Nine of the Biggest Mess Ups in Tech History

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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The Internet is just chock full of great inventions and innovations over the years, but some were not so much. Stinkers actually, that no one wanted or needed or in reality, just really hated to use. Gizmodo assembled nine of their favorite unfavorites, so see if you agree with their choices.
 
I don't know if I'd put N64 carts in there, while yeah that was a mess up for Nintendo, but in hindsight EVERYONE (except Nintendo) is happy it happened because we got the Playstation systems out of it instead.
 
Netbooks didn't fail. Someone added a touch interface and ditched the keyboard and made a mint off them.
 
I personally didn't have a problem with Vista. I bought a copy but didn't install it for while due to people saying it was slow, but I installed it a few months later on my system, Q6600/8gb/GTX260 is what I think I had at the time, and it ran great.
The problem I saw was that Vista was installed on OEM's with not enough ram, making the machines operate pretty slow, compared to an XP machine with the same hardware specs.
 
Gotta love how they relegate Xerox PARC's free sharing of knowledge with the world as not only a blunder, but the single biggest in tech history. I wonder if the author of this article is old enough to remember when being king of the world wasn't the first priority in high tech.
 
JeffDC said:
Gotta love how they relegate Xerox PARC's free sharing of knowledge with the world as not only a blunder, but the single biggest in tech history. I wonder if the author of this article is old enough to remember when being king of the world wasn't the first priority in high tech.
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Yeah, I always felt like moving the tech world forward was the goal at PARC. I mean surely the whole point of bringing those guys in was to share the knowledge and have then go out and do stuff with it. I don't think an intended outcome being met is a blunder.
 
My netbook allows me to review and save pictures taken with my DSLR or from game cameras in my hunting area. Something tablets and smartphones, with their annoying lack of sdcard slots, can't do. But it is a niche use.
 
Dead Parrot said:
My netbook allows me to review and save pictures taken with my DSLR or from game cameras in my hunting area. Something tablets and smartphones, with their annoying lack of sdcard slots, can't do. But it is a niche use.
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Some tablets actually do have SD card slots, and the iPad has a SD card addon.
 
jpm100 said:
Netbooks didn't fail. Someone added a touch interface and ditched the keyboard and made a mint off them.
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Not really. Netbooks were basically just cheap, shitty, underpowered laptops. Modern tablets are more like oversized smartphones. They have little in common with netbooks.
 
JeffDC said:
Gotta love how they relegate Xerox PARC's free sharing of knowledge with the world as not only a blunder, but the single biggest in tech history. I wonder if the author of this article is old enough to remember when being king of the world wasn't the first priority in high tech.
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I'm sure Nikola Tesla's technology, being given to everyone for free, was a "tech blunder" as well.
Fuck this author and the article.
 
Are they taking nominations for future revisions of this list? From the sounds of things, CurrentC (MCX) instead of Apple Pay/Google Wallet is going to be one of those additions.

As for Windows Vista.... yeah.... when I built my Core 2 Duo system in 2007, I purchased a license for both Windows Vista 64 Ultimate and Windows XP. The system had a removable drive bays so that I could easily switch. What ended up happening is that Vista did a very good job of collecting dust on my shelf as it seemed slower than XP. It also didn't help that you couldn't easily use XP drivers, and some manufacturers did not put out Vista drivers for older stuff. I actually had friends who asked me where to get computers with XP installed instead of Vista.
 
Red Falcon said:
I'm sure Nikola Tesla's technology, being given to everyone for free, was a "tech blunder" as well.
Fuck this author and the article.
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Ditto everything from Ethernet and Windows to laser printers and even the mouse.
 
ZLoth said:
Are they taking nominations for future revisions of this list? From the sounds of things, CurrentC (MCX) instead of Apple Pay/Google Wallet is going to be one of those additions.
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As the former CEO of Wal-Mart has already said, “I don’t know that MCX will succeed, and I don’t care. As long as Visa suffers.” As long as the use of QR codes don't prove to be a fatal mistake like it was with Alibaba in China expect all of the stores involved to hold out as long as possible.
 
I would have chosen Windows 8 over Vista ... Vista was poorly executed and hardware requirements and lack of proper drivers hurt it immensely but it was actually a functional OS (if you had the hardware to run it) ... Windows 8 because of the massive change in UI and trying to push things into the mobile area of apps over programs cost MS market share and street cred ... I think that was a far bigger blunder than Vista ... incidentally they could have avoided the 8 blunder by simply offering users the choice and then just marketing the heck out of the new UI and software model ... using the Cortez approach (burning their boats behind them) did not work out for them in this case as it upset consumers AND more importantly Enterprise

For Nintendo, they lost their market share because of shifts in the demographics more than the form factor of their games ... they gained a brief resurgence with the Wii due to its innovative game play (for the time) and the fact that it attracted a new non-traditional gamer to the customer base ... but once the novelty wore off and the two traditional platforms caught up on the kinetic games, they returned to the niche status that their software offerings created
 
jpm100 said:
Netbooks didn't fail. Someone added a touch interface and ditched the keyboard and made a mint off them.
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No, Netbooks failed miserably. See below for why. Netbooks and tablets aren't even remotely the same thing.

Cmdrmonkey said:
Not really. Netbooks were basically just cheap, shitty, underpowered laptops. Modern tablets are more like oversized smartphones. They have little in common with netbooks.
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Bingo. I always hated when someone brought me one of those damn things to work on. More often than not it cost more to work on the stupid thing than to just buy a new one.
 
Pfft! Lame article! I love the netbook idea because computers should be easy to carry around, get all day battery life, and should be affordable. They don't always need to be super fast. I wish they were easier to dock with like a full size keyboard, mousey, and monitor because I do that with my Linux Mint loaded netbook pretty often if I want to be at my desk for more than typing a short e-mail or something.

Also, Vista really wasn't a bad OS at all. It was sorta sluggish, but in technical terms, it was pretty good as far as improving security and the UI was a good step between XP and 7 without being a huge pile of dumb-stupid.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
No, Netbooks failed miserably. See below for why. Netbooks and tablets aren't even remotely the same thing.



Bingo. I always hated when someone brought me one of those damn things to work on. More often than not it cost more to work on the stupid thing than to just buy a new one.
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Duh, that's the point. Computers really should be just stuff you take to the electronics recycle place when they're broken or no longer useful. We're waaay past the point where we need to have individual components and upgrade stuff. Just getting a new one is a good thing and netbooks were great for travel because if it was lost, broken, or stolen, there was not nearly as much money lost. They also sold very well for quite a few years. It's sad to see what they turned into...ultrabooks that are expensive, tablets that have no keyboard and (sometimes) spyware as an OS, and Chromebooks that totally stink at local storage AND are Google's data collection agents in the wide world.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Duh, that's the point. Computers really should be just stuff you take to the electronics recycle place when they're broken or no longer useful. We're waaay past the point where we need to have individual components and upgrade stuff. Just getting a new one is a good thing and netbooks were great for travel because if it was lost, broken, or stolen, there was not nearly as much money lost. They also sold very well for quite a few years. It's sad to see what they turned into...ultrabooks that are expensive, tablets that have no keyboard and (sometimes) spyware as an OS, and Chromebooks that totally stink at local storage AND are Google's data collection agents in the wide world.
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In this instance I was referring mostly to malware removal and OS reinstalls. People constantly complained when I charged them the same for a netbook as a desktop. They couldn't understand that small and cheap didn't lessen the effort to remove all the shit they got on it but in most cases took far more effort because they things were so damn slow.
 
I never had a single problem with WindowsME back then. I still have no idea why people hated it so much.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
In this instance I was referring mostly to malware removal and OS reinstalls. People constantly complained when I charged them the same for a netbook as a desktop. They couldn't understand that small and cheap didn't lessen the effort to remove all the shit they got on it but in most cases took far more effort because they things were so damn slow.
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That's not the netbook's fault. That just happens because people are all morons and the worst ones are the ones that walk into a computer shop with an infected laptop.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Duh, that's the point. Computers really should be just stuff you take to the electronics recycle place when they're broken or no longer useful. We're waaay past the point where we need to have individual components and upgrade stuff. Just getting a new one is a good thing and netbooks were great for travel because if it was lost, broken, or stolen, there was not nearly as much money lost. They also sold very well for quite a few years. It's sad to see what they turned into...ultrabooks that are expensive, tablets that have no keyboard and (sometimes) spyware as an OS, and Chromebooks that totally stink at local storage AND are Google's data collection agents in the wide world.
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Netbooks were so slow they could barely run XP. They had flimsy, cramped keyboards. Touchpads that were often barely useable. Low resolution screens.

Ultrabooks by comparison are powerful, have useable keyboards, high resolution screens, and they run Windows beautifully.

People didn't really want netbooks. They wanted tablets or ultraportable laptops like the Macbook Air or Sony Vaio Z series, just at a more affordable price. And now that we have modern tablets and ultrabooks, no one cares about netbooks.
 
Skripka said:
I think the bigger news that was embedded in this op-ed was this:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/10...-83-million-worth-of-fire-phones-no-one-wants

Amazon sits on $83 million in Fire phones that no one wants.
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Thanks for linking that, I also picked up on that in the article.

And I don't know why he hated on catridges in the N64. Cartridges have many advantages going for them. The only thing that hurt them was data capacity.

But today, that is not so much an issue and I would love to see games comes out on some <protected> form of SD cards.
 
Xbox - lost billions, lost badly to PlayStation

Xbox 360 - RRoD, also lost billions, but its loses were hidden because the same division, Entertainment and Devices Division, received billions in Android licensing fees. Lost badly to the Wii.

Xbox One - PR disaster, inferior to PS4, and is already losing badly to the PS4.

Zune - another major failure

MSN Music - another failure, DRM

Games for Windows Live - stupendously awful, complete failure

Surface - lost billions, no one wanted them, and they spent almost as much advertising them as they cost to make, and still couldn't sell them.

Windows RT - complete failure, basically dead already.

Windows Phone - complete disaster, has fallen to 2.5% market share.

Windows 8 - complete PR disaster. The distaste most had for it on the desktop hurt desktop sales, while helping Google and Apple sell more tablets and smartphones.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
Netbooks were so slow they could barely run XP. They had flimsy, cramped keyboards. Touchpads that were often barely useable. Low resolution screens.

Ultrabooks by comparison are powerful, have useable keyboards, high resolution screens, and they run Windows beautifully.

People didn't really want netbooks. They wanted tablets or ultraportable laptops like the Macbook Air or Sony Vaio Z series, just at a more affordable price. And now that we have modern tablets and ultrabooks, no one cares about netbooks.
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Um, XP runs pretty well on like a 300 MHz Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM. Netbooks are quite a bit more powerful and had no trouble with the OS.

I realize that people are like all grr-ish about performance and stuff around here because there are still a lot of people that are seeking faster computers, but it's a huge exaggeration to say they had problems with any modern OS.

Anyhow, modern tablets and ultrabooks fill different market niches than netbooks do and the netbook market still exists (in fact, it always existed long before netbooks finally came around to fill the need), but without an adequately priced product to meet the needs of potential customers. Ultrabooks are fine, but they cost too much and are costly to lose or break. Tablets aren't very productive because even lame netbook keyboards are muuuch better for data entry than a tablet's on screen keyboard (seriously, become a novelist and get a tablet and a netbook and lemme know which one works better after like 240,000 words).
 
One of the commenters after the article mentioned the text recognition of the Apple Newton. IBM jumped in with both feet in their "Textpad" series which died after 2 years. Handwriting recognition is abysmal. After 20 hours of "training" IBM managed 90% accuracy. How they thought one word in ten misspelled was alright, I'll never know.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Um, XP runs pretty well on like a 300 MHz Pentium II with 256 MB of RAM. Netbooks are quite a bit more powerful and had no trouble with the OS.
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Not in my experience. Saw a lot of PCs with faster CPUs and they ran like shit. 256MB RAM wasn't enough unless all you did was check email and did other light duties. As for netbooks, if they had Win7 installed on them they needed at least 2GB RAM to be usable. Most were shipped with 1GB or less.
 
Does no one remember the DOS 6 debacle? After lulling consumers into complacency with what may have been one of the most stable releases (DOS 5), people rushed out to buy Microsoft's latest OS which promised ingetrated data compression, as Microsoft went after Stacker's great selling software's market share. But Doublespace simply wasn't ready for prime time, and millions of people suffered the disappearing data disaster after installing Microsoft's new baby, creating new life for OS/2 and DRDOS for years. Only Microsoft's creation of Windows 95's monopolistic marketing system software would reestablish their stronghold on the OS marketplace for good.
 
I was with them until they mentioned Vista.

IMHO, this was as huge a leap forward as XP was at its time.

XP introduced protected mode RAM to the consumer side of the OS, and it was a beautiful thing, as it made it much more stable.

Vista introduced *nix user accounts controls to Windows with UAC, and it has turned Windows from a security swiss cheese platform to one that is much more secure.

Vista was actually very good, even in its initial release. Where it failed was that Microsoft didn't do a good job at working with 3rd party vendors. Because of this, when it launched, many drivers were craptastic, causing the OS to have issues.

On one hand, blaming Vista is wrong, because the issues were primarily 3rd party issues. On the other hand blaming Microsoft is the right thing to do, as they should have planned better and worked with their vendors better when it came to driver compatibility and certification.
 
dark_reign said:
Not in my experience. Saw a lot of PCs with faster CPUs and they ran like shit. 256MB RAM wasn't enough unless all you did was check email and did other light duties. As for netbooks, if they had Win7 installed on them they needed at least 2GB RAM to be usable. Most were shipped with 1GB or less.
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Weird, before I installed Mint on my Asus Eee 1005HA, I played around with Vista and 7 on it (this was like 2-ish months ago when I replaced a Dell Latitude 2100 (which is Dell's semi-unknown educational market netbook) that had a screen hinge thingey break) and it was totally lame with 512MB and either OS. Once I upgraded to 1GB, both Vista and 7 were perfectly okay doing pretty much anything within the limits of the n270 CPU including keeping several things going at once (MP3s, word processor, a browser with a few tabs) and so forth. The computer had AV and I admit it was me installing the OS so there wasn't a ton of OEM-yuckware, but I felt it was completely usable like that. As the owner of 3 netbooks over the past couple of years, I don't agree that there's a really significant difference between 1 and 2GB with respect to performance under Vista or 7 as the processor and GPU tend to hold them back more than the lack of a 2nd gigabyte of RAM does. The only significant thing I've noticed is a decrease in hard drive activity after doubling the usual 1GB. In Vista it's pretty significant, but 7 was never very crazy-face about using the drive a lot to begin with and it's less noticeable in that case.

As for XP, I personally haven't really used it much with less than 320 MB of RAM (though I did have Server 2003 on 192 MB and I've fixed other people's super dinosaur XP computers with 64 MB - 2 GB of RAM under XP). What slows down XP and makes it painful to use with less memory isn't really related to the OS, but moreso to junky software or just the usual "it's the OEM-supplied OS that came with the computer in 2004 and we've been using it this way for the past like 9+ years" slowdowns that are fixable just by reinstalling. A nicely installed XP computer without a lot of junk software is completely reasonable with 256 MB though there is a difference if you feed it 512 MB. Beyond that...meh, not really. You end up with the same problems that netbooks have in that the probably much older CPU and other system components start to intercede as the system's overall limiting factor.

Anyhow, if 256MB was unreasonable and didn't work, it would have been a mega-bad world to live in when XP first came out and OEMs were shipping computers with about that much. I betcha people then were bragging about how fast their new PC was compared to their old one with 32MB and Windows 98SE as opposed to complaining that they needed 1GB just to have a usable system.
 
Eisenblut said:
I never had a single problem with WindowsME back then. I still have no idea why people hated it so much.
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Selling one kernel as five different OS's (95/OSR2/98/SE/ME) got to be ridiculous to most consumers, and deservedly so imo. MS repeated the scam in the NT line.
 
I'd agree with Vista I still blame that OS for killing two hard drives, I just could not stop it from constantly indexing, no matter what I did my computer would just sit and consistently read from the HDD even when idle with indexing off. And it ran very slowly especially considering I had pretty much a top end machine at the time of release.

Windows Me would just blue screen at least once a week, but it would run ok the rest of the time.

Oh and mabye it was because i was a lot younger when BOB was released, however i really liked it.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
As for XP, I personally haven't really used it much with less than 320 MB of RAM (though I did have Server 2003 on 192 MB and I've fixed other people's super dinosaur XP computers with 64 MB - 2 GB of RAM under XP). What slows down XP and makes it painful to use with less memory isn't really related to the OS, but moreso to junky software or just the usual "it's the OEM-supplied OS that came with the computer in 2004 and we've been using it this way for the past like 9+ years" slowdowns that are fixable just by reinstalling. A nicely installed XP computer without a lot of junk software is completely reasonable with 256 MB though there is a difference if you feed it 512 MB. Beyond that...meh, not really. You end up with the same problems that netbooks have in that the probably much older CPU and other system components start to intercede as the system's overall limiting factor.
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I find your use of present tense to be disconcerting. :p

XP is EOL, and as such is no longer receiving security patches. It was never particularly secure to begin with, and unpatched it is likely a nightmare.

Continuing to use XP is a very bad idea, and likely just asking to be part of a botnet, or have your identity stolen.
 
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