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PC World's 20 Most Innovative Products of 2006
Craig Sender writes "PC World has put together a list of their choices for the 20 Most Innovative Products of 2006. The List includes Office 2007, Nintendo Wii, Sony Reader, Sony PlayStation 3, the BlackBerry Pearl, and some other interesting choices."
PC World brings you the top 20 most frequent advertisers' current most hyped object!
But wait! There wasn't an iPod! But iPods are the most innovative things evar!
Number 0 must be the iPod Video, now with rubber ducky control built in!
Can someone explain to me exactly what is innovative about this? I do not understand how a hardware upgrade is innovative. Can I get on this list since I put a new video card in my machine this year?
Why bother.
Anything in alpha testing can't really be called a product, much less the most innovative product (or in the top ten) of the year.
Even if PC World is too clueless to realise it, there is a difference between "innovative" and "better than the same thing was last year, due to incremental advances". Core 2 Duo: Good? Hell yeah. Innovative? Not exactly.
750GB HDD: A nice upgrade from the 500GB ones? Sure. An innovation? Well, the number is bigger than it was last year.
That logitech control puck thing: Cute? Sure. Innovative? Well, it has a few more buttons than the Griffin PowerMate that has been around for years.
And so on and so forth. There are almost no actual innovations. Mostly just feature bumps and price/performance increases. Now, that is what makes the world go round, most of the time; but don't call it "innovation".
It could be.
But then
Now, compare that to this system.
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/compaq/
Yes, the "luggable" computer. But, all you have to do to make it "innovative" is to add more speakers (speakers with a portable computer, how
And reviews like that are why PC World is disparaged.
A bad upgrade to a ubiquitous software package, a chip, 2 game systems, 2 hard drives, 2 phones... Now I remember why I don't read PC World.
...do none of those products really strike me as "innovative"? Maybe I'm just missing the old days when innovation meant a complete change from the norm. However, the Wii is pretty neat. :)
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Office 2007's innovation is the ribbon interface, which does away from the traditional toolbar/menu interface. Although I personally don't like the interface (the ribbons are uncustomizable, and some options that used to require only one click on a toolbar now require two or three clicks), the interface does accomplish the task of placing related options together in an easily accessible way to novices of Office, as well as accessing less-commonly used features.
Like the interface or not, the ribbon interface is an innovative way of grouping tasks together, especially in a program such as Microsoft Office that supports hundreds of features. If the ribbon interface contained some concessions for experienced computer users (shortcuts and ribbon customization, for example), then the ribbon interface may be a serious contender to the traditional menu/toolbar paradigm on the Windows platform. This is probably the single most innovative thing I've seen coming from Microsoft yet, even if I personally don't like it ;)
Not as many as I would expect by now.
My initial thought was also "MS OFFICE?!? INNOVATIVE?!?" (see username...).
Personally, I would define "innovative" in this context as "things customers probably wouldn't have thought of, but once they saw it, they liked," and limit it to those products/changes that were introduced in 2006.
When I actually RTFA, MSO 2k7 is actually fairly innovative, in comparison to most of the rest on the list.
Skimming over the list, the only other "innovative" entry is the Wii. Everything else is either of the "$PRODUCT+CLOCK RADIO" variety, or is just an old product, but bigger, stronger, faster, and/or slightly less distasteful (i.e. the e-book reader), essentially failing the definition. Google Sketchup is a tossup, as someone noted it hasn't changed in 2006, it just became known.
The ribbon feature and the live preview of MSO seem minimally "innovative" (I haven't used them), and if I had to rate these 20 items on their innovativeness, I would probably put the Wii as #1, MSO2K7 as #2, and everything else as tied for #20 (sic).
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Innovative?
...
Core 2 Duo: How is this anything but an incremental improvement over the Core Duo, which is in turn just improvements on techniques that have been out there for years? The first dual-core chip could have been innovative. The 39th or whatever this is isn't.
MS Office 2007: I see. So, Office 6, Office 97, Office XP, Office 2003, none of those were innovative. But this one, the 10th or so in a series, really is.
I just don't see any innovation here. A hard drive bigger than previous hard drives? Unheard of!
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
accepting a submission. maybe then, you can see that it's full of crap (i.e. it has much more advertisement than quality content).
This is gonna be the next big thing in all kinds of PC's. Flash drives. We'll be able to say bye-bye to the last of the important moving parts in a PC, that happens to be the most defect prone (because of moving parts), and also the most important (assuming your data is worth more than your hardware). I've been wanting these for years for reliability reasons at work. I can't wait until these things get shoved in a vanilla IDE (or is it SATA these days?) format. Hard drives with platters will be completely extinct in 5 years.
Why did you feel the need to add 'age' to the word 'link'?
Are you also one of those nutters who asks: "Got any coinage?"
WHAT IS WRONG WITH COINS! WHAT!
I felt a disturbance in the Slash, as if a bunch of geeks said, "What the F&*K, Microsoft Office?"
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Maybe it's neat. Is it one of the ten most innovative things done in an entire year?
I mean, every time there's a new Office, various MS-fans tell me that it's completely innovative and, unlike the previous one, doesn't suck. Why should I believe it this time?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Also, a news flash for you: Microsoft probably doesn't really care about ODF because the vast majority of its customers really don't give a damn what the other 1% of people who don't use Microsoft Office are scheming about. The only reason there's a whole push to this ODF format is because people are jealous of Microsoft Office's success and they want to push Microsoft to adopt this format so that they can gain a foothold into Microsoft's market. Why do you care whether or not other software vendors adopt ODF? If it's the wave of the future in documents as you claim, then I guess Microsoft will get left out and will become irrelevant and you'll be raking in the dough sitting at the open source helpdesk answering questions all day. Won't that better further your ideological agenda than having Microsoft become the dominant player and supporter of ODF?
And as far as "fighting against the community... for years" goes, where did you pull that statement from? I'll assume you're referring to the open source community since the business community has been very well served by Microsoft. If you subtract the drama from your statement, I think it would be more accurate to say that Microsoft has been ignoring the open source community for years. It's interesting how people react to a lack of attention. All this just seems to me that a few open source fanboys are throwing a tantrum because they didn't get invited to play in Microsoft's sanbox.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Imagine running a differential equation solver in real time for sound synthesis on one of those, say. Also, I think it is a tool to market Blu-ray, which is a rather interesting strategy.
This is exactly how Sony is shitting on their gamers. I don't want to solve differential equations. I don't want to sponsor a Blu-ray marketing campaign. I want to play games.
The cell processor is optimized for in-order processing. As far as games are concerned, this makes it ideal for pretty reflection and water effects, and practically crippled for gameplay elements like AI (you know, things that make games fun). If they were marketing it as a general purpose processor, it might be innovative. For the PS3, it's anything but.
"2. Intel Core 2 Duo Where is the innovation here? The Intel Core 2 Duo is merely two CPUs on a single chip. Duo is neither the first 64bit processor, nor does it share resources between cores, nor does it have an onboard RAM controller. for all the above look to AMD's CPUs." Well, the cheap C2D did rout AMD's 4X more expensibve heavyweight by a 3rd on just about every meaningful index. It did so at lower energy consumption. That's a lot of innovation (except to the AMD fans who just can't admit it)
Personally, I think the best innovation of 2006 was the YouOS. I started using this thing and I think it is probably the best way to share files between computers than anything else I know of besides VNC, terminal services etc... Its definately the most innovative thing I have seen all year.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad