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The 10 greatest tech U-turns

Posted on 27 Oct 2009 at 14:26

9. Sony and netbooks

When we’ve spoken off the record to Sony execs, they’ve expressed a certain desire to do things you really shouldn’t do to a vice-president of the company.

“If [the Eee PC from] Asus starts to do well, then we’re all in trouble,” said the VP in question, Mike Abary. “That’s just
a race to the bottom.”

Back in February 2008, it might have seemed that way. Asus, a company best known for its motherboards, had burst through the previously closed doors of the laptop world flourishing the Asus Eee PC, with a design built from the ground up to be light and cheap – less than £200, in fact.

When you bear in mind that before the Eee PC if you wanted a light laptop with good battery life you’d have to pay the likes of Sony a grand or more, you can see why the company might have been a tiny bit reluctant to become involved in the burgeoning market.

But while the old guard of the laptop world were shaking their walking sticks at new boys Asus, and later Acer, millions of people were buying netbooks. Month-by-month, day-by-day, senior execs saw their market share evaporating.

By the end of 2008, Sony alone had resisted the call of the netbook (we’re not counting Apple, which shows no sign of joining this battle). It was only in June this year that Sony conceded, producing the rather alluring W-Series. In this case, definitely better late
than never.

10. Microsoft and Windows 7 E

Microsoft’s decision to strip Internet Explorer 8 from Windows 7 after the EU claimed bundling the two harmed browser competition was not, as many claimed, an act of foot-stamping petulance. Microsoft doesn’t do petulance, there’s too much ice in its corporate veins.

In fact, it was a valid response to an allegation undermined by Firefox’s snowballing market share. There was no commercial imperative for Microsoft to offer rival browsers with Windows, which likely means the EU must have threatened it with a very big stick indeed to make the company change its mind.

And while we welcomed the option to choose our own browser when installing Windows 7, even the Chuckle Brothers would have been shamed by the way the reversal was handled. The announcement came late on a Friday night, direct from the US. It then took the company’s elite
team of PR obfuscators nearly a week to confirm UK customers would be able to upgrade from Vista – an option ruled out by the Windows 7 E version. Confirmation that Family Packs would be available to UK customers was even tardier, and wouldn’t arrive for another fortnight.

In an attempt to clarify the upgrade paths from older OSes, Microsoft then produced a grid so indecipherable that Dan Brown is thinking of basing his next novel on it. The entire thing wasn’t so much a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, as stupidity wrapped in incompetence inside a cock-up.

On the bright side, we can now look forward to choosing our browser when we install Windows 7. All seems worthwhile... doesn’t it?

Author: PC Pro staff