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Top 10 Disappointing Technologies
Slatterz writes "Every once in a while, a product comes along that everyone from the executives to the analysts to even the crusty old reporters thinks will change the IT world. Sadly, they are often misguided. This article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world, from the ludicrously priced Apple Lisa, to voice recognition, to Intel's ill-fated Itanium chip, and virtual reality, this article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world." But wait! Don't give up too quickly on the Itanium, says the Register.
I honestly think if the VR headgear had been less expensive back in the 90's, VRML would have been a LOT more mainstream; I used some of the better goggles, with (IIRC) 480x480 elements, and they rocked. Bulky, uncomfortable, HEAVY, but cool & useful as hell.
Off Topic: Can anyone tell me what I can do to get back the "you have 3 replies to your last post" info at the top of my /. page? I thought I had just been particularly un-interesting until I checked my email notifications.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
I think that maybe this article cross that line far too much. It really should have focused on technologies of false promise (virtual reality, voice recognition, biometrics) instead of products. Some of the ideas were interesting when they limited themselves to the technology over the product. So what if the Zune fails? It's not the end of a technology.
And for fucks sake, can we please stop beating on 10+ year old technology? I'm sick of hearing retards go on and on about Apple Lisa, Microsoft Bob and a bunch of morons who have to make a 640k joke because they don't understand anything more than that. These are the same asshats who've probably never even touched a machine with less than 128 megs of ram.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
At one point, I could write Palm better than block letters. I remember one class where I forgot my Palm. I took notes on a piece of paper. When I got home, I noticed that I had written in Palm!
Anyway, Palm is now a could-have-been. Lost out to Smartphones I guess...
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
It's only now that Bluetooth is getting to be useful, and only then in very limited terms. Sure, it allows people to walk around babbling into headsets, but it could have been so much more.
Umm....the Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii make major use of Bluetooth technology. In fact those are the only devices I own that I use Bluetooth for.
I wouldn't say the Bluetooth being in the Dualshock 3 and Wiimote is a disappointment at all for both the creators and consumers of the technology.
Even if Bluetooth is underperforming based on its technological potential is it really one of the 10 most disappointing technologies currently?
Based on what appears to be their idea of how long widespread adoption of new technology should take before it is considered a failure, I'm surprised they haven't mentioned ripped on IPv6.
Maybe, maybe not.
However, I think that Ubuntu's a bit too young to call it a 'flop.' The project still has plenty of forward momentum behind it.
That it's the most popular Linux to date is certainly a feat, and major manufacturers have adopted it (albeit in limited circumstances). It may not have changed everything, though it did give things an enormous shove in the right direction. Currently, my eyes are on OpenOffice to clean up its act, or for a new competitor to emerge. The OS itself is no longer the limiting factor.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Back when a 16K x 1 bit RAM chip cost $40, and needed a herd of glue chips to keep it refreshed, bubble RAM was supposed to save us. It was fast, nonvolatile, and (for those early 80's days) dense. There were demo systems and ads and all kinds of hype. And then it just never sort of happened. Dynamic RAM kept getting cheaper and easier to use and the bubbles never came out at all.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I literally cannot buy a non-x86 desktop or laptop even if I paid $5000.
In the early 1970s, who could have guessed that the great-great-great-grandson of the 4004 would dominate 100% of the desktop market and a sizeable chunk of the rest of the computing market?
No list of tech disappointments could be complete with the Intel 432. Object oriented machine code and hardware-assisted garbage collection - what's not to love?
How about audio applications? If you want an audio interface for your laptop, you're almost always better off buying a Firewire model than a USB one; but also for many desktop applications Firewire can fit the bill over PCI/PCI-E. Plenty of the audio gear companies (M-Audio, RME, MOTU, Tascam) of course are still putting out new models using Firewire now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I like Firewire and especially as of a few years ago, it's (finally) ubiquitously included with decent PCs/System boards and pretty much every Mac.
However, I'm concerned about the future of it. When Apple did not include FW ports on their Macbooks several months ago, I wondered what this meant for Firewire. They also didn't include them on the Air.
Firewire is Apple's brainchild and they've been pushing it for a decade, but what was the motivation for this? I like to think maybe it was to entice people to purchase the Macbook Pro (which still has FW800 ports) -- No, actually I don't like to think that -- but at least it isn't the other potential reason: The end of Firewire.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Well... Stupid as the CueCat was, I finally found use for it years latter. For the price (free), it's a workable barcode scanner with just a little bit of coding.
http://linux.wareseeker.com/Internet/cueact-0.1.1.zip/318832
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=cuecat
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/03/06/1815618.aspx
Now if I could just find a use for all those damn AOL CDs in the attic.
Ask me about my sig!
The Lisa could also be used for Macintosh development.
During this time I had been designing without programming. I had a Macintosh but no development system for the Mac. In those days, the only way to develop serious Macintosh programs was on a Lisa computer. I had ordered a Lisa from Apple in May, 1984, but I did not receive the machine until August 1. So I spent the first three months of the project doing "paper design."
Without a development system, all I could do was read the manuals, study my references, and write proposals. As it happens, this can be a good thing...If it does not go on for too long. Too many games are hacked together at the keyboard rather than designed from the ground up. In this case, however, three months of paper design was too long because during the process I needed to test some ideas on the computer before I could proceed with other aspects of the design. It was with great relief that I took delivery of my Lisa and set to work on learning the system.
Chris Crawford BALANCE OF POWER International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game
For some reason, I wasted my time wallowing in the pages of schedenfreud. What I want to know is about the authors of these sorts of articles... Have they ever worked on a useful project? Sure, Lisa or the Zune didn't save the world, but what did the authors do for humanity?
No, MS Works does not count as a graphical Office suite because:
* it wasn't graphical until Windows arrived (unless you count colored DOS text as graphical) in the early 90s (nobody used it before then, and please don't revise history to suggest they did)
* nor was it a suite. It was an integrated app that did different tasks, like 1984's AppleWorks, at least through version 4.5 in 1995, a half decade AFTER Office arrived for the Mac.
In other words, MS Works was an AppleWorks clone.
MS Office recreated Lisa Office.
See a parallel there? Both were several years behind. AppleWorks outsold Works, and Apple forced MS to stop advertising that its Works was the top seller.
Had Apple continued to develop its own Lisa Office apps for the Mac rather than bending to third party developer pressure to leave the market open for them, Apple would never have needed to partner with Microsoft to ship its failed DOS apps for the Mac as graphical apps. Microsoft would not have been able to rip off the Mac, Bill Gates could not have used exclusivity Excel for Mac as a bargaining chip for obtaining a free license to Mac IP from Apple CEO John Sculley, and Microsoft would have fizzled out as a DOS vendor in the shadow of OS/2, without an application suite of Mac apps it could port to the PC to launch Windows.
But Apple bowed to its third party developers, Microsoft screwed the company over, and then killed off its own DOS third party developers (Lotus, Word Perfect, ect) and ended up as the company with a lock on both the PC operating system and the PC Office market.
I can only go by my own experience regarding Ubuntu. Every new version of Ubuntu Studio goes on a machine in my media production suite just for that purpose. And every version falls short of being able to do any meaningful media production work. As long as "jack" is my only choice for an audio platform, I'll never be able to replace my Windows and Mac machines. In fact, I can do more actual media production on an old BeOS machine than I can on a Linux machine using current hardware.
I will say this: The ReaMote technology that Cockos Reaper DAW software has allows me to use that Linux machine to offload some of my more resource-intensive processes, such as rendering, sample streaming or real-time effects processing. This makes the Ubuntu box extremely useful. This is why I do my best to support Cockos financially and in other ways. I really want to see more professional media production software companies develop for Linux. Someday soon, I hope to be able to have an all-Linux production facility, but for now, I'm disappointed that this area has been so badly neglected. And I know the money's there, because companies that develop DAW and video editing software for Windows and Mac OS are doing OK.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Microsoft products got where they are now on the back of tech folks copying them and using them at home. Those tech folks then took to helping friends and family by installing those same products for them. Nowadays, as MS becomes better and better at locking down their products with DRM and more and more tech folk start coming to grips with linux you will find that this will eventually trickle down to the non tech users.
Personally, I sick and tired of fixing malware infestations for my relatives. These days I just stick dual boot ubuntu on their PC's, show them how it works and tell them they can use the non infested ubuntu or their old broken Windows. It's their choice. So far most people are quite happy as long as they don't want to run games, which mostly they don't.
Most of them just want to browse the web, send emails and write simple documents and you don't need windows for that.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
I reckon it's more to go to gnome. Running vista, things look a little different, but installing software is pretty similar, the file system places where you might find things are not quite the same, but not that much different. A lot of system tools are pretty much the same. To be fair, it is a bigger leap to gnome or kde, or to OS X. Haven't tried w7, to be honest.
The biggest asset Microsoft has, worth 10s of billions of dollars, is peoples inertia about learning something new. On the other hand, Microsoft has tried to tie buying a new OS to buying a new machine, and that's precisely where they are vulnerable. I think people are less likely to upgrade every 3 to 4 years than they used to be because generally they are pretty happy with what they have.
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