 SCSI zip drive chugging away but I don't use it as much any more now that USB flash drives are almost everywhere and can finally run on everything short of DOS.
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?
Uh, you complain about the article, but apparently failed to read it. The article is not about bad technology (who could deny that pop-up ads and DRM are terrible), but about bad technology products, i.e. discrete items and/or services produced and marketed by individual companies. The article discusses specific products, not general trends in broad sectors of industry.
+1 Flamebait... I know.
They dare? They DARE?!? They dare to disparage the Timex Datalink?!?!?
Heathens!
I wore the crap out of my Datalink until it finally died in a pool in Arkansas of H2O exposure. Show me another watch that could sync up phone lists, memos and TIME to a PC and under linux no less (yes sir!). Not too bulky and had all the needed features. I'm talking the blinkly light version here, not the USB.
Consider today's watchscape, the best that's out there are the "atomic" (*cough* radio sync) watches and for the most part none of them work quite as well or have the anywhere near the feature set of the Good Old Ironman Datalink.
The best part was holding your breath long enough for the watch to finish the transfer without crapping out. Good times, good times.
Anything is possible given time and money.
1 America Online (1989-2006)
2 RealNetworks RealPlayer (1999)
3 Syncronys SoftRAM (1995)
4 Microsoft Windows Millennium (2000)
5 Sony BMG Music CDs (2005)
6 Disney The Lion King CD-ROM (1994)
7 Microsoft Bob (1995)
8 Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)
9 Pressplay and Musicnet (2002)
10 dBASE IV (1988)
11 Priceline Groceries and Gas (2000)
12 PointCast (1996)
13 IBM PCjr. (1984)
14 Gateway 2000 10th Anniversary PC (1995)
15 Iomega Zip Drive (1998)
16 Comet Cursor (1997)
17 Apple Macintosh Portable (1989)
18 IBM Deskstar 75GXP (2000)
19 OQO Model 1 (2004)
20 CueCat (2000)
21 Eyetop Wearable DVD Player (2004)
22 Apple Pippin @World (1996)
23 Free PCs (1999)
24 DigiScents iSmell (2001)
25 Sharp RD3D Notebook (2004)
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
The shoe fitting fluoroscope was a common fixture in shoe stores during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. A typical unit, like the Adrian machine shown here, consisted of a vertical wooden cabinet with an opening near the bottom into which the feet were placed. When you looked through one of the three viewing ports on the top of the cabinet (e.g., one for the child being fitted, one for the child's parent, and the third for the shoe salesman or saleswoman), you would see a fluorescent image of the bones of the feet and the outline of the shoes.
The machines generally employed a 50 kv x-ray tube operating at 3 to 8 milliamps. When you put your feet in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, you were effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube. The only "shielding" between your feet and the tube was a one mm thick aluminum filter. Some units allowed the operator to select one of three different intensities: the highest intensity for men, the middle one for women and the lowest for children.
Naturally children loved this gadget and kids were getting months of radiation exposure every chance they could get! I know the list is all modern technology but this product is so magically horrid it should get honorary mention...
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.
Circuit City DiVX
How could they forget???
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I was online with pictures, multiuser chat, news, message boards, and email in 1981, on both CompuServe and GEnie. AOL invented nothing. You have no idea what you are talking about.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Ooooh. What did I do to deserve that?
Well, the irony is delicious.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I mean, they are the 'Happy Shopper' company of the PC World (pun intended).
Clippy! I'd love to take a blow torch to that S.O.B
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Strangely, I haven't trusted MS since.
They should have blasted IE4 -- the first IE that really muckled itself into the OS. Install IE-4 on the user's machine, and run the risk of trashing their whole OS. I saw it happen in tech support, and it led to the whole mishmash of exploits that allowed IE to get into Windows and mess up your box. The integration is better now, but the idea remains suspect.
The whole list looks whacked. AOL may not be something I would ever use, but "worst tech product???". It's an intro to the web for newbies. That doesn't make it "bad tech".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I actually ran Pointcast on a spare laptop in the living room back in the day. I actually thought it was pretty useful.
Once in the middle of the night I got up and went out to the kitchen for a snack. Our cat was on the back of the couch staring at the Pointcast screensaver. She was transfixed. Everytime it would change, she would twitch a little. She loved to watch it while we were sleeping. I guess she liked the contrasting colors and movement.
I wrote a note to the Pointcast folks about this. They were quite amused. They sent me a T-shirt. I thought that was nice of them.
I'm not real good with ages, but I don't think the author of TFA is 16...18 maybe.
The Diamond Rio 300 could make the "best" list for being one of the first MP3 players on the market, but as a product it completely sucked.
... Real Soon Now. It took more than 6 months from the date I purchased the player. (Which, given the poor quality of its manufacturing was well beyond its life expectancy.)
First, the battery compartment. It was so shoddily constructed that only Duracell batteries would work. Have you ever heard of anything so absurd? But it was true. The manual even mentioned it. (Since they obviously knew about this quite serious defect, did it occur to them to fix it?) I had to return to the store because it would not work with the Energizer batteries I had on hand. You would think that AA batteries are pretty much standardized, but apparently there are slight differences among manufacturers and Diamond managed to screw it up.
Then, the false advertising. They hyped the hell out of the fact that you could use this thing to play files from Audible.com. The packaging had an Audible.com logo on it. It came with Audible.com software. But the player *did not* support Audible.com's file format! When I checked with tech support they promised support would be available with a firmware upgrade to be released, urm,
Fortunately, the Rio 300 I purchased broke 2 days after I bought it and I was able to return it to Fry's for a refund. Oh, and this is how it broke: it got hot. Real hot. Like it was going to catch on fire. Ever seen the Star Trek episode where a phaser overheats, starts to glow, and Capt. Kirk has to throw it down a garbage chute before it explodes? That's what this was like.
All that said, Rio changed owners and management several times. By the time later versions of the Rio came out, it was made by effectively a different company. The Rio Cali I bought a few years ago was a decent player. But they continued their practice of hyping their relationship with Audible.com even though their players didn't support the file format until a firmware upgrade that came months or even years after the release of the player. To this date I've never listened to an Audible.com file on a Rio--the firmware releases always happen after I've bought a newer player.
I ran one app more useful than any other on 3.1 -- WordPerfect 5.1.
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???
Holy crap! I just tried it -- and it works! You rock!
There's a Firefox plugin that takes care of that.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Actually, the Zip drives were fantastic in the beginning. I ordered one the same day I got the first MacWarehouse catalog pimping them, in spring of 1994 or 1995, IIRC. It was still going strong when I decommissioned my last SCSI-equipped Mac, in early 2003.
Zip drives only got shitty once they got really popular and Iomega started selling them by the boatload. They cut corners to pump them out faster and cheaper, and product quality suffered as a result. I didn't encounter my first Click of Death-afflicted drive until probably 1997 or 1998, and I saw a lot of Zip drives because I worked in the creative industry in the mid and late 90s-- Zips supplanted 44/88MB SyQuest drives there with amazing speed and became a defacto standard for shuttling files back and forth from service bureaus.
~Philly
I hereby propose a sister law to Godwin's Law which shall heretoforth be referred to as Quinn's Law stating that as a slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of a Microsoft bashing approaches one.
I had a very brief employement with AOL last fall doing their tech support call center.
ITs not in the past when things they did were rough. Today they are worse as they are freaking out how to keep their 7 million customers that are left and leaving by the day.
Its not billing problems. Its intentional fraud that we are supposed to do to prevent you from leaving and charging everything for. If I recall the most cancellations an hour you were allowed to do was 4 an hour. (I could be off? ).
Bad was not even the worst. They treat their employees and their customers as capital and objects to squeeze for maximum profit rather than people. Management brain dead to anything else with a strict bean counter mentality. THey dont need to know what they are doing. Just fire fire fire and if someone meets insane handle time then keep them.
The culture inside is just hostile as day 1 when you are threatened to be outsourced to India during your orientation if you dont perform and how we are all overpaid at 9/hr. so do your job or else bla bla bla.
Then on the floor on the first day we are reminded how quickly each of one us are about to be fired and perform or ELSE! People get fired within the first few days and are made light about it on purpose to set examples to meet handle time requirements.
Maybe I am just bitter but AOL is well deserved to be labelled low and I wonder how legal it is do things like prevent cancellations and intentionally be overly aggressive with marketing lies? For example they have subsidary names for certain call centers and they keep changing their name every year because they keep getting sued by former workers and states. Makes you wonder?
http://saveie6.com/