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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've got some barcodes that need scanning!
Honourable mention: Ubuntu
Shaun Nichols: We're no doubt going to catch some flack for this one, but deep down even the hard-core evangelists will agree that Ubuntu has thus far been something of a disappointment. While Linux has definitely caught on in the enterprise server and database market, the open-source OS has never really been able to move into the greater market.
I don't know if I'm just easily offended or a fanboy, but I stopped reading the article at that point.
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.
Is he just complaining that Dell doesn't offer the same Ubuntu packages that it offers in the United States?
This is the first I have heard of the Tukwilla processor. With Intel not releasing a new processor in the Itanium line for such a long time, I thought they had abandoned it.
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?
Yes, first post technology never really panned out. It is sometimes funny as a second post though, but the joke really is on the AC there.
Not following them on that one, and they have the chronology completely wrong. Jobs, in particular, knew the Lisa was DOA and knew that the Mac was the way of the future for the company, and pulled people off it all the time to work on the Mac. They are right, in that the Lisa was a very nice machine (I wanted to get my father one to replace his typewriter a few years ago - he needed and wanted no more - instead he wound up with a $299 Officemax Dell shitbox that still barely functions from day to day) but I think it certainly doesn't deserve a Top 10 list. It wasn't a big enough deal to matter. I would have put the Newton on there before the Lisa.
Brett
"Outside of a few models of high-end video cameras, FireWire isn't seen much these days."
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.
Neat way to sum it up, but not accurate. Macintosh was nearly finished while Apple was still pushing the Lisa, and Jef Raskin's original concept for the Mac pre-dated the Lisa.
Of course, once Jobs got his mitts on it, he completely changed it from Raskin's vision, eventually provoking Raskin to quit Apple.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
In the end Apple ended up dumping nearly 3,000 Lisa's in landfill
Give me a good reason for doing this instead of lowering the price or even donating them
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
There are much greater fails. Fails of such epic magnitude their ripples are easily confused with the tides on the ocean of technology:
10. Floptical storage. Great stuff if you want to lose data.
9. DIVX DVDs. The ones that you could only buy at Circuit City.
8. VRML. Virtual reality is still around. But VRML was an abortion.
7. CueCat. The epic fail that made Slashdot famous.
6.iOpener. What happens when you try to sell a blade free razor using the razor blade model.
5. The Apple Pippen. You've never seen it, it's that bad.
4. Windows ME. Awful, bad, hideous don't describe this one.
3. Chandler. Mitch Kapor's been a part of lots of great things, but Chandler is the PIM we'd all like to forget.
2. MS Bob. Any top 10 tech failure list without it is not credible.
1. Windows Vista. One would think ME would have taught Redmond a lesson.
-- $G
Presumably by nanotechnology you mean molecular manufacturing.. and that should hardly be on that list because it hasn't happened yet. The list is about shit that happened but fizzed. If an assembler was created tomorrow (and it could happen if Merkle pulls his finger out) and the entire fucking materials world didn't change in under 12 months, I'd be entirely surprised and put it at #1 on this list.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Artificial intelligence. We have expert systems, neural networks, etc... but an "human like" artificial intelligence? The singularity that have more odds to happen near us in the future is a black hole.
The close second, if we include transportation are (antigrav) flying cars, of course.
Agreed, it can drive you nuts when there's a regression , but for the most part, Ubuntu has been great. It's important to understand that there is a long term support version, and then all the other releases. If you want stability & reliability, stay with long term support. If you don't mind getting cut on the bleeding edge, then stay with the current version.
-- $G
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.
Of course, these ninnies had no idea what they were talking about, and they didn't know enough about programming to tell the difference between a documented API and the semantics of that level of communication between pieces of software.
Instead of the promised wonderland, we were lured into a dark alley where Microsoft beat us with a sock full of kruegerrands and then proceeded to do all manner of horrible, system destabilizing things to us.
Oh, the binary horror...
What is wrong is expecting businesses to pay for something they don't need.
That line can be used in many places at many times for many sides of an argument. It's my favorite argument for staying with Windows XP and Office 2003.
Less of a top-ten, and more of a ten-random. What is the domain of this list? It seems like if you can go from Zune to Bluetooth to Biometrics, you should at least touch on something like the Segway HT: the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "tech flop".
Well yeah, the Lisa might have been a failed PRODUCT, but it wasn't a failed technology. Whether the Mac is a parallel product or an evolved product, the point is that the idea of user friendly computer with a WYSIWYG, mouse based GUI was not a failure. This was an early unsuccessful attempt, but in the long run the problems and costs were sorted out. You are working on a machine right now, no matter what the brand of OS, that took those basic ideas and made something successful out of them. And the Newton... same thing. It's Version One of a new tech. The Newton failed, but the Palm arose out of it, and from there a whole world of handhelds and now smartphones.
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?
They did not mention DRM? What the hell?
Also this quote about Ubuntu:
Maybe it was just the overenthusiastic marketing or the fanboys who swarmed to the system but Ubuntu really was supposed to change everything, where as the operating system landscape looks very much the same these days.
It did lower the price of XP for netbooks down to a few dollars though... In a way, desktop Linux made netbooks possible - otherwise Microsoft wouldn't lower the price of their system enough for this class of machines to become viable.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Talk about the most ridiculously overhyped invention in recent memory...for a damn scooter.
Some of the products, like FireWire, are in widespread use, although maybe not for consumers. I used to work in broadcast; we had a ton of FireWire equipment where I worked.
Itanium, similarly, has a place in certain markets. If you have an HPUX or VMS shop (like lots of government agencies), you're buying Itaniums. I know that Navy and Coast Guard have quite a few Itanium systems in production.
As for Vista, after three years of use, I am very impressed. The only major issue I've had was with the audio/network performance present in the RTM build. Only bluescreen I've had during that time was due to a stick of RAM that'd gone bad. I can't say the same about 95, 98, NT4, 2K, or XP. And it's poor short-term memory on most people's part; XP was a steaming pile when it was released. The shop where I was working didn't start adopting XP over 2k until SP2 came out. People just have forgotten how bad it was, because after several years, it became a stable product. Vista was far better at release.
Similarly, I've been very impressed with 2008 Server. Am in the process of implementing it throughout an enterprise, and haven't encountered any major difficulties. /UAC is annoying, though
PointCast anyone?
My friend, Duke, just read the article, and man is he pissed.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm sick of top ten lists. Why do I care that some group at a magazine chose an arbitrary number of things in some category at their discretion with no real measurable criteria for entering the list? Get me if I'm wrong, but the whole point of a top ten list is to attract visitors to argue about what the magazine chose, and suggest things of their own that didn't make the list. It's a pseudo-event in pure form: a news story with no real news in it.
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?
Then it could have included Wolfram Alpha.
Also it's wrong anyway.. Firsly, if you decentralise too much the communication issues between developers mean that you get fragmentation, and most of the work ends up never being used because nobody ever hears of it. Secondly you can't even really do it - there will always be one definitive release, with a set of core developers. For most projects that's basically as far as it ever goes - despite intentions few people have the time to devote to a project, so most (I expect nearly all) opensource porjects whilst being theoretically decentralised are really only one tree with 3 or 4 people maximum committing to it. The linux kernel is the exception to this somewhat, but it can't be used as a general model.
In the corporate world of course decentralisation makes no sense (tracking,auditing and access control is *important* to a company and you can't have people going off and doing their own thing). So in no way is decentralisation 'inherently superior' - it depends on your circumstances.
Now, that's a more accurate title.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Utter bullshit.
What most distros do is just collect together applications and make it as seamless as they can to install them. Development is spread over a pile of different applications that ultimately end up in every distribution if they are good enough. I think the confusion above comes from thinking that because some companies that put out distributions pay people to work on different applications that the other companies can't use it - so a complete misunderstanding of this open source thing. The reality can be shown with an example. The distribution "Yellow Dog Linux" (which the above poster and most other readers have probably never heard of) put together a package update system called the "yellowdog update manager" which is run by the command "yum". Other more mainstream distributions picked this up.
A distribution "doing your own thing" is really limited to choice of a packaging method, testing how all the applications it chooses run together and artwork. The exceptions are special cases for different architectures, optimisation to run on slow systems or modification to run from different media (eg. live CD or usb stick). There are also many others that use somebody else's distro as a base as just a delivery mechanism for a specific set of applications (eg. MailCleaner).
Ultimatly development is on the application level or kernel level which benefits any distribution that wants those things. That is very different to either the complete misunderstanding or deliberate misdirection in the post above.
Since the article is almost completely pointless (it could've been written at any point in the last decade, almost), here's my list.
1) The Linux kernel. Yes, I use linux almost exclusively these days, but what the fuck happened to the quality since 2.6 came out? ext3 performance issues, CFQ and general i/o issues (I could do things on my 550MHz athlon w/ 256M - with respect to concurrency of tasks - that made my 1.2GHz, 512M system grind to a halt); VM priority; potential libata problems with PATA disks; breaking and shipping a new version with broken drivers (acpi) or architectures (PCMCIA/bluetooth) when it worked previously, just because the architecture was being re-written to make it 'work better'. "Leave it to the distro packagers to fix".
2) Ubuntu. It has a lot of promise, but once you scratch the candy coating, you can see the rust underneath due to hasty product development. Part of this is due to #1, but the rest is due to simple negligence. There is absolutely no reason for basic SMB/CIFS filesharing to be fundamentally broken in a distro indefinitely; and there is no sane reason why a bug that's been fixed upstream should not be in a new distro release months after the bug has been fixed.
3) Xorg. I remember when it forked from XFree86 and thought "good, maybe they can improve it". It's being improved, but damn is it taking a while. I imagine an alternative could've been written in the time they've taken to get this far, with the ability to run Xnest (and still have all the features of today). Why is X taking almost a gig of memory?
4) "netbooks". I know they've only been out for a couple years now in any concrete form, and that they're "wildly" popular, but they're selling something which doesn't take advantage of what was learned 7-9 years ago when "HPC" computers were around. There were certain features which were almost a sure-thing sell: long battery life, decent display readability, touchscreen, and a usable keyboard. Current netbooks are awkward and lacking in all of these points.
5) ARM processors/SBC/SoC as offered to the 'consumer'. This directly, somewhat, relates to #4. In the last 3-5 years, their prices have gone up - but with no substantial improvement in their specs. Yes, you can get a SoC with a 400MHz ARM CPU and 512M and host USB and SATA, but it'll cost you over $400 to do so. And really, for the cost of a 200MHz non-Intel SoC, running at ~130-250MHz with 32-64Mb, it'll still cost more than an entire Atom system (WindPC).
6) Intel Atom. 40W power use with the Intel chipset, and (until just now, basically) you were limited to the Intel chipset. That's horribly self-defeating, making them only desirable on price.
7) "Smartphones". If they're so damn smart, why can't I use them to their full potential? Most of them have some awesome hardware, yet we're restricted to the horrid software stacks on them (Apple included). Why no host mini-USB? I can't wait for MS to release a WinMo phone, because at least then things would (hopefully) get stirred up a bit.
8) Anti-spam filtering. It's still a huge up-hill battle to try and deal with it, and there isn't a solution in sight.
9) SSD storage, and rotation-free storage in general. It is not living up to expectations or promises, never mind the crystal storage methods mentioned almost a decade ago that got some really nice density.
10) Duke Nukem Forever. Let's face it: everyone wanted to at least see if it'd be as fun as Duke3D.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...it would have included the Internet, since nothing good ever came out of it. Period.
Bluetooth has always worked great for me. For the last 7 or 8 years I've used it to sync contact/calendar data between my Mac and whatever mobile phone I've had (I'm still an iPhone holdout). Plus I use it for file transfers between the computer and phone, and to tether to the phone to use its WWAN connection.
And I'm a huge fan of Firewire and hate that it lost out to USB. Firewire is a lot more versatile and was designed that way from the start (comes in damned handy as a network port between two Macs sometimes, because you can run TCP/IP over it). USB was never supposed to be much more than a new connection for keyboards and mice, and now they're shoehorning other capabilities into it that it was never designed for-- which IMHO never leads to good things. This line from the article particularly annoyed me: "I know of at least three people who purchased shiny new portable video recorders and were stuffed when they realised they'd have to upgrade their systems to support FireWire." Oh, noes! They have to spend a few bucks on a PCI card! The horror!!!! Seriously? Is this a real gripe? I mean, the cheapest Firewire card at NewEgg costs $6. A really good one will only set you back $40 or so.
~Philly
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?
Too soon?
I agree - the technology itself was fairly sound, especially in the later versions
The main issue were definitely market implementation:
1) Software stack - why were the basic stacks so buggy and counter-intuative. Most windows users had to pirate a third party stack to do anything usefull.
2) Price - I rarely saw anything bluetooth (even generic brands) for under A$100 (US$70) which is rip off for a wireless keyboard or mouse.
I daresay both of these were caused due to restrictive and expensive licensing schemes. Had it been cheaper alot of poeple could have made more money through increased sales.
on MIPS, beware China!
Combining Linux with Wine, ReactOS and qemu is the basis of a Wintel killer.
The platform? LUK on Loongson.
Perhaps no match for Nehalem based desktops but a challenger for the Netbook market. A platform that runs Windows applications via seamless x86-->MIPS translation. Intel and MS may struggle to match the price point, which is good for consumers because Intel with be forced to considerably beef up the performance of Atom, to compete on value. (Not to mention multi-core ARM Cortex chips.)
Of a quote from "Mostly Harmless" the final book in the Hitchhiker's series:
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
This is the case with the "just works" mentality in MacOS. When things are as expected, yes everything and just work with no effort and it's cool. However when something goes haywire, the tools needed to find and fix it are absent since it "just works" and thus doesn't need any.
As a historical example, take Appletalk. Appletalk was designed with the misguided idea that you could have a protocol that was both zero configuration and high scalability. Other protocols were either one or the other. You had things like NetBEUI, which was Windows' small workgroup protocol that basically consisted of machines in the same broadcast domain shouting at each other. Easy to use, but didn't scale past a single segment and the broadcast traffic could get intense. You also had things like TCP/IP. It scales to, well, the whole world as we are well aware today. However, there's some configuration needed, it isn't all automatic.
Basically you could configure routers to route it, but on the computer level there wasn't any config. You plugged in a bunch of Macs and they just went to town. This was accomplished in part through the idea of a seed router. One computer on a given Appletalk segment was promoted to seed router and then took care of handling various functions needed for computers to communicate. The users didn't have to set it up, and in fact were not aware of it. None of the computers noted who their seed was.
This was all well and good, until something went wrong, and you got two seed routers on a network. Then everything went to shit, and nothing would tell you why. None of the computers would tell you who they thought their seed was, the seeds themselves wouldn't tell you they were seeds, and they wouldn't back off and fix the problem. More or less you had to turn off every single computer, and then power them back on to fix the problem.
Thus today everyone, even Apple, uses TCP/IP. Maybe it doesn't "just work", maybe you need to configure it, but at least when something goes wrong you CAN configure it and fix the problem.
Fire up itunes, grab your collection of 200 CDs, now start building your library. If you have ever done this then you would have experienced the "Why the fuck won't this CD import?" problem.. you will also experience the "Why doesn't it name the tracks for this CD?" problem and at least three other problems that I've blocked out of my memory.
So, for that one, I think you're just being a fanboi. As for the wifi, yeah, maybe you haven't experienced the exact same thing as me. So what? The point of the discussion was that IF you have a problem with wifi (or anything else on a Mac) there's just no way to figure out what the fuck is going on. The "just works" mentality gets in the way when shit doesn't "just work". How do I diagnose this issue? You don't, you're a Mac user.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Not products, technologies.
I love it.
It makes me suspect that they made Ubuntu an "Honorable Mention" just to give it a little more publicity!
The worst bit was when they said
Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu and have it running on a home system. But unless a major manufacturer starts preinstalling it it's going to be confined to the Linux enthusiast and the hobbyist market.
Is Dell not a major manufacturer? This seems like pure flamebait, or perhaps just extremely ignorant journalism.
which is totally what she said
Better marketing.
Those Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld ads which cost millions and which everybody thought were monumental failures were part of the vital ground-work for the current wave of marketing success which is Windows 7.
--The two hidden messages in those ads were these. . .
1. "Vista was a failure because Bill went walkabout and left the ship in the care of others who are not awkward geniuses."
2. "See? Bill is an awkward genius who makes us cringe when he's seen on public TV, but that's okay. Investors don't want him to be cool like Seinfeld. Investors want him to be an awkward genius who will make them tons of money when he returns home and kicks that fat 'developers, developers, developers' retard off the MS throne."
There's a reason why public relations firms you've never heard of make and spend billions of dollars every year. I wouldn't be one little bit surprised if that 'developers' video wasn't quite as naturally "viral" as people thought it was. Essentially, if you can think of a clever way to manipulate public perception through the media, then it has probably happened faster, better and smarter than the thirty seconds you took to envision it. Professional PR guys are scary people paid to be scary people 24/7.
And of course, Windows 7 boots and runs fast on my crappy old laptop where Vista crunched it to a halt. PR isn't the only force at work.
-FL
I think I would be more interested in a list of technologies that were expected to take off, and really did.
Granted, I'm sure there would be a few things like "cure for polio", "Increased food production", "faster computers", but I'm referring to things a little less obvious. What is the track record on technology predictions?
When they tried to make VR in the early 90's (talking from my experience of the video games like pterodactyl nightmare or whatever it was called and a few others i tried), they were trying this tech in 3d obviously on two screens, when 3d was just barely happening on one screen. The idea was way ahead of it's time.
Not only were these games super low resolution, it felt like 10 fps. It was so choppy and low res it ruined any sense of immersion.
Surely we can do two high res screen at a smooth 60 fps for each screen now. I would love to try VR again with today's tech. Surely, someone in the industry must realize it's not that it was a bad idea but that the tech wasn't ready yet?!
I am sure you know that all modern consumer CPUs consist of a RISC processor core with an x86 instruction set translator that provides a CISC x86 interface to the software. There are no more pure CISC consumer CPUs. In that way, RISC was the ultimate success story in terms of technology.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/