Technology Flops

PC Authority recently published a thought-provoking article: Top-10 Disappointing Technologies in which commentators Iain Thompson and Shaun Nichols discuss their top-ranked information technology failures.

We'll discuss these, omitting a couple (with which we're unfamiliar) and adding one of our own:


MP3 File

• Virtual Reality: A technology that allows the user to interact with a computer simulation of a real or an imaginary world.
• Alternative search engines: Google is the 600lb gorilla of web-search. Where's the competition?
• Voice recognition (actually Speech recognition): The automatic conversion of spoken words into machine-readable input.
• FireWire: A technology for connecting peripherals to computers, similar to USB.
• Bluetooth: A wireless networking protocal for communicating over short distances - sometimes referred to as personal area networks.
• Zune: Microsoft's line of portable media players.
• OpenID: A standard that allows a user to log in to multiple services using a single digital identity.
• Windows Vista: Microsoft's current PC operating system.