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Vintage Collection of Tech Failures
StormDriver writes "For every good design there are a dozen failed concepts. Nothing illustrates that better than a great online vintage gadget collection, published yesterday by the Microsoft Research team. The collection is a brainchild of Bill Buxton, one of the principal Microsoft researchers, a guy who's been through 30 years of continuous tech design. Awarded with three honorary doctorates and several professional awards, Bill also likes to gather things – the vintage, geeky kind of things, to be precise. Over the years, he has gathered an impressive collection of prototypes, probably the best I have seen online."
It's not a definitive list of tech failures without the ::cue::cat ! That changed everything! We never browsed the web the same again!
:CRQ "audible URL" technology that was going to allow us to directly link tv advertisements for fine products to the web?
Hey, whatever happened to their
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The /. headline is wrong - the iPod is on the list.
To you and all the other commenters complaining that great things like iPods and Etch-a-Sketches are on the list: you clicked the wrong link. Actually RTFS and you'll see that the links go to two separate lists, one of failures and one of successes. It would have taken you less time to read the relevant 3 word description of each link than it took you to click the wrong link, come back here and post a complaint, you know.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
He's mostly using "failed" in the conventional marketdroid sense - they didn't fly off the shelves making the corporation manufacturing them and those investing in them buckets of cash.
That's true of many of the items in the collection.
He labels the overblown Swiss Army Knife as a bad design - while failing to consider the purpose of the design. (As a collectible/art piece, which he tacitly admits it was a success at.) The next knife down he's equally dismissive of. But he fails to consider that a) there are other methods of carrying (a belt pouch for example), or b) that there *are* people who constantly have something it will fit into handy (a photographer and his camera bag, a fisherman and his tackle box, etc..). The lowest knife, which he praises, has so little functionality it's only real use is to be impressive to the guy in the next cubicle over because you're the Guy Who Always Has A Knife.
The same with the Nikon Coolpix 100. He seems utterly unaware that there are a huge number of cameras out there... My little Canon A1200 has no extra chargers or cables either.
He praises the Olympic Memory Stick Thumb Drive - but take away the 'cool' packaging, and it's just another thumb drive. Maybe he keeps the 'cool' packaging as an art piece on his desk, but I suspect he's one of the few.
Overall Mr Buxton is really, really bad at evaluating the success or failure and the usefulness or not of many of the items he has in his collection.
Most advanced linux users do really think that Windows 7 is unstable and slow. It's slow because they run it on 15 year old hardware.
They expect old hardware to run a modern system because their modern system can run on old hardware.
Circumcision is child abuse.