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Top 10 Disappointing Technologies
Posted by
timothy
on Sun May 17, 2009 06:46 PM
from the top-10-lists-are-a-disappointing-technology dept.
from the top-10-lists-are-a-disappointing-technology dept.
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.
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Submission: Top 10 disappointing technologies by Anonymous Coward
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VR (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:VR (Score:5, Insightful)
The current 3D MMORPGs are virtual realities.... Millions of people spend the majority of their time in these virtual worlds. Just because they don't wear bulky helmets they're disqualified?
The article is a bit misguided on some of it's top 10 choices.
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Re:VR (Score:5, Informative)
I do actually think that current MMORPGs should not be considered VR.
VR was never about creating a persistent virtual world populated by masses of real people, it's all about the sensory experience. The technology aims to replace all perception of the real world with the virtual, and make the user's interaction with the computer as close to interacting with the real world as possible. If the user is alone in the Virtual Reality or not doesn't matter, nor if there is any persistence between each session.
"Cyberspace" is the combination of Virtual Reality with a persistent, populated Virtual World, but just because MMORPGs are approaching that concept from one direction, it does not mean that they are VR.
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Technologies vs products (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Technologies vs products (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Technologies which haven't yet and may never live up to their promise:
2)Good products which failed to break into the market:
3) Products which should have never seen the light of day.
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Palm (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Bluetooth? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Bluetooth? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard for telcos to figure out how to charge you for it, so they cripple the phone instead.
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Firewire (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:Firewire (Score:5, Informative)
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Macintosh was not a replacement for Lisa (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Real Top 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Bubble Memory (Score:5, Interesting)
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Top so far (Score:5, Insightful)
The close second, if we include transportation are (antigrav) flying cars, of course.
Slow adoption rate designates failure? (Score:5, Interesting)
Failed Technologies: All RISC Chips (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Weird choice (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Uh, what about the SEGWAY???? (Score:5, Funny)
Talk about the most ridiculously overhyped invention in recent memory...for a damn scooter.
my friend... (Score:5, Funny)
My friend, Duke, just read the article, and man is he pissed.
Bah! Another list... (Score:5, Insightful)
Top 10 technologies the author doesn't use (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, that's a more accurate title.
If Sony executives had wrote this list (Score:5, Funny)
Must be an Australian thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Is he just complaining that Dell doesn't offer the same Ubuntu packages that it offers in the United States [dell.com]?
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is, are they wrong? Ubuntu really has remained for Linux hobbyists. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is, for the most part.
Brett
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
" The question is, are they wrong? Ubuntu really has remained for Linux hobbyists. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is, for the most part."
Yes, yes they are. The article's name is "Top 10 most disappointing technologies". Maybe the marketshare of Ubuntu has somewhat lagged behind what people hoped for, Ubuntu's tech itself is great and its improvements from release to release are worth the pain of switching to a newer OS. The fact that MS is holding the market hostage with Windows(and it's gigantuan legacy heap) can hardly be described as a fault of Ubuntu.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Funny)
But did anyone promise that ubuntu would kill off MS or something?
Ubuntu pretty much considers the fact that MS hasn't been killed off, or at least humbled, to be a bug [launchpad.net].
Promise? No, but they're trying.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Informative)
You should've read further, there's this hilarious bit:
You'd figure at least someone who likes Ubuntu and runs it themselves would have known that Dell has been offering systems with Ubuntu preinstalled for two years now.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dell has been offering systems with Ubuntu preinstalled for two years now.
Ya, and the incredible impact of this holy grail of Linux has been.......
That's what they should have put on this list :)
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you seriously suggesting that it's better for a user to have to click a button before being presented with essentially same choice?
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
I installed Ubuntu for the first time last year, and man, I was disappointed.
Right out of the box, so to speak, there were problems:
1. NVIDIA graphics card drivers weren't installed because they were proprietary. Come on. Even then, dragging windows around and typing into text boxes had a minor delay that didn't feel natural.
2. All websites looked different and ugly as sin, because the package didn't come with the fonts that every other system used. Come on!
3. Multi-monitor use was difficult to set up without having to alter configuration files ( though I do wish taskbars on multiple screens would come to Windows 7). Some things I found simply couldn't be done without writing scripts: setting up a hotkey to send a window to the other monitor, etc.
To resolve most of these issues, I had to navigate a bunch of forums and wiki help pages. I couldn't imagine trying to show my mom how to do that, for instance.
Ubuntu has a lot of strengths, and many of its features made me go "OOOO, cool!" But the Linux learning curve is freakishly steep. To do something of medium difficulty in Windows generally requires advanced console command knowledge in Ubuntu.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu offered to install those for me after starting up the system, I clicked a checkbox and it was installed - no issue.
ubuntu-restricted-extras is rather easy to install.
There is a hotkey to do this on Windows? Please tell me what it is, because I have been getting very irritated recently with win7's multi monitor support.
I'm sceptical after you mentioned point one.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. NVIDIA graphics card drivers weren't installed because they were proprietary. Come on. Even then, dragging windows around and typing into text boxes had a minor delay that didn't feel natural.
Since when did Microsoft start shipping NVIDIA drivers with their Windows releases, anyways?
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on! proprietary driver issues are the fault of the hardware maker. Nvidia is the 5uXX0r when it comes to Linux support. Anyhow, since last year, Ubuntu auto installs proprietary drivers.
What would we say if Microsoft or Apple took that attitude?
I know for a fact both companies have people who's job it is to work with specific hardware vendors all day long resolving issues and making sure everything works perfectly.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Informative)
It depends on your viewpoint. Has Ubuntu saved the unwashed masses from the evil empire yet? Not really. On the other hand, I think it's safe to say that Ubuntu has become the overwhelmingly dominant distro of choice for just about any Linux use case that can be classified as "mainstream". After Red Hat kind of went astray, Mandrake went bye-bye, and Debian (brought into the limelight by Knoppix) decided that ideological purity was more important than being popular, there really WASN'T any distro that was an obvious choice to recommend by default to just about anyone interested in Linux. Gentoo? Good god. I've personally had hours of good clean & wholesome fun with it, but there's no way in *hell* I'd suggest it to my dad... or use it for anything meaningful at work in a context that could get me fired if things went disastrously wrong. Slackware? Yeah, you never forget your first... um... well, you know. But it's just a little more retro than I'd prefer now.
I'm still undecided as to whether i prefer Ubuntu or CentOS for servers, but for desktop use it's no contest whatsoever -- Ubuntu. That's not to say it's the best in every conceivable way... but it's good enough in enough ways. More importantly, it's the one distro with enough market inertia right now to have books dedicated to its specific details. Someone who's been building their own copy of KDE for 10 years probably doesn't need to know the exact directory paths on ${his-specific-distro}... but someone like... well... my dad *does* need to have it given to him in explicit detail. And frankly, even if I don't necessarily need click-by-click details anymore, having the examples in the book actually *work* DOES make things a lot nicer and more enjoyable. In fact, IMHO the "book advantage" *alone* is enough to recommend Ubuntu to just about everyone. When the day comes that they understand the Linux multiverse well enough to stray from the well-marked, illuminated and crowded path known as Ubuntu, they'll know it and be able to find their own way. Until then, Ubuntu.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I think that Ubuntu's a bit too young to call it a 'flop.'
Who's calling it a "flop?" The reason for quoting a word is because you're indicating that someone else said it. It's a disappointment, not a flop. It may still do great things, but before and just immediately after it was released, to hear a user talking about it you would have thought it was God's own OS.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your final point is the key thing here. The OS is no longer the limiting factor.
The limiting factor is that the linux ecosystem is just not complete enough for a lot of users (accounting software, games, application specific software of so many types), and running a windows VM is mostly pointless if all you do is run windows apps (good for winding back, snapshots, image management etc).
Other thing that is not mentioned enough. Lots of users have struggled for years to accumulate just enough know-how to just get by with Windows. They simply are resistant to having to learn anything new. Total change fatigue dominates the user experience. Think how immense the effort Apple has put in and how long it's taking to win new customers, and it has a far superior ecosystem to Linux in the desktop world.
The great advantage in the server market is that the people making decisions have a clue, so you see Linux win on technical merit, and do very well indeed.
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Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Insightful)
I love Linux, but sadly I agree with him.
I don't.
"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."
You have to draw the line before you can cross is. KIA's not the first brand that comes to mind when citing car manufacturers that are prevalent in the United States, like Ford or Dodge or Mitsubishi, but it certainly exists and will continue to exist.
"Those who do use Linux as the primary OS for their home or work PC are still by and large tech-savvy users who comprise what used to be known as the 'hobbyist' market. The larger end-user crowd has not been able to warm up to Linux."
The large end market, no. Users who are not tech-savvy, yes.
"Ubuntu was supposed to change that. When the OS was launched, I remember all of my Linux-advocate friends predicting that this would be the product to make the jump and challenge Microsoft in the consumer and workstation spaces. Nearly five years after its release, Ubuntu remains popular amongst Linux users, but has yet to really pick up any sort of real momentum in the greater desktop OS market."
Number one on Distrowatch, Dell, System 76, massive consumer backing, fanatical support, extremely active development, et cetera...
"Yes, getting rave reviews from the Linux community is nice, but get back to me when the housewives and pensioners, not just the IT pros and college students, start dumping Windows for Ubuntu."
How can we know that housewives and pensioners aren't using it?
"But the more he explained his position the more I came to agree. 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."
Overthrowing Microsoft would have been nice but it doesn't have to go down to change anything. It's easy to think nothing's changed but under the waters the change really is there to behold.
"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."
Dell.
From wikipedia...
Total assets US$ 27.561 billion (2008)[1]
Not major enough?
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Re:Just as disappointing as... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Nanotech, virtual reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What about the CueCat?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What about the CueCat?! (Score:5, Informative)
CueCat had a lot riding on it and lots of fairly high profile partners. Perhaps if it wasn't in the retarded shape of a big plastic cat it might have taken off.
But what's this about the "ludicrously priced Apple Lisa"? Sure it was $10,000 in 1983, but it wasn't targeted to home users. The only other graphical computing package available at the time, the VisIon hardware/software kit from the makers of VisiCalc, the killer app spreadsheet, was less impressive and just as expensive.
"the base VisiOn software and a mouse cost $790, each application cost between $250 and $400, and it required a $5000 hard drive upgrade on top of a $2000 PC"
It was not hard to price a $10,000 PC in the mid-80s simply by adding a little RAM and a hard drive. The Lisa pioneered a new class of hardware at a reasonable cost compared to its newness and the competition.
Apple's Lisa also invented the Office desktop suite, which was bundled into its price. If you wanted an integrated suite of Office software, you'd have to wait out the 80s for another seven years before Microsoft could reassemble its own Office suite for the Macintosh, and then later Windows.
Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly [roughlydrafted.com]
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Re:What about the CueCat?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [erasmatazz.com]
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Re:What about the CueCat?! (Score:5, Insightful)
CueCat had a lot riding on it and lots of fairly high profile partners. Perhaps if it wasn't in the retarded shape of a big plastic cat it might have taken off.
Perhaps if it wasn't a solution in search of a problem it might have taken off.
There, fixed that for you.
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Re:What about the CueCat?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:What about the CueCat?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wareseeker.com]
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=cuecat [freshmeat.net]
http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/03/06/1815618.aspx [msdn.com]
Now if I could just find a use for all those damn AOL CDs in the attic.
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Re:What about the CueCat?! (Score:5, Funny)
CD FIGHT!!! Seriously it's a lot of fun as long as nobody minds a few scratches. Back, oh god, 10 years ago a friend of mine interned at Microsoft and was on their developer network. If Microsoft made a CD for distribution anywhere in the world, any version, he got it. He had 300+ by year's end. We had about 15 guys in the dorm hucking CD's down the hall and stairwells. Everybody still had the correct number of eyes and nobody needed stitches, just a couple bandaids. And what else are you going to do with Windows 98 OSR 50.2.4.6.A-4 in Swahili?
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Failed Product != Failed Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
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