"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," says PC World.
The magazine readily admits that these aren't really the worst 25. It adds: "Of course, most truly awful ideas never make it out of somebody's garage. Our bottom 25 designees are all relatively well-known items, and many had multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns behind them. In other words, they were made by people who should have known better."
There's a complete list here, and it starts as follows:
1. America Online (1989-2006) 2. RealNetworks RealPlayer (1999) 3. Syncronys SoftRAM (1995) 4. Microsoft Windows Millennium (2000) 5. Sony BMG Music CDs (2005)
AOL? Really? Was AOL worse than CompuServe or Prodigy or, especially, Prestel? PC World's writers and contributors are clearly too young and too US-centric to have seen enough of the world's worst tech products.
But can we do better? Some obvious clunkers are the IBM PC Convertible, Apple's Lisa, the Sinclair QL, the Commodore 1541 disk drive, Sun's 386i workstation, Philips CD-i, Amiga CDTV, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Nintendo Powerglove, etc. (The Sinclair Black Watch is too old for PC World -- 1975.) What about the Nokia NGage?
The worst software includes Lotus Notes, of course, IBM's TopView, WordStar 2000, Netscape 4-6, Word Perfect for Windows, Star Office, and all versions of Microsoft Windows before 3.0. (Windows Me was fine -- as long as it started with a clean installation.)
Any more suggestions?
