the 25 worst tech products EVAR.

from http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20060526/tc_pcworld/125772

1. America Online (1989-2006)
How do we loathe AOL? Let us count the ways. Since America Online emerged
from the belly of a BBS called Quantum "PC-Link" in 1989, users have
suffered through awful software, inaccessible dial-up numbers, rapacious
marketing, in-your-face advertising, questionable billing practices,
inexcusably poor customer service, and enough spam to last a lifetime. And
all the while, AOL remained more expensive than its major competitors. This
lethal combination earned the world's biggest ISP the top spot on our list
of bottom feeders.

AOL succeeded initially by targeting newbies, using brute-force marketing
techniques. In the 90s you couldn't open a magazine (PC World included) or
your mailbox without an AOL disk falling out of it. This carpet-bombing
technique yielded big numbers: At its peak, AOL claimed 34 million
subscribers worldwide, though it never revealed how many were just using up
their free hours.

Once AOL had you in its clutches, escaping was notoriously difficult.
Several states sued the service, claiming that it continued to bill
customers after they had requested cancellation of their subscriptions. In
August 2005, AOL paid a $1.25 million fine to the state of New York and
agreed to change its cancellation policies--but the agreement covered only
people in New York.

Ultimately the Net itself--which AOL subscribers were finally able to access
in 1995-- made the service's shortcomings painfully obvious. Prior to that,
though AOL offered plenty of its own online content, it walled off the
greater Internet. Once people realized what content was available elsewhere
on the Net, they started wondering why they were paying AOL. And as America
moved to broadband, many left their sluggish AOL accounts behind. AOL is now
busy rebranding itself as a content provider, not an access service.

Though America Online has shown some improvement lately--with better
browsers and e-mail tools, fewer obnoxious ads, scads of broadband content,
and innovative features such as parental controls--it has never overcome the
stigma of being the online service for people who don't know any better.

2. RealNetworks RealPlayer (1999)
Real annoying: The RealPlayer of the late 90s worked fine, but its entourage
included aggressive installations, uninvited popups, and insidious Registry
rewrites.In order for your browser to display the following paragraph this
site must download new software; please wait. Sorry, the requested codec was
not found. Please upgrade your system.

A frustrating inability to play media files--due in part to constantly
changing file formats--was only part of Real's problem. RealPlayer also had
a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your
PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with
your Windows Registry, popping up annoying "messages" that were really just
advertisements, and so on.

And some of RealNetworks' habits were even more troubling. For example,
shortly after RealJukeBox appeared in 1999, security researcher Richard M.
Smith discovered that the software was assigning a unique ID to each user
and phoning home with the titles of media files played on it--while failing
to disclose any of this in its privacy policy. Turns out that RealPlayer G2,
which had been out since the previous year, also broadcast unique IDs. After
a tsunami of bad publicity and a handful of lawsuits, Real issued a patch to
prevent the software from tracking users' listening habits. But less than a
year later, Real was in hot water again for tracking the habits of its
RealDownload download-management software customers.

To be fair, RealNetworks deserves credit for offering a free media player
and for hanging in there against Microsoft's relentless onslaught. We
appreciate the fact that there's an alternative to Windows Media Player; we
just wish it were a better one.

3. Syncronys SoftRAM (1995)
Back in 1995, when RAM cost $30 to $50 a megabyte and Windows 95 apps were
demanding more and more of it, the idea of "doubling" your system memory by
installing a $30 piece of software sounded mighty tempting. The 700,000
users who bought Syncronys's SoftRAM products certainly thought so.
Unfortunately, that's not what they got.

It turns out that all SoftRAM really did was expand the size of Windows'
hard disk cache--something a moderately savvy user could do without any
extra software in about a minute. And even then, the performance boost was
negligible. The FTC dubbed Syncronys's claims "false and misleading," and
the company was eventually forced to pull the product from the market and
issue refunds. After releasing a handful of other bad Windows utilities, the
company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1999. It will not be missed.

4. Microsoft Windows Millennium (2000)
This might be the worst version of Windows ever released--or, at least,
since the dark days of Windows 2.0. Windows Millennium Edition (aka Me, or
the Mistake Edition) was Microsoft's follow-up to Windows 98 SE for home
users. Shortly after Me appeared in late 2000, users reported problems
installing it, getting it to run, getting it to work with other hardware or
software, and getting it to stop running. Aside from that, Me worked great.

To its credit, Me introduced features later made popular by Windows XP, such
as system restore. Unfortunately, it could also restore files you never
wanted to see again, like viruses that you'd just deleted. Forget Y2K; this
was the real millennium bug.

5. Sony BMG Music CDs (2005)
When you stick a music CD into your computer, you shouldn't have to worry
that it will turn your PC into a hacker's plaything. But that's exactly what
Sony BMG Music Entertainment's music discs did in 2005. The discs'
harebrained copy protection software installed a rootkit that made it
invisible even to antispyware or antivirus software. Any moderately clever
cyber attacker could then use the same rootkit to hide, say, a keylogger to
capture your bank account information, or a remote-access Trojan to turn
your PC into a zombie.

Security researcher Dan Kaminsky estimated that more than half a million
machines were infected by the rootkit. After first downplaying the problem
and then issuing a "fix" that made things worse, Sony BMG offered to refund
users' money and replace the faulty discs. Since then, the record company
has been sued up the wazoo; a federal court judge recently approved a
settlement in the national class action suit. Making your machine totally
vulnerable to attacks--isn't that Microsoft's job?

6. Disney The Lion King CD-ROM (1994)
Few products get accused of killing Christmas for thousands of kids, but
that fate befell Disney's first CD-ROM for Windows. The problem: The game
relied on Microsoft's new WinG graphics engine, and video card drivers had
to be hand-tuned to work with it, says Alex St. John. He's currently CEO of
game publisher WildTangent, but in the early 1990s he was Microsoft's first
"game evangelist."

In late 1994, Compaq released a Presario whose video drivers hadn't been
tested with WinG. When parents loaded the Lion King disc into their new
Presarios on Christmas morning, many children got their first glimpse of the
Blue Screen of Death. But this sad story has a happy ending. The WinG
debacle led Microsoft to develop a more stable and powerful graphics engine
called DirectX. And the team behind DirectX went on to build the
Xbox--restoring holiday joy for a new generation of kids.

7. Microsoft Bob (1995)
No list of the worst of the worst would be complete without Windows' idiot
cousin, Bob. Designed as a "social" interface for Windows 3.1, Bob featured
a living room filled with clickable objects, and a series of cartoon
"helpers" like Chaos the Cat and Scuzz the Rat that walked you through a
small suite of applications.

Fortunately, Bob was soon buried in the avalanche of hype surrounding
Windows 95, though some of the cartoons lived on to annoy users of Microsoft
Office and Windows XP (Clippy the animated paper clip, anyone?).

Mostly, Bob raised more questions than it answered. Like, had anyone at
Microsoft actually used Bob? Did they think anyone else would? And did they
deliberately make Bob's smiley face logo look like Bill Gates, or was that
just an accident?

8. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)
Full of features, easy to use, and a virtual engraved invitation to hackers
and other digital delinquents, Internet Explorer 6.x might be the least
secure software on the planet. How insecure? In June 2004, the U.S. Computer
Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) took the unusual step of urging PC users to
use a browser--any browser--other than IE. Their reason: IE users who
visited the wrong Web site could end up infected with the Scob or
Download.Ject keylogger, which could be used to steal their passwords and
other personal information. Microsoft patched that hole, and the next one,
and the one after that, and so on, ad infinitum.

To be fair, its ubiquity paints a big red target on it--less popular apps
don't draw nearly as much fire from hackers and the like. But here's hoping
that Internet Explorer 7 springs fewer leaks than its predecessor.

9. Pressplay and MusicNet 2002
It's time to die: MusicNet's entries expired after 30 days' use, after which
each file you wanted to renew had to be redownloaded as a new
selection.Digital music is such a great idea that even record companies
finally, begrudgingly accepted it after years of implacable opposition. In
2002, two online services backed by music industry giants proposed giving
consumers a legitimate alternative to illegal file sharing. But the
services' stunningly brain-dead features showed that the record companies
still didn't get it.

PressPlay charged $15 per month for the right to listen to 500 low-quality
audio streams, download 50 audio tracks, and burn 10 tracks to CD. It didn't
sound like an awful deal, until you found out that not every song could be
downloaded, and that you couldn't burn more than two tracks from the same
artist. MusicNet cost $10 per month for 100 streamed songs and 100
downloads, but each downloaded audio file expired after only 30 days, and
every time you renewed the song it counted against your allotment.

Neither service's paltry music selections could compete against the virtual
feast available through illicit means. Several billion illegal downloads
later, an outside company--Apple, with its iTunes Music Service--showed the
record companies the right way to market digital music.

10. Ashton-Tate dBASE IV (1988)
In the early days of the PC, dBASE was synonymous with database. By the late
1980s, Ashton-Tate's flagship product owned nearly 70 percent of the PC
database market. But dBASE IV changed all that. Impossibly slow and filled
with more bugs than a rain forest, the $795 program was an unmitigated
disaster.
Within a year of its release, Ashton-Tate's market share had plummeted to
the low 40s. A patched-up version, dBASE IV 1.1, appeared two years later,
but by then it was too late. In July 1991 the company merged with Borland,
which eventually discontinued dBASE in favor of its own database products
and sold the rights in 1999 to a new company, dataBased Intelligence, Inc.

11. Priceline Groceries and Gas (2000)
The name-your-price model worked for airline tickets, rental cars, and
hotels--why not groceries and gas? Unfortunately, even Priceline
spokescaptain William Shatner couldn't keep these services in orbit. Grocery
shoppers could find real discounts bidding for products online, but only if
they weren't picky about brands and were willing to follow Byzantine rules
on what they could buy and how they paid for them.

Fuel customers had to pay for petrol online, wait for a Priceline gas card
to arrive in the mail, and then find a local station that would honor it--a
lot of hassle to save a few pennies per gallon. In less than a year,
WebHouse Club, the Priceline affiliate that ran both programs, ran out of
gas--and cash--and was forced to shut down.

12. PointCast Network (1996)
Push, push, push: PointCast tried to produce customized content by dial-up,
but the delivery systems of the mid-90s couldn't bear it. Back in the
mid-90s, so-called "push" technology was all the rage. In place of surfing
the Web for news and information, push apps like the PointCast Network would
deliver customized information directly to your desktop--along with a
healthy serving of ads. But push quickly turned into a drag, as PointCast's
endless appetite for bandwidth overwhelmed dial-up connections and clogged
corporate networks.

In addition, PointCast's proprietary screensaver/browser had a nasty habit
of commandeering your computer and not giving it back. Companies began to
ban the application from offices and cubicles, and push got shoved out the
door. Ironically, the idea of push has made a comeback of sorts via
low-bandwidth RSS feeds. But too late for PointCast, which sent out its last
broadcast in early 2000.

13. IBM PCjr. (1984)
Talk about your *** offspring. IBM's attempt to build an inexpensive
computer for homes and schools was an orphan almost from the start. The
infamous "Chiclet" keyboard on the PCjr. was virtually unusable for typing,
and the computer couldn't run much of the software written for its hugely
successful parent, the IBM PC.

A price tag nearly twice that of competing home systems from Commodore and
Atari didn't improve the situation. Two years after Junior's splashy debut,
IBM sent him to his room and never let him out again.

14. Gateway 2000 10th Anniversary PC (1995)
After a decade as one of the computer industry's major PC builders, the
folks at Gateway 2000 wanted to celebrate--not just by popping a few corks,
but by offering a specially configured system to show some customer
appreciation.

But instead of Cristal champagne, buyers got Boone's Farm--the so-called 6X
CD-ROM spun at 4X or slower (a big performance hit in 1995), the video card
was a crippled version of what people thought they were getting, and the
surround-sound speakers weren't actually surround-capable. Perhaps Gateway
was sticking to the traditional gift for a tenth anniversary: It's tin, not
gold.

15. Iomega Zip Drive (1998)
Finger, finger, trigger, trigger: Not every Zip Drive was suicidal, but
those that were took your data with them when they
self-destructed.Click-click-click. That was the sound of data dying on
thousands of Iomega Zip drives. Though Iomega sold tens of millions of Zip
and Jaz drives that worked flawlessly, thousands of the drives died
mysteriously, issuing a clicking noise as the drive head became misaligned
and clipped the edge of the removable media, rendering any data on that disc
permanently inaccessible.

Iomega largely ignored the problem until angry customers filed a class
action suit in 1998, which the company settled three years later by offering
rebates on future products. And the Zip disk, once the floppy's heir
apparent, has largely been eclipsed by thumb drives and cheaper, faster,
more capacious rewritable CDs and DVDs.

16. Comet Systems Comet Cursor (1997)
Curse you, Comet Cursor, for your innovative use of programming code to spy
on users. Thank the Comet Cursor for introducing spyware to an ungrateful
nation. This simple program had one purpose: to change your mouse cursor
into Bart Simpson, Dilbert, or one of thousands of other cutesy icons while
you were visiting certain Web sites. But Comet had other habits that were
not so cute.

For example, it assigned your computer a unique ID and phoned home whenever
you visited a Comet-friendly Web site. It secretly installed itself into
Internet Explorer when you visited certain sites or installed other free
software like RealPlayer 7 (yet another reason to loathe RealPlayer). Some
versions would hijack IE's search assistant or cause the browser to crash.

Though Comet's founders insisted that the program was not spyware, thousands
of users disagreed. Comet Systems was bought by pay-per-click ad company
FindWhat in 2004; earlier this year, Comet's cursor software scurried down a
mouse hole, never to be seen again.

17. Apple Macintosh Portable (1989)
Some buildings are portable, if you have access to a Freightliner.
Stonehenge is a portable sun dial, if you have enough people on hand to get
things rolling. And in 1989, Apple offered a "portable" Macintosh--a
4-inch-thick, 16-pound beast that severely strained the definition of
"laptop"--and the aching backs of its porters.
Huge lead-acid batteries contributed to its weight and bulk; the batteries
were especially important because Portable wouldn't run on AC power. Some
computers are affordable, too; the Portable met that description only if you
had $6500 of extra cash on hand.

18. IBM Deskstar 75GXP (2000)
Dead as a womp rat: The Deskstar 75GXP had one notable vulnerability--it
tended to crash and die without warning.Fast, big, and highly unreliable,
this 75GB hard drive was quickly dubbed the "Deathstar" for its habit of
suddenly failing and taking all of your data with it.

About a year after IBM released the Deskstar, users filed a class action
suit, alleging that IBM had misled customers about its reliability. IBM
denied all liability, but last June it agreed to pay $100 to Deskstar owners
whose drives and data had departed their desks and gone on to a celestial
reward. Well before that, IBM had washed its hands of the Deathstar, selling
its hard drive division to Hitachi in 2002.

19. OQO Model 1 (2004)
The 14-ounce OQO Model 1 billed itself as the "world's smallest Windows XP
computer"--and that was a big part of its problem. You needed a magnifying
glass to read icons or text on its 5-by-3-inch screen, and the hide-away
keypad was too tiny to accommodate even two adult fingers.

The Model 1 also ran hot to the touch, and at $1900+ it could easily burn a
hole in your wallet. Good things often come in small packages, but not this
time.

20. DigitalConvergence CueCat (2000)
Appearing at the tail end of the dot com craze, the CueCat was supposed to
make it easier for magazine and newspaper readers to find advertisers' Web
sites (because apparently it was too challenging to type www.pepsi.com into
your browser).

The company behind the device, DigitalConvergence, mailed hundreds of
thousands of these cat-shaped bar-code scanners to subscribers of magazines
and newspapers. Readers were supposed to connect the device to a computer,
install some software, scan the barcodes inside the ads, and be whiskered
away to advertisers' websites. Another "benefit": The company used the
device to gather personally identifiable information about its users.

The CueCat's maker was permanently declawed in 2001, but not before it may
have accidentally exposed its user database to hackers.

21. Eyetop Wearable DVD Player (2004)
Some things just aren't meant to be done while walking or driving, and one
of them is watching DVDs. Unfortunately, that message was lost on
Eyetop.net, makers of the Eyetop Wearable DVD Player.

This system consisted of a standard portable DVD player attached to a pair
of heavy-duty shades that had a tiny 320-by-240-pixel LCD embedded in the
right eyepiece. You were supposed to carry the DVD player and battery pack
in an over-the shoulder sling, put on the eyeglasses, and then... squint. Or
maybe wear a patch on your left eye as you walked and watched at the same
time.

Up close, the LCD was supposed to simulate a 14-inch screen. Unfortunately,
the only thing the Eyetop stimulated was motion sickness.

22. Apple Pippin @World (1996)
Maybe if they'd called it the Winesap instead of the Pippen... Nah. This
game console was slower than a worm through a Granny Smith.Before Xbox,
before PlayStation, before DreamCast, there was Apple's Pippin. Wha-huh?
That's right--Apple had an Internet-capable game console that connected to
your TV. But it ran on a weak PowerPC processor and came with a puny
14.4-kbps modem, so it was stupendously slow offline and online.

Then, too, it was based on the Mac OS, so almost no games were available for
it. And it cost nearly $600--nearly twice as much as other, far more
powerful game consoles. Underpowered, overpriced, and underutilized--that
pretty much describes everything that came out of Apple in the mid-90s.

23. Free PCs (1999)
In the late 90s, companies competed to dangle free PCs in front of you: All
you had to do was sign up, and a PC would eventually show up at your door.
But one way or another. there was always a catch: You had to sign up for a
long-term ISP agreement, or tolerate an endless procession of Web ads, or
surrender reams of personal information. Free-PC.com may have been the
creepiest of them all. First you filled out an extensive questionnaire on
your income, interests, racial and marital status, and more. Then you had to
spend at least 10 hours a week on the PC and at least 1 hour surfing the Web
using Free-PC's ISP.

In return you got a low-end Compaq Presario with roughly a third of the
screen covered in ads. And while you watched the PC (and the ads), Free-PC
watched you--recording where you surfed, what software you used, and who
knows what else.

We can't say whether this would have led to some Big Brotherish nightmare,
because within a year Free-PC.com merged with eMachines. By then, other
vendors had similarly concluded that "free" computers just didn't pay.

24. DigiScents iSmell (2001)
Few products literally stink, but this one did--or at least it would have,
had it progressed beyond the prototype stage.

In 2001, DigiScents unveiled the iSmell, a shark-fin-shaped gizmo that
plugged into your PC's USB port and wafted appropriate scents as you surfed
smell-enabled Web sites--say, perfume as you were browsing Chanel.com, or
cheese doodles at Frito-Lay.com. But skeptical users turned up their noses
at the idea, making the iSmell the ultimate in vaporware.

25. Sharp RD3D Notebook (2004)
Disorientation, discomfort, dysphoria: Sharp's notebook was first to market
with 3D that hurts.As the first "autostereo" 3D notebook, Sharp's RD3D was
supposed to display 3D images without requiring the use of funny glasses.
But "auto-headache" was more like it, as the RD3D was painful to look at.

When you pressed the button to enable 3D mode, the notebook's performance
slowed, and the 3D effect was noticeable only within a very narrow
angle--and if you moved your head, it disappeared. Maybe the funny glasses
weren't so bad after all.


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