10 Biggest Tech Failures Of 2010
Many blogs throughout the last few days have made their own Top 10 or 20 of the year's biggest tech flops, so I decided to jump in and share my own top 10 tech failures of 2010.
10: Google Buzz - Google tried to launch its own social network of sorts, but privacy issues plagued the service with its "automatic follow" algorithm (it ultimately ended up in a Class-action settlement). The service never became a big hit, and most posts to Buzz originated on Twitter. Even Leo Laporte, who used to use Buzz as his main social network over Twitter for a good six months, dumped the service in late August because of its posting problems and the fact that no one even noticed.
9: BlackBerry Torch - The BlackBerry Torch wasn't a bad phone. However, it wasn't the big boost that RIM needed to stop the bleeding of everyone flocking over to iOS and Android. The phone only had a 3.2'' touchscreen, not to mention Blackberry OS 6 hasn't taken off as RIM expected it to. Although it wasn't a bad phone, it wasn't nearly enough for RIM to make some sort of comeback.
8. Palm who? - Palm pretty much disappeared off the radar in the second half of 2010 - even though they were buzzing in the first half. We were all worried about Palm dying off and going bankrupt, but HP came to the rescue and acquired Palm in April. We were promised new Palm stuff: Tablets, phones, Webos 2.0, but it's almost 2011 and the only thing we've seen is a Palm Pre 2(which only has slight improvements from the original Pre) and Webos 2.0, but it's in RTM stages, not general availability. Not sure what's been going on at HP throughout these months, but if they want Webos and Palm phones to continue being players in the market, they better put on their boots in 2011. And no, touchscreen printers don't count.
7. iPhone 4 Antennagate - As an iPhone 4 user, the antennagate problem hasn't affected me personally, so you can scroll back up and not comment "well, the antennagate issue hasn't affected me, so this isn't a failure!". Personally, I find Apple's reaction to the antennagate more of a failure than the antenna issue itself. Apple for almost a month literally denied that the issue itself even existed - until all of the media coverage, which got to the point where tech noobies were discussing antenna issues - got to Steve Jobs and announced a press conference regarding the issues. There, he announced free bumpers for all iPhone users up to and including September 30th. I agreed with the step Jobs took, and the issues certainly didnt hurt Apple's sales (almost 47 million iPhones were sold in 2010), but Apple's initial reaction plus all of the media coverage made it a huge issue.
6. JooJoo - The name itself almost sounds as funny as the sales numbers. The JooJoo, which previously was dubbed the "CrunchPad", which was originally Michael Arrington's idea and teamed up with FusionGarage to make it. After the CrunchPad died off, FusionGarage ran away with it and decided to rebrand it and create a totally new tablet, which ended up in him suing FusionGarage and a whole mess followed thereafter. For a while, the JooJoo was considered vaporware, since it was announced in December of 2009 but no news came thereafter. However, it did start shipping in late March... March 25th to be exact. A week later, this thing everyone called a failure, the iPad, made its release, which pretty much killed any chances of the slow, buggy, and unintuitive JooJoo. It was later confirmed that the JooJoo had 90 preorders, 15 of which were cancelled at a later date.
5. iTunes Ping - "You mean ping.fm"? as most people would jokingly say if anyone asks if people use Ping on a day-to-day basis. Ping was announced by Apple in September in conjunction to iTunes 10. Ping's biggest flaw - the fact you can only use it through iTunes (which many people are not fans of to begin with) or the iOS iTunes app. Also, Ping is only music, not apps, movies, and other stuff. Just music, which, if you ask me, is not the only thing people are interested in when friending other people. I want to know what latest app you downloaded on your iPhone, not your music tastes which could be completely different from mine to begin with. Although it can be a good way to see what new music people are downloading, that's all you can really do.
4. Facebook privacy - Facebook's countless overhauls in 2010 all leaded to privacy issues, and the overhauls in privacy controls really got to people. They were confusing to most, but eventually Facebook got it right. Nonetheless, Facebook's countless blunders in privacy throughout this year have really made people not trust Mark Zuckerberg and his crew.
3. White iPhone 4 - A slew of broken promises by Apple on the white iPhone 4 - delaying it at first to next month when the iPhone 4 originally came out, then "later this year", and now it's apparently delayed to next Spring, which raises the question: Why not just cancel the white iPhone 4 and just focus on a white iPhone 5 when it comes out?
2. Microsoft Kin - The Kin One and Kin Two were announced by Microsoft earlier this year, and supposedly they spent almost $100 million in ad campaigns for the two phones. Six weeks later, Verizon announced that they were sending back all Kins right back to Redmond. There were reports that only 503 sold, and there's no surprise. It was a feature phone that was tied into Verizon's data plans, so in essence, you were paying smartphone monthly rates for a feature phone. Now, the Kin is looking to make a comeback without Verizon's data plans as the ONEm and the TWOm, but for now, it's definitely one of the biggest failures in 2010.
1. McAfee's False Positive - A terrible, terrible software update from McAfee really screwed up computers when it was released in April, which shut down thousands of Windows XP corporate computers around the country. The software flagged a critical system file as a threat to the computer and quarantined it. Oops!
Well, that's the top 10 biggest tech failures of 2010. Have any others that didn't make the list? Disagree with the order? You're welcome to comment below.
Kevin Nunez Dec 29, 2010 at 4:39 PM in Apple, BlackBerry, Facebook, Google, Malware, iPhone, iTunes tagged Apple, Buzz, McAfee, blackberry, facebook, iphone, palm
Reader Comments (4)
I dont think that Ping was a failure... but I completely agree with all of the rest. Lmao, white iPhone.
@Danny Luksa Apple thought everyone would use Ping, but all I see is people's latest purchases - no activity between people.
about the iphone antenna issue, will i have an iphone 4 right now I've been using it for the past 2 months or so and honestly my antenna was perfect and nothing is wrong with it (so i dont know about yours) *(nice blog)
I really like this post, good job!