Top 10 Disappointing Technologies 682
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 stopped reading... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
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:3, Interesting)
Bluetooth is on the list because it's been around for years and you still can't get decent support for stereo headsets or other simple connections to work. It's been underwhelming.
Slow adoption rate designates failure? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Bubble Memory (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bluetooth? (Score:2, Interesting)
I still plug my phones into my PCs to transfer data. That or email the data to myself (ie from my phone in my hand to the computer 2 feet in front of me via Gmail's servers in the US), because apparently it's such a hard problem to solve sending data direct to my PC via a bluetooth dongle. I don't know what it is about the problem that's so hard. I'd love to hear of a technical description of it all.
Re:Dinosaurs were a marketing failure (Score:2, Interesting)
> Give me a good reason for doing this instead of lowering the price or even donating them
Not wanting to throw good money after bad supporting them?
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?
Re:Palm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't do better than this? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
What about the 432? (Score:4, Interesting)
No list of tech disappointments could be complete with the Intel 432 [wikipedia.org]. Object oriented machine code and hardware-assisted garbage collection - what's not to love?
Re: Firewire (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
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]
My "most disappointing" list (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Who writes up these lists? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:Number 1, without a doubt (Score:3, Interesting)
You might be confusing with OLE...Pretty much the only people that ever used it seriously were Microsoft, and I don't think even they do it any more
Actually, it's the underlying foundation of the clipboard and drag/drop, among other things, so yes OLE is still very much alive. That said, I completely agree about the messy and unintuitive API when it was a new and magical thing, and when computers could just barely support pasting a spreadsheet inside a word document. If you want to see an example of an OLE-like concept that's more narrow in scope, but widely adopted, check out Steinberg's VST [wikipedia.org], which is used in many audio applications.
Re:Importing cd button..... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:2, Interesting)
Those who seriously expected that Ubuntu would change the world had a little unrealistic expectation, but then I don't really know anybody who expected that. It delivered what I was expecting perfectly well: An enduser friendly version of Debian. Also Ubuntu has grabbed a very large part of the Linux distribution market share, so yeah, for Linux users it actually has changed things around quite a bit.
Anyway, when it comes to Linux related technologies I'd put the OLPC on there. That thing got a ton of hype and while actually a really fine product, it utter failed in the enduser segment and Eee and other competitors took over. Not so much the fault of the thing itself, but more the fault of terrible marketing and complete lack of normal commercial sales to end users.
Love this quote (Score:2, Interesting)
I love it.
It makes me suspect that they made Ubuntu an "Honorable Mention" just to give it a little more publicity!
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole business model of netbooks is "cheap, portable and with a long-lasting battery" - not exactly a model that leads itself in going in the direction of multi-core & "phat" graphics.
Tiny keyboards and trackballs are completely inadequate for playing games - a DS or PSP is much better for portable gaming.
In the netbook arena expect exactly the opposite move
- From x86 to the ARM architecture for significantly lower power consumption.
- Even cheaper as the price of the electronics goes further down (the "the price of a chip with the same transistor count halves every 18 months" side of Moore's law).
Such a move would play to two of the biggest the strengths of Linux (multi-architecture, low cost).
The future might very well be populated with sub-$100 netbooks for mobile internet with batteries that go for 12h without recharging (think a merge of a mobile phone and a notebook).
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Interesting)
except that now, going from win2k/xp to vista/7 is about the same amount of relearning to go to gnome. if you have to relearn .. sometimes go free never come back.
Rubbish. The fundamentals of the Windows GUI haven't changed since 1995 (and are still the same in Windows 7).
Re:Why is Vista always Horrible and Windows 7 Amaz (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Another list (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:I stopped reading... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you need to remember two things. First, the article is about disappointments, but not failures. Ubuntu is a success, but it failed to live up to the hype that surrounded it when it first appeared. Second, Ubuntu is only an "honourable mention" precisely because the hype wasn't all that widespread. Ubuntu isn't a disappointment as an operating system, far from it; it is merely a disappointment as a Windows killer.
I think that's the thing here: it's not so much the product's end form that makes a disappointment as much as the expectations created before it comes out. Were Ubuntu to arrive on the scene without much preamble, then we would recognise it for the system that it is. As it stands, though, it had to fight off unrealistic expectations for how fast it would be adopted first.
As a side note, I think this is why Steve Jobs tries to keep new products secret, to avoid getting burned like he did with Lisa. Part of the iPod's success lies in how they caught the tech press by surprise.
Why won't someone give VR another go? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?!