The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

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dipdude

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These products are so bad, they belong in the high-tech hall of shame.

At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But it's the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shriveled, and that make tech editors cry out, "What have I done to deserve this?"

Still, even the worst products deserve recognition (or deprecation). So as we put together our list of World Class winners for 2006, we decided also to spotlight the 25 worst tech products that have been released since PC World began publishing nearly a quarter-century ago.

The Complete List of Losers

  • America Online (1989-2006)

    [*]RealNetworks RealPlayer (1999)

    [*]Syncronys SoftRAM (1995)

    [*]Microsoft Windows Millennium (2000)

    [*]Sony BMG Music CDs (2005)

    [*]Disney The Lion King CD-ROM (1994)

    [*]Microsoft Bob (1995)

    [*]Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)

    [*]Pressplay and Musicnet (2002)

    [*]dBASE IV (1988)

    [*]Priceline Groceries and Gas (2000)

    [*]PointCast (1996)

    [*]IBM PCjr. (1984)

    [*]Gateway 2000 10th Anniversary PC (1995)

    [*]Iomega Zip Drive (1998)

    [*]Comet Cursor (1997)

    [*]Apple Macintosh Portable (1989)

    [*]IBM Deskstar 75GXP (2000)

    [*]OQO Model 1 (2004)

    [*]CueCat (2000)

    [*]Eyetop Wearable DVD Player (2004)

    [*]Apple Pippin @World (1996)

    [*]Free PCs (1999)

    [*]DigiScents iSmell (2001)

    [*]Sharp RD3D Notebook (2004)
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6. Disney The Lion King CD-ROM (1994)

For more details on any product go to the home page ;)

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.
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Anything with the Microsoft prefix has high chances of featuring on that list.

another funny one is the Iomega Zip drive. i remember telling a hasty friend of mine not to buy it as it was sure to flop. Takes my advice on tech related things ever since
 
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