The Biggest Tech Mishap of 2013? 162
Nerval's Lobster writes "Some high-profile tech initiatives really crashed-and-burned this year. Did BlackBerry executives really think that BlackBerry 10 would spark a miraculous turnaround, or were they simply going through the motions of promoting it? That's the key question as BlackBerry 10 devices fail to sell. Then there's Facebook's misbegotten attempt at 'skinning' the Android OS with its Home app. Or maybe Healthcare.gov counts as 2013's biggest debacle, with its repeated crashes and glitches and inability to carry out core functions. What do you think was the biggest software or hardware (or both) mishap of the past twelve months?"
NSA leaking (Score:4, Insightful)
NSA leak was the most damagind and biggest tech fail.
They still don't know what was taken.
Slash!dot Beta (Score:5, Insightful)
taco must be turning in his grave
I'd say the target hack... (Score:4, Insightful)
They lost credit card numbers... pin codes!? and the c v v codes?!?!?!? what. the. fuck.
Why were they even storing those. at all. thats some world class fuckup that's going to cost many thousands of people real money. Theres no writeoff for regular people unlike businesses. People are Fucked...
Altho it's slightly more than a "mishap".
It's either that or the obamacare fuckup. But really who expected a goverment website to work right... Thats like a normal fuckup for us.
Or maybe the NSA being such treasonous completely useless wastes of space and money who should all be swinging at the end of a rope.
But that goes beyond just this year too. They've been shitheads for a long time. We just now know about it for sure.
My vote is for (Score:2, Insightful)
The NSA's exfiltration detection system...
Re:All of the above (Score:5, Insightful)
I nominate: (Score:5, Insightful)
If that's not a screw up, I don't know what is.
Nokia (Score:3, Insightful)
Website makeover (Score:5, Insightful)
Without a doubt, the biggest tech failure of the year is slashdot's new mobile site, and the horendous beta desktop site. I can't imagine the motivation behind the flashy, slow, non-functional mess. If classic.slashdot.org ever goes away, so too will I.
Re:Windows 8.1 (Score:4, Insightful)
iOS 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple basically threw away everything that made iOS look approachable and polished.
Re:I nominate: (Score:5, Insightful)
The Sim City 4 screwup is even larger than DRM servers.
They claimed the need the servers to simulate a total lot of the cities and that this was too much for the average PC. So the need to simulate the cities on the server. That was a lie. Sim City 4 is not really a good simulation, it works with very simplified models which create all kinds of odd occurances in the cities (which are totally unrealistic). For example? They simulate Sims in packs of 1000s, so skyscrapers are empty when one "sim pack" leaves. Every Sim drives the shortest route to the closest(!) place of work and also from there to the closest (!) free house. That leads to jammed roades even if a bypass freeway is near (and empty), this leads to entire regions where people cannot find work even if there's a lot of shops, these simplified simulations lead to all kinds of stupidity in a game that claims to be a "simulation".
Everyone said their maps are too small. They ignored it and now people complain the maps are too small.
People did want to build their city, but now are forced to build several small ones in their "regions", I guess the developers and publishers had the wet dream to create a large, buzzing online environment where ten people each build their small, specialised city in their own region and happily working together. But totally neglected that their audience wants to build their own megacity, not ten small pieces or one small piece and work with someone else.
Sim City 4 is acutally a bigger screwup than you make it out to be and what sets this apart from other "bad" games are two things: First the lies and the deliberate deception of game magazines and customers before the release who much the game would actually simulate. Second, the screwups are not issues of bad implementation or limited budget of a small developer who planned and wanted too much. Many of the really big, bad issues of this games are actually working as designed. They are not bad code, incompetence of a few coders, bad planning what you can do, but fundamentally wrong strategy, misunderstanding what the franchise is, the attempt to turn it into something that cannot work with the franchise and planning from the very core by the publisher and game designers.
So yes, I do say Sim City 4 fully counts and EA/Maxis screwed up much more and on a much deeper level than parent is giving them credit for.
The Year No One Learned From Mistakes (Score:5, Insightful)
2013 is notable for being the year the technology industry did not learn from its mistakes. There's no one single worst mistake. It's like the year Time magazine put a mirror on the cover - the entire industry is to blame!
Windows 8. Gnome 3. Unity. iOS 7. What is the lesson? Users do not want gratuitous change that destroys workflow patterns and muscle memory, and yet technology companies keep cramming them down our throats. In 2013, Windows 8.1 came out and it was just more of the same. iOS 7 destroyed everything we knew about Apple's "it just works" usability, and threw in a snow-blindness photo browser with a white background just to put salt in the wounds. The only thing we can look forward to is more change for the sake of change.
Healthcare.gov is just a symptom of a dysfunctional system of outsourcing to contractors who skim their money off the top, and then hire technology experts with whatever is left, insuring any technology project is going to fail. No one seems to care about quality. That's why software projects fail. Until structural changes are made in how technology is created, nothing will change.
Lessons were there to be learned from, but in 2013, forget it - no one cared.
Re:HealthCare.gov, by a mile (Score:5, Insightful)
And does everyone know that in 2014, the health plan tax kicks in? I don't mean the "Cadillac plan" tax, or the tax if you don't have insurance. I mean the 2% tax on every health plan. Yes, in order to make health insurance more "affordable," they are taxing health insurance! Words fail.
Well, I'm assuming the goal is to use that money to provide health plans to those who can't afford them, obviously if more people get coverage than before and the costs per person don't go down the total will go up. Here in Norway it's a tax for employers when they pay me income, essentially for every 100 NOK I get they must pay 7.80 NOK to the government. If there's a street bum with no income, get still gets the same healthcare as me and obviously that's coming out of the pockets of everyone else. If we took away the tax and let everyone get their own insurance I'd be paying for just me, right? And the bum would probably die, but let's leave morality out it for a second.
By making sure everyone is in good health and vaccinated, we reduce the spread of disease and infection. If some of the uncovered people could get back into taxable work they could become an asset or at least less of a tax burden. Desperate people who need money for surgery can lead to crime and exploitation. And most of all, we don't throw hot potatoes around in the system trying to deny or revoke their coverage. The overhead is far less. I'm also fairly confident I will get an appropriate treatment based on medical needs, of course our doctors and nurses are just as human as anyone else but at least I'm not fighting a giant insurance company who want my treatment to be cheap as possible without getting sued and lose.
If you want to take non-tech mishaps then Obamacare is taking on all the challenges and costs of socialized medicine while providing little to none of the benefits other countries have. The Democrats sacrificed the soul of the system, while the Republicans have poisoned the apple so it's set up to fail. In a few years it'll be a disaster and everyone in the US will agree socialized medicine can't work, despite all the pointing to what happens in pinko commie land.
Re:HealthCare.gov, by a mile (Score:5, Insightful)
What's funny is that the person you are quoting barely even mentions the TECH mishap - he sums it up as "numerous huge IT errors" but then goes on a rant about things that have NOTHING to do with the fucked up launch of healthcare.gov, but you want to claim that other people can't seem to separate their politics from their ability to assess the success or failure of a tech project. What the ever loving fuck does someone saying there will be doctor shortages, or a 2% tax, have to do with the website sucking? Nothing. Stop projecting your partisanship onto other people.
Personally I hate the ACA because it isn't single payer and all it will wind up doing is delaying actual healthcare reform in this country by decades while simultaneously keeping a useless industry alive. In any case, this story isn't about politics, it's about tech fuckups in 2013. So:
As an IT project, Healthcare.gov was an abortion. You had project management that was behaving in a fairly schizophrenic fashion (namely, political leadership who were battling over the ACA trying to repeal/defend it) leading to delays in starting implementation, you had incompetent contractors hired to put it out, you had incompetent developers building it (my god, the amount of pointless data streaming up and down was staggering, the front end code we could see was incompetent at best, the whole mess was completely non-performant) and then to top it off, as a post-mortem it seems that most were trying to assign blame and score political gotcha points and throwing up all kinds of irrelevant shit rather than just dealing with reality and trying to do a solid job implementing the law of the land.
I do agree there can be no doubt that Healthcare.gov is the absolute biggest fuck-up of the year.
Though my vote for worst tech issue of the year definitely goes to the NSA stuff - I'll take a thousand shitty websites over big brother any day.
ObamaCare website (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether you agree w/ the Affordable Care Act or not, it is legally required that everybody have insurance. When you've got a government mandate to use a website* and that website doesn't work, that's a pretty big problem.
* Yes, I am aware there are other ways to sign up. But a) have you ever had to wait for service at any office run by the government? and b) isn't this 2013? almost 2014?
Re:Slash!dot Beta (Score:2, Insightful)
Why are you using that gawdoffal interface? Just use the classic interface. I tried the beta for all of two minutes, UGH!
It's telling, though, that the beta interface is so horrible that an offtopic comment that only mentions how horrible the beta is gets moderated 4, insightful. Slashdot staff, are you listening to your users?