What would you guys say are some of the worst tech blunders? I would say: 1. Intel Netburst (Pentium 4) architecture - The Williamettes were actually outperformed by the Pentium 3s they were supposed to replace. It ran so hot it was worthless as a mobile CPU. The Prescott was almost as big of a shitchunk as the Williamette. And it was routinely beaten by AMD's CPUs throughout its lifespan. The Athlon T-birds, XPs, and 64s were just downright better than comparable P4s. The one bright spot was the Northwood C, but netburst was so bad in general, who cares. This was a crap architecture intel should have dumped. Thankfully they eventually turned things around with the Pentium M and Core architecture. 2. AMD Bulldozer - It's slower than the Phenom II in many cases, and the Phenom II was already nothing to get excited about. It was supposed to compete with the Sandy Bridge chips, but it's not even comparable to Nehalem. 3. Geforce FX Series - The FX5800 was known as the dustbuster because it was so loud. These cards really underperformed and were beaten badly by the Radeon 9700/9800 series. The Geforce cards had been nothing but amazing before this, so this really sent nvidia back to the drawing board. 4. HP Touchpad - nobody gave a crap about webOS and it was too expensive. Sold like crazy though once they dropped the price to $99. 5. Rambus - This shit was ridiculously expensive. We're talking extortion prices. Like $1500 for 64mb of ram. DDR was also fast and was way cheaper. 6. Netbooks - These things were all the rage a couple of years ago. But they were so underpowered you couldn't do shit with them, and they had crappy keyboards. People eventually caught on and stopped buying them. 7. HD-DVD - Toshiba started a stupid format war to push their inferior format, which delayed HD adoption by several years. Thanks assholes! Apparently making the crappiest laptops on the planet wasn't enough for them. 8. Windows Me - Worst. OS. ever.
1. Watergate 2. MS Antitrust trials 3. The .com revolution and crash 4. The hacking of PSN 5. The 'mis'-direction HP had under their former CEO(s) 6. The kidnapping of Adobe DEO 7. The misuse of 3dfx properties 8. The fall of Sega as a hardware manufacturer 9. Rambus 10. not so much netbooks but the ones with restrictive functions like chromebooks and those notebooks they sell to poor african children or something. If it's more than 50 bucks it's too much!! 11. Tech recalls like the P67 one I know there was a worse one... I just don't remember it. I rather liked my copy of WinME... mostly because of Dx7 (I think) though... but that did things like the beginnings of Media Center that you just couldn't do on Win98.
The early Pentiums had an issue where they'd screw up floating point math in some rare cases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug Guess I'm not the only one who remembers how unbelievably expensive this stuff was. Part of the reason I went with an Athlon and not a Pentium 3 back in the day was to avoid the 820 chipset and its disgustingly expensive RDRAM.
Hah! but, predictably, I always had a place in my heart for the massive bandwidth rambus provided, it's like the Playstation 2 with it's EE-Dram and stuff. Good stuff on paper. ridiculously expensive.
Yahoo! acquiring Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in 1999 has to be pretty high up in the tech blunder stratosphere. :lol: Broadcast.com was worthless dot bomb vapor...but made Mark Cuban a billionaire.
It's estimated that the Intel Cougar Point chip recall cost 1 billion dollars. HP bought Palm for 1.2 billion dollars and lost most of that.
Still being bought by satisfied customers Are you kidding? It was way better than 95 or 98 for that matter.
Newscorp buying Myspace for $580 million in 2005 and selling it for $35 million in 2011. It basically became the ghetto version of facebook.
Remember Lycos? Purchased for $12.5 billion in stock by Terra Networks and sold four years later for less than $100 million. Oh, those wacky job creators and their stock deals!
I suppose that's why Dell just announced that they're completely dropping netbooks from their lineup. http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/12/dell-quits-netbook-business-in-favor-of-ultrabooks/
netbooks will slowly die out. ultrabooks will take over for high end and tablets will take over for casuals/mainstream.
from maximum pc a day after this was posted... http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/floods_flops_and_failures_21_techs_worst_disasters they didn't even mention watergate... or the spanish inquisition, NOBODY EXPECTED THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!
Looks like AMD is pulling out of the high-end CPU market thanks to bulldozer. They'll no longer attempt to compete with Intel. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-cpu-apu-processors,15741.html
It's an expensive 8 core CPU that performs worse than a $120 Sandy Bridge i3. Don't do it! On another note, I have a feeling we'll be adding Windows 8 to this list.
History has shown that people who say there wont be a need for faster computers are idiots but I'll go ahead and say it anyway. We don't need faster PCs. Not now anyway. Hell, I'm typing this on an older AMD dual core and the CPU is still overkill for anything this PC will ever be be used for.