In response to CNet’s Top Ten Terrible Tech Products, here I’m listing what I consider to be the five worst technology products of all time.
5: The Digital Blue Video Camera
These horrible, stupid, newbie-ish cameras are so hated that I can’t even find any pictures on the Internet. They’re cheap, tacky, made of blue plastic, look like a gun so you’d get shot if you used one in London, and are generally only used by schools who can’t afford a proper camera with a screen and tape.
The worst problem, however, was with the terrible, Flash-based, n00b-interfaced software. That was the only way to get the camera to talk to a PC (it has something against UNIX) and it was slow, clunky, and generally useless.
4: The Lexmark Z30 printer
I’m not even sure if I’ve got the model number right, but my goodness are they awful. In my experience they only last around 80 days before they fail to power up altogether, before which they produce horrible, smeared prints that might have come out of a medieval scribe’s quill.
3: The Apple PowerBook Duo
Now, I don’t know about you, but I thought the whole point of a portable computer was that it would be a fully functioning computer whether or not you were near a docking station.
The concept was completely pointless - unless you were near a docking station, your computer was crippled. There should already have been a proper set of I/O ports and components on board the machine.
2: AOL
A horrible, newbie-ish Internet provider, which gives headaches to anyone with an ounce of sense in them. It’s tiresome, anti-competitive (its browser blocks rival search engines, Email services etc) and generally rubbish.
1: Tie break: Windows Vista, Microsoft Zune
Both these products are nothing short of shams. I mean, what idiot had the idea of offering a WMA player in black and… brown? And the Zune isn’t compatible with previous purchases made in Windows Media Player, has restrictive DRM, and can’t even be used as a hard drive.
Then we come to the horror of Windows Vista - Windows, but with added safety tape, bloat and a jazzed-up Explorer. It’s still the same core, though - DLLs, closed kernels, and now with added DRM.
The thing that pees me off most though about Vista and the Zune is that Microsoft seem to have lost the ability to innovate. Most of the much-touted new features in Vista have been in UNIX-like OSes such as Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris for ages. And the Zune seems like the worst part of every MP3 player out there salvaged from the R&D department’s wheelie bin, and glued together into a Windows Live Frankenstein of awfulness.