I've been reading about VNUNet's choice of the top ten most disappointing technologies - stuff that really didn't deliver. I'm sitting here typing with a wireless keyboard and mouse talking to my Mac by Bluetooth stunned that they chose Bluetooth as one of them, and enough Linux addicts have Tweeted about Ubuntu to suggest they're wrong about that one too. We'll all have different perspectives but here are my top ten (there is some overlap) - you can compare with theirs or just argue about your own.
1. Voice control: It just doesn't work. It doesn't like accents, it doesn't like names, it doesn't like doing what it's supposed to.
2. Intel Mac: If it's not going to recognise all the peripherals, if you're still going to find some things that won't work with the Mac at all, why bother?
3. Facebook 'games': OK, FB's massively powerful and people love it, but there's still an awful lot of junk on it. Only this morning I was being chomped by a zombie, it tells me. I mean: why..?
4. Zunes: Like VNUNet I'd point to the zune as a flop for the moment - purely because it's been 2.5 years and it still hasn't schlepped to Europe.
5. Handwriting recognition: Absolutely hates my handwriting. End of.
6. The NeXT cube: Remember that? Steve Jobs leaves Apple and this new box is going to be the best system anywhere in the...er...oh, they've stopped making them.
7. RockR Phones: The iTunes compatible phone before the iPhone. Yicch.
8. Cuil: The search engine that was going to eclipse Google. Go ahead, look it up, it was really hyped - but I'll bet you look it up on Google.
9. Web authoring packages: Now this is going to be a little hypocritical, but I see a lot of packages that enable you to put together competent-looking websites in a very short time. They're great for small businesses - who then want to put in some tags and stuff for SEO and find, what do you know, that they have to start all over again because the packages won't accommodate them.
10. Internet dependency. OK, it's not strictly a technology but the result of technology, and believe me when my Internet connection went down for an hour and a half this morning I knew all about being hooked...
