News - Microsoft features big in Time's "10 biggest tech failures of the decade"

[HEXUS]

Windows Vista and Zune handheld dubbed as failures.

Read more.

[shaithis]

24% of the global market share = Catastrophic failure ??

Makes you wonder about everything else in that list.......

[DeludedGuy]

I honestly never saw how YouTube would ever make a profit, it has to set a limit on how many videos people can upload and how many videos people can browse, otherwise, like the report said, it will face high bandwidth and storage costs. Another option would be a £0.50p annual subscription fee per user.

[mycarsavw]

Backing up its accusation with recent statistics, the magazine adds that Vista's global share of PC operating systems sat last month at just 24 per cent - a long way from the 62 per cent occupied by its ageing predecessor, Windows XP.

Windows Vista

Release date
RTM: November 8, 2006;
Vol. Lic.: November 30, 2006;
Retail: January 30, 2007

Windows XP

Release date
RTM: August 24, 2001
Retail: October 25, 2001

Using the retail release dates as a benchmark, a product that's been on the market for ~8 years has more market share than one that's been on the market for ~2 years.

Whatever next, day following night?

[Singh400]

Yeah sure, Microsoft is a complete and utter failure

Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98se, Office suite. Not to mention all the server OS'es, and the other client OS'es.

And you can hardly call the Zune a failure. It was only released in NA and CA. Europe and the rest will be getting there hands on it soon, only after a couple of years can you say with some confidence if it has failed.

Right now, I'd buy a Zune over an iPod.

[Hicks12]

Hd-DVD, a failure? Hell no, no funding from microsoft when toshiba brought it out and since MS had joined in against sony then sony pushed BR hard!. HD-DVD has the same quality of BR and a triple layer can reach 35/45gb and be cheaper than BR, so considering its cheaper and similar but the films have a much better feature list on hd-dvd and BR doesnt... yet.

Why isnt Ipod up there?. They have made the public think expensive things are great and that isnt true, the players cost a bomb(imo, £60 for a shuffle 1gb is a piss take) and yet provide average quality now how is that good? For the company(apple) yes its good but for consumer it sucks balls as the amount of adverts they do it actually FORCES people to look at it and buy it, for every 2 normal ads i see about 1 ipod ad.

How about Mac? Market share is less than MS iirc. Vista is a HUGE improvement and even though i didnt like vista, it was much better than XP in stability and reliability. I had no problems with Vista in those 2 departments for the month i used it, it didnt break but i had it dual booted with XP and that had already broken(both clean installed same day!) so how is Vista not an improvement?. It adds a big new UI which is what the market wants(flashy stuff=sales now), i have Windows 7 now and its quicker than XP and now more reliable aswell so really its not a failure.

[superscaper]

Technical failures in the last decade? As mentioned XP has been around a long time so of course still has the larger market share. If an MS OS from the last decade is to be put on the list why Vista and not ME? Which surely was far more of a "failure".

[cheesemp]

Shouldn't they call call Time's list of things we're going to slag off as we want to appear trendy/cool?

Vista's not the fastest but I love the new searchable start bar/file copy dialogs (with preview) and dislike using XP at work now.

[Noxvayl]

WTF does Time Magazine know about technology anyway?

Its like Gordon Brown telling us why Tiger Wood's shouldn't be the worlds best golfer.... get out of here.

[dbates]

I don't agree that Zune should be there (which actually has some significant benefits over the ipod/itunes combination), when the original DiVX isn't... (can't post a wiki link because I'm a noob, but search for "DIVX (Digital Video Express)"

[TheAnimus]

Why isn't AOL in the list

[dangel]

Just remember, if in 3 years Windows 7 isn't on 70% of all PCs in the world - it's a failure.

[schmunk]

Although the Time article is headed 'Tech failures', it really means 'Commercial failures of Tech products'. Hence:

Hd-DVD, a failure? Hell no, no funding from microsoft when toshiba brought it out and since MS had joined in against sony then sony pushed BR hard!. HD-DVD has the same quality of BR and a triple layer can reach 35/45gb and be cheaper than BR, so considering its cheaper and similar but the films have a much better feature list on hd-dvd and BR doesnt... yet.

HD-DVD is a commercial failure, to the point that it was discontinued within 2 years of launch. Whilst Bluray perhaps could not at the moment be considered an unqualified success, it has beaten HD-DVD commercially by a significant margin.

Why isnt Ipod up there?. They have made the public think expensive things are great and that isnt true, the players cost a bomb(imo, £60 for a shuffle 1gb is a piss take) and yet provide average quality now how is that good? For the company(apple) yes its good but for consumer it sucks balls as the amount of adverts they do it actually FORCES people to look at it and buy it, for every 2 normal ads i see about 1 ipod ad.

Why isn't iPod up there? Because, to quote Wikipedia "Since October 2004, the iPod line has dominated digital music player sales in the United States, with over 90% of the market for hard drive-based players and over 70% of the market for all types of players.".

I'm not sure I need to say anything more...

Edit: Except to say that the iPod Shuffle is £59 for a 4GB unit, not 1GB.

How about Mac? Market share is less than MS iirc. Vista is a HUGE improvement and even though i didnt like vista, it was much better than XP in stability and reliability. I had no problems with Vista in those 2 departments for the month i used it, it didnt break but i had it dual booted with XP and that had already broken(both clean installed same day!) so how is Vista not an improvement?. It adds a big new UI which is what the market wants(flashy stuff=sales now), i have Windows 7 now and its quicker than XP and now more reliable aswell so really its not a failure.

Here you may have a point, but then again one cannot really directly compare Mac OS with MS Windows, due to the much smaller user base of Apple computers. However, again according to Wikipedia "Steve Jobs stated at Macworld 2008 that over 20% of Macs use Leopard as their operating system.", which is a similar figure to the proportion of Windows PCs using Vista. This figure is likely to have grown since that date but, even so, perhaps it is a justifiable comparison.

[schmunk]

Why isn't AOL in the list

Because it isn't a product or service launched in the last 10 years?

[neonplanet40]

I have to agree that HDDVD was a failure. I mean it lost, and cost the investers a fortune. Thats a huge loss

Thankfully i went the blu-ray route.... expensive but so much potential!

[shaithis]

Thankfully i went the blu-ray route.... expensive but so much potential!

Slightly higher capacity but less features and region lock-in = so much more potential?

No wonder HD-DVD lost the battle.