The Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

May 27, 2006 8:55 AM

PCWorld magazine lists the top 25 worst tech products of all time. via /.
posted by Afroblanco (40 comments total)

What, no FAT32?
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 9:06 AM on May 27, 2006

I have to disagree about the CueCat. It sucked as originally introduced, to be sure, but it was quickly hacked and is now one of the most affordable barcode scanners you can buy. I used a modified CueCat to quickly scan my several thousand book library into LibraryThing. It would have taken ages to do it manually.
posted by longdaysjourney at 9:22 AM on May 27, 2006

I loved my Timex Data Link watch, and I also used a cuecat to once scan my library of books into a web app. Otherwise, a fine list and kudos to them for including IE 6.
posted by mathowie at 9:30 AM on May 27, 2006

3 of the top 5 worst, were/are actually three of the most helpful technologies I've used. I used free AOL Internet for 3 or 4 years during college. I was poor and I just kept calling them every couple of months and told them that and they kept extending my "trial". I never had a connection problem and the speed was just right for what I needed.

I still use RealPlayer every day, I have no complaints there either - tons of Internet audio in the WFMU archives that I listen to through RealPlayer.

Third, my senior year of highschool I must have ripped off Sony BMG for 100s of free/cheap CDs, with no repercussions as of yet, so hats off to them as well.
posted by dgaicun at 9:30 AM on May 27, 2006

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the PC Jr. It was the first computer my family owned, and Writing Assistant and a dot matrix printer got me through as an undergrad English Major. I enjoyed the hell out of the first couple King's Quest games too.
posted by marxchivist at 9:35 AM on May 27, 2006

The zip drive was a life saver back in the day....

Opinions, they are like ..... everyone has one....
posted by HuronBob at 9:38 AM on May 27, 2006

And I have to disagree with the Twentieth Anniversary Mac -- the article's author missed the point of that one. TAM was intended to be complete design porn.
posted by nathan_teske at 9:46 AM on May 27, 2006

RealPlayer has improved slightly, but it's still incredibly bad. Comet Cursor should be higher and the ommission of Bonzi Buddy is a disgrace.
posted by fire&wings at 9:52 AM on May 27, 2006

The zip drive was a life saver back in the day....

If you wiped a zip drive and copied data onto it, you could take it somewhere else and read the data. The problem was that you were led to belive that it was an actual file system, and that you could use it as a workplace for Photoshop, etc.

That inevitably led to the "click of death" and loss of all your data.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:56 AM on May 27, 2006

Pointcast was impressive at the time, no google news, no great news sites. But PC magazine articles always seem to be either really good or wrong.
posted by IronWolve at 9:57 AM on May 27, 2006

Although I dont really agree with most of the list, I am VERY happy to see AOL on it. (I wont bore you and eleborate on why I feel this way)
posted by BillsR100 at 9:58 AM on May 27, 2006

very glad to see realplayer included , may it vanish off the face of the earth !
posted by sgt.serenity at 10:34 AM on May 27, 2006

I generally agree with their picks, although the omission of DoubleSpace is baffling.

Aaah, those heady days of the early 1990s, when hard drives were expensive and MS was competing with the likes of Digital Research.
posted by Afroblanco at 10:51 AM on May 27, 2006

How did the pcworld.com website not make the list? Holy crap. What a train wreck.
posted by thinman at 10:53 AM on May 27, 2006

No Virtual Boy?
posted by furiousthought at 10:55 AM on May 27, 2006

If you wiped a zip drive and copied data onto it, you could take it somewhere else and read the data. The problem was that you were led to belive that it was an actual file system, and that you could use it as a workplace for Photoshop, etc.

Zip was bad, but the Orb was worse. It was a 2.2gb removable disc, sort of a combination between Jaz and Zip. It also had a SCSI chip that was extra sensitive to magnetic fields, and placing the drive near a pair of speakers or monitor would fry the chip. You would then have to send the drive off to Castlewood, wait 6 to 8 weeks to get get a new one, and then wait for it to break again. I remember doing that dance two or three times before demanding my money back.

Pretty sure they went out of business.
posted by SweetJesus at 11:13 AM on May 27, 2006

They seem to be confusing "worst tech products" with "biggest tech marketing flameouts." PointCast and CueCat may not have been the best things ever, but they weren't the worst either -- they were just high-profile failures.

(And how about an honorable mention for the first tech product name to use an InterCap?)
posted by aaronetc at 11:44 AM on May 27, 2006

Heh, I knew the CueCat was going to be on the list. It was such a brain-dead marketdroid idea, but thankfully (like longdaysjourney does) it's easily used as a basic barcode scanner instead. Thus, I still have mine tucked away alongside all the other random cables and connectors.
posted by SenshiNeko at 11:53 AM on May 27, 2006

AOL was a great way to swap files with my clients NOW back in the days before many of them had full-time internet connections (This was in the '90s -- I know, before most of you were born -- I'm old.)

Even if they didn't have an account, I could set them up over the phone with a garbage username/pw I used for this purpose and the Try AOL! CD they invariably had lying in the garbage can (or packed in a computer magazine.)

And the best part was we didn't have to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare of getting empire-building IT staff involved. IMHO, this alone made it one of the greatest tech innovations in history.
posted by Opposite George at 11:58 AM on May 27, 2006

Wow, PCWorld really has gotten a lot more bitchy since 1996 -- I think that was probably the last year I read an issue.
posted by blacklite at 1:09 PM on May 27, 2006

Microsoft Bob gets no love.
posted by TwelveTwo at 1:13 PM on May 27, 2006

Maybe Bob could get together with Lisa?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:52 PM on May 27, 2006

I doubt Steve and Melinda would approve.
posted by stenseng at 2:43 PM on May 27, 2006

I think this is more of a 'most infamous tech products' rather than worse. I tend to think the absolute worst products were probably ignored by the market and died silently, and now no one remembers they ever existed.

If anyone doesn't like Realplayer, there's always an alternative. There's one for quicktime too, which is a blessing, since quicktime is the most god-awful buggy software I have ever seen. It must work better on macs, because if my experience is typical no one would touch it. As usual, Linux users can just download a giant pack of questionably legal codecs that can handle anything that can be handled in Linux.

I'm surprised Divx only made honorable mention. A bad idea from start to finish. Let's fill up the landfills with canceled disks! The Hockey Puck mouse (and more generally the single mouse button mouse) should also be promoted, as a prime example of "How to screw up something that should be impossible to get wrong."

It's a pity WebTV came out when it did. With large HDTVs, wireless networks, wireless keyboards, and wireless gyroscopic mice, it would be possible to make a web-browsing experience on the TV that would rival a computer. Of course, the cost would also rival a computer, diminishing the usefulness.
posted by Mitrovarr at 2:44 PM on May 27, 2006

I think this is more of a 'most infamous tech products' rather than worse. I tend to think the absolute worst products were probably ignored by the market and died silently, and now no one remembers they ever existed.

Yeah, I was expecting oddities, not 'well, of course that was shit' type stuff. I must admit the Apple Pippin passed me by, though - heartening, given the amount of information on Apple products wasting space in my brain.
posted by jack_mo at 2:59 PM on May 27, 2006

I used to work at DigiScents... Whenever the Fearless Leaders would lock some hapless VC or journalist in a room to give a demonstration, the entire office would stink, as if someone had fried up a heavily-perfumed grandmother.

:shudder:

I think it was the girlfriend of one of the founders who christened the product the "iSmell" -- she fancied herself a "guerrilla marketer." She stank as well.
posted by potsmokinghippieoverlord at 3:32 PM on May 27, 2006 [2 favorites]

What is this, old home week? I opened up the PCWorld list and see the iSmell, then I look here and see another person who worked at DigiScents.

So did I! I wonder how many other former DigiScents employees are crawling around Metafilter.

How appropriate that the iSmell gets mentioned near memorial day, because this product-which-never-really-was is only a memory now. I do occasionally see news of other companies trying to do something along those lines, but I haven't seen anything actually hit the market.

As flawed as the DigiScents idea was, it was a fun project to work on, because it covered so much ground. Uh, air, that is.
posted by telstar at 3:48 PM on May 27, 2006

In my office it was quickly noticed at the time that only managers used Pointcast, and only the sort of managers who never did any real work on their computers and in fact had very little idea of how to use them. The rest of us had better things to do with our PCs and knew better than to clog them with pointless shit like that. This was 1996, and Windows still had very little idea how a TCP stack should work at all, bandwidth, memory and performance were tight and you really didn't want to spare any from what you were actually trying to do, like work.

Also, I really wish this list had the HP ScanJet 6200 series on it. A scanner that cost 2.5x any near competitor and was so deeply flawed that they ended up abandoning support for it. At no time was there any driver for it that worked properly on any platform. It would sometimes work on Windows 98, but only once. Close the scanning application and you'd have to reboot before it would work again. If it did.
posted by George_Spiggott at 3:57 PM on May 27, 2006

You know what's worse? 8 pages for an article. Why does the web need pages?
posted by Orange Goblin at 4:18 PM on May 27, 2006

AOLTV was far, far, far worse than AOL itself. I am saddened that WebTV stole its place on this list.
posted by jewzilla at 4:34 PM on May 27, 2006

Why does the web need pages?

So you can see more adverts.
posted by jack_mo at 4:53 PM on May 27, 2006

Heh, telstar! I left rather early in the lifespan of DigiScents -- shortly after CNN's Rusty Dornin showed up and demanded to see our "laboratory" -- which, at that time, was our company kitchen, crammed with diet Cokes and Chips-Ahoy cookies. (We had some oil samples for the machine squirreled away in one of the cupboards, for some reason.)

I remember the phone calls from the press, virtually all beginning "This is a joke, right?"

The best part of the job was the location in downtown Oakland. In fact, as I type this, I can see the ol' Hotel Leamington from my window....
posted by potsmokinghippieoverlord at 5:18 PM on May 27, 2006

I guess I'm nopt surprised to see the CueCat on the list, given the enormous amount of hype they generated (and didn't they partner with a lot of companies that should've known better [I'm looking at you, Radio Shack]?), but I'm not sure it was a complete bust.

I remember playing around with a few of these in high school, when you could literally walk into the mall and walk out a few minutes later with an armful of scanners, owing to the overly exuberant sales staff who were sure this was the Next Big Thing. Scanning ads was useless, sure, but you could do cool things like open the case up and sodder on a power button, and write little VB apps that could turn them into pretty useful (and free!) barcode scanners.

Those were the days.
posted by Mayor West at 7:21 PM on May 27, 2006

The Apple Performa certainly deserves to be on the list. Not only was it a step backward to the "integrated" monitor/computer model of the mac classic, it was so bad in every respect that Apple simply dropped support for it within a month of its release.
posted by slatternus at 7:39 PM on May 27, 2006

I also nominate the Apple Cube, and Palm OS's Graffitti handwriting system. The Cube was an idea ahead of it's time, but that didn't stop apple from using a cheap formulation for the acrylic shell, which developed unsightly spider vein cracks sometimes within days. As for Graffitti, it's just plain annoying to see a great device like the Palm Pilot surrender a third of its screen real estate to a pointless shorthand system that hardly anyone uses.
posted by slatternus at 7:45 PM on May 27, 2006

How could they name Comet Cursor and overlook the insdious Gator/Gain family? Pure unadulterated evil, I tell you.
posted by madamjujujive at 7:48 PM on May 27, 2006

slatternus, many people really liked Graffiti: it took three minutes to learn and you were soon able to write a lot more quickly than you can with those preposterous little buttons on the Treo -- whose display, by the way, is the same size as the Palm's, so giving up graffiti didn't buy you any more display. Anyway, on Handsprings and some Palm-based phones, the Graffiti area was virtual and could be removed to give more application display area when you weren't using it.
posted by George_Spiggott at 8:24 PM on May 27, 2006

Comet Cursor should be higher and the ommission of Bonzi Buddy is a disgrace.

I agree, when I first saw the link I immediately thought of Bonzi Buddy. I remember helping a friend out with his computer and seeing that damn dirty ape in the corner of his screen. So sad.
posted by phirleh at 9:30 PM on May 27, 2006

The Apple Performa certainly deserves to be on the list. Not only was it a step backward to the "integrated" monitor/computer model of the mac classic,

Uh, are you familiar with the iMac?

it was so bad in every respect that Apple simply dropped support for it within a month of its release.

No, Performas were made from 1992 to 1997.
posted by George_Spiggott at 10:22 PM on May 27, 2006

Anyone who condemns Zip for being unreliable doesn't remember what preceded it -- meaning Syquest drives. The arrival of Zip was like being rescued by the seventh cavalry. "You mean it's a tenth of the price, and it actually works most of the time?"

Audrey has no place on the list. It was a very sweet piece of tech with some brilliant ideas, killed not by the market but by internal politics at 3Com. To include it but not the internet-enabled fridges, waste-bins and other dot-com detritus shows a lack of perspective.
posted by Hogshead at 11:46 PM on May 27, 2006