PC World Worst 25 Tech Products Of All Time

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/0,aid,125772,00.asp#">http://www.pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/0,aid,125772,00.asp#</a><br /><br /><i>"At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But it's the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shriveled, and that make tech editors cry out, "What have I done to deserve this?"...Of course, most truly awful ideas never make it out of somebody's garage. Our bottom 25 designees are all relatively well-known items, and many had multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns behind them. In other words, they were made by people who should have known better. In fact, three of the ten worst were made by Microsoft. Coincidence? We think not."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/hansberry/2006/20060527-25worstproducts-oqo.jpg" /><br /><b>#19 Worst Tech Product, the OQO Model 1</b><br /><br />I thought it was funny Real Advertising, I mean Real Audio kept getting mentioned. :lol:

[signothefish]

Thanks for posting this, Ed. It was good reading, and some not-so-good memories.

Interesting that the OQO came in at #19. Kind of makes you wonder if the UMPC or any other similar device will ever take the place of PDAs.

Priceline groceries and gas at #11... I used the gas service quite a lot, and remember getting the cards in the mail. It used to save me on average about 20 cents/gallon. At that time, it was about $1.35, so I was getting it for $1.15. I also remember not being able to find the gas stations that accepted my price, as well as getting my gas at the wrong stations. I was sad to see that service go, though.

Iomega zip drive at #15... My father-in-law still has a zip drive. I told him to stop using that thing, so he did. It was a parallel unit that connected in-line between the printer and the PC. One didn't dare attempt to print and use the drive at the same time.

IBM Deskstar hard drives at #17... When UBid.com (http://www.ubid.com) was not yet popular, this was one of the items you could get at a good deal and turn around and sell on eBay. I'm glad this was one of the products I never sold.

[rob_ocelot]

15. Iomega Zip Drive (1998)
Click-click-click. That was the sound of data dying on thousands of Iomega Zip drives. Though Iomega sold tens of millions of Zip and Jaz drives that worked flawlessly, thousands of the drives died mysteriously, issuing a clicking noise as the drive head became misaligned and clipped the edge of the removable media, rendering any data on that disc permanently inaccessible.

Iomega largely ignored the problem until angry customers filed a class action suit in 1998, which the company settled three years later by offering rebates on future products. And the Zip disk, once the floppy's heir apparent, has largely been eclipsed by thumb drives and cheaper, faster, more capacious rewritable CDs and DVDs.

The kicker to the entire saga of the Zip drive "Click of Death" was that a few years later they came out with a mini disk drive that fit into a PCMCIA card sheath and could be used with a digital camera.

Some dunderhead at Iomega thought that the Iomega Clik! was a good name for the product! :oops:

Go to Iomega's site today and they been reduced to selling rebranded IBM microdrives and tape backup drives.

Rather sad. Then again, Iomega really didn't do anything revolutionary with the Zip drive... Syquest had been making removeable hard disk catridges for years. Iomega just made them look sexier.


There's a couple of items missing from that list.

Anyone remember:

- Tiger Game.com (aka Lame.com)

- Nintendo Virtual Boy

- Nokia N-Gage

- HP IPAQ rz1710 (overpriced, underpowered, unerwhelming)

- HP Jornada 820 (at the time it was the only Handheld PC that was ARM based, meaning you were SOL for software. Compared to contemporary subnotebooks it was way behind and overpriced)

- Phillips CDI (no one at the time was willing to pay more than $500 for a game mac.. err... 'Infotainment' machine [Now there's a word that has been hacked out of the English language quite abrubtly])

- Apple MacTV (Someone at Apple didn't think that being able to watch TV in a little window was a good thing so the TV part and the computer portion were completely separate. It was cheaper to buy a real TV and a real Mac that you could put more ram into[MacTV came with an odd 5mb of non expanable RAM]. Also only available in badass black, meaning that you couldn't find any matching Mac compatable accessories)

- Commodore CDTV and CD32 (see entry on Phillips CDI -- same crap, different company).

[Typhoon]

Yea, this article was a good read. AOL does suck. It's fraudulent business practices from day 1 makes it one of the worst companies out there.

And the OQO...has its small number of supporters. I have been thinking that it would be really cool if it had the Core Duo 1.1GHz (not out yet), 60GB HDD, 1GB RAM, CF slot, Tablet OS.--like this, I think it just miiiggght sell for nearly $2000...but $1500 is a way better price. I think they could have more customers that way and maybe they wouldn't look so greedy. What company out there is actually respectable? Mostly none, but maybe sort of Dell.

[lapchinj]

I wasn't surprised to see that AOL led the pack. Once installed it was impossible to get rid of. But if I was 30 years younger collecting different versions of thier discs would have replaced baseball cards. For a while there wasn't a day I didn't receive a disc in the mail either by itself or packed into one of the periodicals or magazines.

I was upset to see that the IBM PCjr. was on the list. It is true everything that they say about it but it was my first upgrade from my Timex Sinclair 1000 with 2K of ram 8) since I really didn't have 4K to plunk down on a new IBM PC. After a couple of months me and my friend did choke up the 4.5K for one. Then we added another few K for a hard drive - 5 meg (DOS 1.1 was out) and an assembler. (My brand new 85 Chevy van only cost 8.5K with tax and shipping and... 8O .) :cry:

The IBM PC was chucked out during cleaning of my friends garage :( but the PCjr is still running in my basement. So really the PCjr outlasted the venerable IBM PC :roll: . If that's not weird enough then I do have a laptop with Windows 286 on it and a pre version 1 copy of OS/2 which had no graphics yet (who needed graphics) from my first PC oriented job building OS/2 news servers. None of these were on the list. But all these machines and OS's were no match for the Data General machines that I started out on. Funny though that I still have all the code me and my colleagues wrote during 3 years work on the DG creating news servers and their satellite connections etc. stored on a 720K floppy 8) today code is backed up on DVD's.

Bottom line is that they all deserved to be on the list - except for my PCjr :cry:

Jeff-

[daS]

The 25 worst technology products of all time???

It seems that in PC World's world, time began circa 1990. :roll: What about all the pre-PC tech products? For example, there were the shoe store fluoroscopes which, unlike AOL, actually killed people.

[iscogd]

Great article, made my day, couldn't stop loughing.

I admit being sometimes one of the guys who purchased some of these products.

:D

[yawanag]

It's hard to believe that I experienced some of these first hand. I never fell for AOL; never could stand it. I compared it to a child only being able to play in his own backyard and wasn't allowed out to explore the rest of the world.

The one I fell for was the CueCat from Radio Shack. That sat on my desk for months until I convinced myself this is a piece of junk.

[Ed Hansberry]

It seems that in PC World's world, time began circa 1990. :roll: What about all the pre-PC tech products? For example, there were the shoe store fluoroscopes which, unlike AOL, actually killed people.
It is "tech products" not "technology products" and the difference is someone can generally refer to a computerized item as "tech" and you know they are talking about some computerized gadget, especially when used by a computer magazine. 8O Shocking, I know.

If it were just products that had technology in them, then you'd have to include the Ford Pinto, which at least has something in common with the other items on the PC World list - a consumer purchased it! Not sure how many consumers had shoe fluoroscopes in their homes. Furthermore, the Pinto is a product that actually did kill people.

Also, do you have a link to the deaths associated with the fluoroscopes? The articles I found kept repeating things like "Despite these relatively high exposures, there were no reported injuries to shoe store customers. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the operators of these machines. Many shoe salespersons put their hands into the x-ray beam to squeeze the shoe during the fitting. As a result, one saleswoman who had operated a shoe fitting fluoroscope 10 to 20 times each day over a ten year period developed dermatitis of the hands. One of the more serious injuries linked to the operation of these machines involved a shoe model who received such a serious radiation burn that her leg had to be amputated (Bavley 1950)." Granted, that is horrible for the store operators, but I don't see where it killed anyone.

Or, were you just trying to rain on our link that was meant to be fun (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chill+out), reminiscing on some of the garbage we spent our hard earned money on that at the time looked really cool? :roll: Have a good weekend.

rob_ocelot - on the N-Gage. This product would definitely be worth a mention except consumers saw right through it and didn't buy it. I'd put PalmOS6 in this category too. The OEMs stayed away in droves. :rotfl:

[Jonathan1]

I guess since Vista isn't out yet it can't be listed. :D :razzing:

[welmoed]

20. DigitalConvergence CueCat (2000)

I remember getting one of these... mostly because there were some enterprising people who realized "Hey, this is a cheap barcode reader!" and wrote some interesting apps for it. There was one that I used to catalog all my CDs and DVDs. I never installed the spyware...er, software that came with it, but it was a cute and handy piece of hardware that did have its uses!

--Welmoed

[Ed Hansberry]

20. DigitalConvergence CueCat (2000)

I remember getting one of these... mostly because there were some enterprising people who realized "Hey, this is a cheap barcode reader!" and wrote some interesting apps for it. There was one that I used to catalog all my CDs and DVDs. I never installed the spyware...er, software that came with it, but it was a cute and handy piece of hardware that did have its uses!
Sort of in the same vein as this, I got a card reader from American Express. They were giving them away free when you got an AmexBlue card (they were new in 98 I think) and you could plug it in your PC, install software and then shop online by swiping your card rather than typing your info in. The thing was, it required 2 ports, a serial and a PS/2. You could piggyback your keyboard/mouse on the PS/2 port but the serial was exclusive. I couldn't use my Nino without swapping cables, and given the hassles of Windows CE Services 2.x on Windows NT 4 (this was before ActiveSync) I was scared to really hose something and get involved in a few hours of removing/reinstalling RAS and then reinstalling.

[mv]

There's a couple of items missing from that list.

Anyone remember:

- Nokia N-Gage



Uh... the n-gage was great as i see it... my wife had a QD, it was a really cool gaming phone. It was so cool that it was stoled after a few weeks use... :cry: :cry: :evil: :evil:

Anyway, where´s win me? That was a big fiasco, wasn´t it? :roll: