Time: Vista One of Decade's 10 Biggest Tech Failures
Posted 05/15/09 at 09:48:18 AM by Paul Lilly
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There's still more than seven months left in 2009 for any last minute tech flops, but barring any amendments, Time has posted its list of what it views as the 10 biggest tech failures of the last decade. Compiled in no particular order, Time kicks off the list with Microsoft Vista, pointing out the OS's "underwhelming" user satisfaction and rocky start.
Gateway comes next for its fall from being the No. 3 PC maker (in terms of market share) in the US in 2004, to being acquired by Acer in 2007 for just $710 million.
HD-DVD makes its requisite appearance on the list (we're still bitter over that one), and somewhat surprisingly, YouTube makes an appearance as well based in large part on low estimated revenues.
View the full list here, then hit the jump and tell us what you'd change.
Vista not a failure
Submitted by kirkland81 on Wed, 05/27/2009 - 7:46pm
Vista brought a 64-bit OS into the mainstream.
Plus it brought the computer into the living room as HTPCs.
Also, you can't blame an OS for faulty drivers from manufacturers. I've been running Vista since it was first released and the only errors I've gotten were from driver issues.
Submitted by guardian8xxx on Wed, 05/27/2009 - 9:04am
When discussing whether or not Vista was a failure, I think it's important to consider not just the home & hobby market, but also the business world. An overwhelming majority of medium to large businesses refused to upgrade from XP to Vista. The main problem was application compatibility.
Sure, Vista ran MS Office and Adobe and even QuickBooks. But outside of these staples were the home-grown applications businesses used on a day-to-day basis. When they tried porting them to Vista, the apps wouldn't work. Businesses had a choice to make: Should they spend a gargantuan amount of time and money re-coding their apps just so they could spend more time and money deploying Vista? Or should they stick with XP Pro, which was working just fine? As Harvey "Mr. White" Keitel once said, "That ain't no choice at all."
In this sense, Vista was a failure. The fact that a "virtual XP" machine will be included in the Pro, Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows 7 for running XP-only apps can be interpreted as Microsoft's acknowledgement of Vista's shortcoming.
which is really only a
Submitted by nekollx on Wed, 05/27/2009 - 9:29am
which is really only a upgrade to Compatibility mode in Vista....
Submitted by pastorbob on Tue, 05/26/2009 - 2:56pm
I am still running Windows XP without any problems or issues. In fact the last time I had a system lockup was with Windows Me several years ago.
Several people I know run Vista because that is what their new computers came preloaded with and they hate it. The school system for which I work still runs Windows XP without any problems.
I saw no reason to buy Vista when it came out and I still see no reason to buy it. However I did download and install Windows 7 RC (dual boot on an XP system) and it is beautiful. I anxiously await its final release. If Microsoft ends support for XP I will run Windows 7, but I will not buy Vista under any circumstances.
Submitted by majorsuave on Sun, 05/24/2009 - 7:29am
"To make the list, a product had to be widely recognized and widely
available to customers. It had to be aimed at a large global market. It
had to be technologically equal to or superior to its competition. It
had to be a product or new company that had the possibility of bringing
in billions of dollars in revenue based on the sales of similar or
competing products. Finally, it had to clearly miss the mark of living
up to the potential that its creators expected, and that the public and
press were lead to believe was possible."
Am I the only one surprised the PS3 isn't on this list? Despite the win of BD over HD-DVD, the PS3 did not manage to bring pennies in yet
Submitted by Germ on Sun, 05/17/2009 - 4:59am
Zune made the list (and probably rightfully so).
I LOVE the Zune Pass and The Social. It's a DAMNED SHAME that Microsoft isn't supporting Zune as they ought to...
Submitted by MeTo on Sat, 05/16/2009 - 12:50pm
google pays $1.65 billion for you tube that loses 450 million a year they need to turn that around. Perhaps they should charge to upload video.
Linux Mint,Duel boot/Vista,AMD Athlon+ x2 5600,3 Gig ram,500 Gig HDD,ATI 1300 Video.
Submitted by whiplash55 on Sat, 05/16/2009 - 9:46am
Had it since May 2007 and have never regretted it. Time Magazine will be out of business in 10 years so maybe they should worry about themselves.
Satellite radio isn't a failure and isn't going anywhere.
Submitted by squarebab on Sat, 05/16/2009 - 9:05am
Satellite radio is a fantastic product and shouldn't be considered a failure just because the competition wants to see it fail. The fact that the established media's influence in government held up the Sirius -XM merger for over a year, and cost both sat-radio companies millions, speaks volumes about why Sirius-XM was chosen for their article.
Satellite radio isn't going anywhere. The big boys merely want to see Sirius-XM fail financially so they can add sat-radio to their portfolio. In fact, the radio holdings of Time-Warner are on the light side, so maybe they are hoping to acquire Sirius-XM for themselves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Time_Warner
How much validity can you
Submitted by Geeksquadmyss on Sat, 05/16/2009 - 5:05am
How much validity can you give the article though? They had youtube on there for fuck sake! How is the biggest video sharing site a failure? Its not because its flawed or is bad, its because wall street doesnt have there hands in it and isnt make 10's of millions off its users. The whole list is a joke because all there doing for there list is using random facts like MS announcing profit loss, is it vista or the global recession?
Vista is as good as the person using it makes it. I havent had any problems with since i got it on my laptop 2 years ago.
you should actually read the time artical
Submitted by jihnn on Sat, 05/16/2009 - 8:03am
Credit Suisse estimated that YouTube will lose $470 million this year
primarily due to the costs of the storage and bandwidth required to run
the website.
that is from the time artical and they site more problems with utube duhhhh
know what you are talking about
Submitted by jihnn on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 8:12pm
vista fanboys
your moment in time.......
you paid your hard earned cash for your copy of vista...... and of course you never make mistakes.... so it is the best
you are all missing the point it is only 1 of the top 10 biggest goofs no one said it was the biggest.
chin up you still have some pride
all i have ever said about vista is that there was ... no ..nada...any compeling reason to switch from xp
now i am glad i didn't pay my hard earned cash for one of the biggest tech failures in the last 10 years
Submitted by Saiyan Monkey on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 8:17pm
Amen.
Consider Vista as the ME of
Submitted by bigtoyota479 on Sun, 05/17/2009 - 10:06am
Consider Vista as the ME of windows. They had to do something. Windows 7 will be the new XP. I've been running it since beta, and it's everything Vista could have and should have been. Vista is nothing more than a stepping stone, just like ME was.
Submitted by tehR0XX0Rz on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 4:51pm
What is this "We Are the World" crap? Tree hugging for sake of a computer OS? Really?
Oh, and who are the twits taking Vista bashing personally, as if it were an attack against their manhood? Are these bitter Microsoft drones who wasted their youth coding that pile of crap? Good God, get a freakin' grip....
Microsoft's strong-arming of consumers over Vista pissed me off: Plans to throttle and kill availability of XP; DirectX 10 only for Vista; high-profile games only for Vista. Vista sucked and couldn't sell itself; Microsoft was quick to open its old bag of dirty tricks.
It was slow, bloated, and buggy as crap. Fixing it wasn't part of some brilliant marketing scheme; it was yet another desperate attempt to polish a turd.
Submitted by nekollx on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 4:58pm
and i'd rather have a new OS fine tuned to all the technology, like oh 64 bit, that has progress since the turn of the mellinium instead of trying to put new shoes on a ten year old horse (XP) and expecting throubred performance.
Submitted by almax on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 2:19pm
Is the real failure the lack of technical aptitude of those who say an OS sucks, or the fact that they mistakenly think they have any?
Submitted by hershey101 on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 1:41pm
The only Vista sucess I felt was Windows DreamScene for Ultimate. Vista was released way too early, and now that they have 7 RC out... I am pissed it doesn't come with DreamScene.
Submitted by Morete on Sun, 05/17/2009 - 9:00am
Hershey101.... a great substitute for Windows DreamScene is the VLC's Media Player desktop video wallpaper.
VLC Media Player 0.9.9 is a free and open source cross-platform media player. It supports a large number of media formats, without the need for additional codecs. It features a complete streaming server with extended features (video on demand and on the fly transcoding). Best of all, it's free.
Pick any video you wish to have (downloaded onto your desktop or by playing a DVD from your CD/DVD drive), then start up VLC Media Player and choose "play video as desktop background wallpaper" and the video will be played/looped on your desktop. The playback is in high definition and excellent sound quality. It works great with Windows 64-bit O.S. and Linux.
Code Name Long Horn
Submitted by joeyjr on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 1:16pm
Bill Gates stated that were not there yet when speaking about Windows Vista on TV.
Where are we and where are we going with O/S's, I don't Know. If we reach for Mars but only get
to the Moon, is that a failure or a goal not reached yet. In the fast pace and changing world of computers
in the past 20 years we went from going online to a very limited modem based bulleten boards to the high speed world wide web of seemingly endless knowlage at our finger tips.
Windows was a big part of it. When Vsta was being created Microsoft had to dig deep and create a new O/S.
I remember watching webcasts about how much work went into Vista's developement. I just hope in the evilution of computers we can all learn to get along. The whole world is in trouble now and we all need to work togather and get with the program. Just like programers and cridics need to follow the rules of the Vista programming and stop blaming Microsoft for a falled product. Nothing is perfect. but I hope we get there, were ever that is!
joeyjr
completely agree
Submitted by johnny3144 on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 2:30pm
i completely agree with you. i wont' call vista the biggest failure of the decade. i mean lots of stuff in windows 7 is based off vista, and if windows 7 turn out to be awesome, vista hasto be the reason. vista tested the water and showed microsoft what works, and what don't. vista didn't fail completely, it discovered the stuff that dont' work well. i mean, when you try to evelutionize something, it's not gonna be done in one step and turn out perfect. i think vista might turn out to be a great success in the long run.
personally i love vista, and think it is a great OS, but that just my opinion. i perfer vista over xp.
Well you can at least say
Submitted by MAXPCreader07 on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 4:09pm
Well you can at least say Vista was a mistake, and Microsoft learned from that mistake and made Windows 7.
Yes, Fail
Submitted by Bender2000 on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 12:24pm
Vista would be a success except that with Win 7, MS is burying it. Its a case where it can't shake the perception, so they're going to try something else. The Mojave Experiment illustrated how the perception had become the reality for Vista. No matter how good it iis no one will believe it.
Compare.
Submitted by AntiHero on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 11:59am
How many people were skeptical about changing to XP when it first released? MANY wanted to stick to 98, because it was..SURVEY SAYS! "Familiar" Same thing with Vista. I have no issues with Vista, it's just unfamiliar. Sure it had problems on release, but what OS by Microsoft didn't? That's what service packs are for. Windows 7 is great for a release candidate, and their best RC yet, if you take into consideration you can't play games for the most part, laptops have driver issues, and some programs run wonky. Microsoft does shit the way they do because they can clearly get away with it, without loss of market share, because everyone RELIES on Windows. 90% of todays programs are Windows Only, so really, what do you think Microsoft thinks in this situation? Release it when it acts and runs shitty, then fix it in time to gain credibility for being able to, and showing the initiative to fix problems they probably knew about very early off. They do it as clever marketing, and it works.
I don't like Microsoft, I associate with it.
Vista
Submitted by Zazubovich on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 11:49am
I used Vista on a Toshiba bargain laptop when it first came out. Even with a 1.8 Core II and only a gig of memory it did everything it needed to do well with Vista. There are some things I didn't like about (security nagger, flashy interface) it but thanks to MPC I could fix those things and move on with life. My new rig runs Vista 64 and aside from game compatibility issues (which XP has as well) it goes great guns. Microsoft may have screwed up a lot of things (flight simulator, Mechwarrior games) it does more right than Apple and is easier to deal with than Linux can be.
Submitted by neo1piv14 on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 11:22am
This just sounds like that same type of study that says Second Life is played more than every game out there but WoW. It's like they polled a bunch of people who only knew what they heard in rumors and then decided on that. Everyone that doesn't use it says it sucks, and those that do use it and believe the rumors will find any reason to knock it. Every time my roomie's computer crashes, he's like "f*** Vista it sucks so bad," but when it happens on his XP laptop I made for him, it's no big deal. It's just like the placebo effect, and I'm betting most people are just mad at MS because of the Mujave experiment.
Submitted by HokieTechie on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 11:15am
The problem with the Time article is that it is really the big failures of the last few years, not the entire decade. The entire decade includes the collapse of the dot com bubble.
On this scale, YouTube is a success story, because they got bought by a big guy for a premium price. Compare this to Beyond.Com and all those other companies that just plain evaporated, or even the big players that collapsed into insignificance and got bought at discount, like SGI, Lucent, Nortel, et cetera. And, let's not forget America Online . . .
Windows Vista is a failure, but if the timescale is the entire decade, then we have to talk about Windows Me. Windows Me is ten times the disaster of Windows Vista.
Microsoft Windows Security, collectively, belongs on the list. All the viruses, worms, and just plain stupid design decisions (macros in word documents, automatic opening of attachments, ActiveX) were a collective disaster for the IT community and the world.
Submitted by daveyboy062 on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 9:55am
Vista? Really?? Zune maybe.. Sorry but i'll never go back to XP. Besides you can't run tri or quad sli on XP ;-b
Submitted by konata on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 10:56am
I think they are referring to how unpopular it is because of how buggged the first release was, so they are not talking about Vista SP1.
Submitted by nekollx on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 10:58am
which is just inane
i mean it's still Frigging Vista. if they won't count sp1 then they cant coutn XP SP1-3 either.
How do I Hit the JUMP?
Submitted by ZayLay on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 8:50am
How do I Hit the JUMP?
YOUTUBE?! FAIL?!
Submitted by Havok on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 7:26am
Well, maybe they're kinda right on that one. Afterall, no REAL ads or money are really made there, but... if you have an idea, see it through and it becomes a household name around the world, then I guess you can't consider it a failure.
Oh wait, Vistas a household name
OMGWTFBBQ
Submitted by nekollx on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 8:03am
Let's see
Windows ME
not even being sold or mentioned any more
Vista
running on eveyr new computer made since 2008
yup can tittal see Vista as a fail
[/sarcasm]
Submitted by Digital-Storm on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 9:35am
I don't think Vista is a failure. The failure, is the people that pass on rumors and deception when they havn't even used a fully updated version of Vista.
Submitted by MeTo on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 9:53am
Say what you want. I have Vista home p 32 and 64 and when they launched they were "BAD" and that is what gave Vista a bad RAP. It was not people that pass on rumors and deception. When Vista launched it was a big fat turkey. It took at least 1 year to get the bugs worked out thats not the peoples fault its Microsofts fault they "SHOULD" not have released it till it was ready.
Linux Mint,Duel boot/Vista,AMD Athlon+ x2 5600,3 Gig ram,500 Gig HDD,ATI 1300 Video.
Submitted by N25PHILLY on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 12:31pm
I've used Vista on a daily basis since the first rc, and it was never bad. I remember all the complaints when Vista came out and a lot of it was BS and trying to blame Microsoft for not knowing what they were doing. So many people based their complainst for a long time on RC versions. When Microsoft phases out Vista I wonder what people are going to blame for all their stupid.
Submitted by daveyboy062 on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 9:56am
So was XP's launch.. no one wanted to upgrade from 2000 or 98..
Exactly
Submitted by digital demon on Sat, 05/16/2009 - 12:43pm
XP was just as big of a piece of shit when it launched as Vista was. Only now there are millions more people with computers to have witnessed Vista's early struggles. It makes me laugh to see so much hate thrown at Vista, when everyone's darling, XP, sucked just as bad or worse when it came out. I've used Vista for over 2 years and love it more than I ever did XP. The perception is thay Vista is a slow, buggy, hard to use OS, which just goes to show what perceprion really amounts to...not much.
Submitted by MeTo on Fri, 05/15/2009 - 9:19pm
I did not get xp till SP1. I did not get vista till sp1 and if i get Win7 i will wait till SP1 is out. I have learned over the years to wait till they fixit. I have had DOS 6/win 3.1,win 95,win 95b,win 95c,win 98,win 98se,win mel. I would rush out and get the latest one only to be disapointed. Now i wait till they fixit.
Linux Mint,Duel boot/Vista,AMD Athlon+ x2 5600,3 Gig ram,500 Gig HDD,ATI 1300 Video.
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