According to well-respected Time's website, the world's greatest tech failures of the last decade include Windows Vista, Palm and, believe it or not, YouTube.
Now the list, assembled by 24/7 Wall St, documents what are called 'colossal failures' picked with a number of criteria which seem to largely boil down to "missing the mark of living up to the potential that its creators expected, and that the public and press were lead to believe was possible."
That's right – it's a seemingly arbitrary list that has some fairly non-offensive failures (who can disagree with Zune or Segway?) and some that, well, perplex.
YouTube is included in the list by dint of losing a lot of money. "YouTube is big, but that has not made it a success," says the author.
Harsh but unfair?
Of course, you would be entitled to point out that, considering it is one of the most trafficked sites in the world, considering it is still growing and considering it is slowly moving towards a more profitable model, writing it off at this stage as a "colossal tech failure" would seem a little bit, well, premature.
Ditto Palm, which has, truth been told, made a terrible mess of things since its Pilot became the gadget de jour a few years ago.
Indeed, Palm's failure to compete with RIM in a market it once dominated is ripe for criticism – but saying that the company has failed to live up to its potential seems a little cruel considering it is still very much battling back.
Pre-mature criticism
Indeed, with the Palm Pre slated to arrive in the summer – and having enough X-factor to leave the TechRadar mobiles' expert frothing at the mouth (more than normal, anyway) – it could yet prove to be just wrong.
It would probably be fair to say that if the list had been assembled in 1995, for instance, the 'colossal tech failures' might well have included Apple; a company that was in the doldrums and still without its figurehead.
So have a heart Time; writing lists of colossal failures before they have even finished seems a little bit spurious, like you were trying to be controversial and just came off a little bit snide.
Your comments (1) Click to add a new comment
mobius
May 27th 2009
1. I think this list is mostly lazy journalism as demonstrated by the easy way out of bandwagon Microsoft bashing.
I would disagree with Zune being in the list, it doesn't even meet Time's own criteria for the list (global availability). It has yet to even be launched outside the US and Canada so I'd say it's way too premature for this as well to call it a biggest tech failure of the decade
And how can Vista be called a failure? It's still got a huge market share and growing constantly (3 times the share of Mac OS). It may not have done as well as expected but that's not in itself synonymous with failure, if any Windows version were to go on the list of worst in the last decade surely it should be Windows ME?
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