Top 10 technology flops of 2008

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Posted on 24 Dec 2008 at 12:50

PC Pro editor Tim Danton gives his verdict on the companies and products that have entirely failed to impress in 2008.

There's nothing us Brits like quite as much as failure. Witness our complete lack of admiration for Lewis Hamilton ever since he won the F1 world championship ("yeah, but he lives in Switzerland") and the mockery to which we subject our greatest entrepreneurs.

Give us someone to criticise, on the other hand, and we're all for it. Which is probably why the PC Pro editorial team gave me almost 30 responses when I asked for the top flops of 2008.

Even after I'd honed down their suggestions to ten (and they weren't happy), more piled in. So, feel free to agree or disagree, and post your comments below.

10. Windows Home Server

Now we confidently predicted that home servers would sell by the bucketload in 2008, writing in the January 2008 issue of PC Pro: "By offering all the features of NAS (networked attached storage), as well as a sophisticated system backup feature for all of your networked PCs, it ticks all the boxes for what any multi-PC household needs."

We were utterly wrong. In October, I asked retail analysts GfK for this year's sales figures compared to NAS drives, and the answer couldn't have been clearer: NAS drives sold 80,512 units in retail, home servers a princely 2,774. We'll get our coat. It's sitting over there, right on top of that unused pile of home servers.

9. Kangaroo

Not the marsupial - although, as it happens, the kangaroos of Canberra didn't have such a great 2008 either - but the on-demand TV service. Slated for release in August 2008, Kangaroo was meant to be the unified video-on-demand service for Channel 4, BBC Worldwide and ITV. According to one source, it was going "to do for broadband what Freeview did for digital TV".

Instead, it's been caught in a mire of regulation, with the Competition Commission investigating whether or not it could lead to Kangaroo having "a stranglehold on TV content". Evidently tired of waiting, or perhaps aware of the final result of the commission's investigations (which will be announced in mid-January), Kangaroo's chief executive resigned in favour of a posh-sounding role at Microsoft.

8. Ultra-Mobile PCs and MIDs

"Dear Intel and Microsoft,

"Thanks awfully, The Public."

That may not have been the literal message sent to Intel and Microsoft HQ, but it's the real one. UMPCs and MIDs joined the Smart Display and Tablet PC in Wintel's great catalogue of Failed Ideas We Liked Because We'll Make Money If They Succeed, and instead we all swooned over cheap-as-chips netbooks made by Asus and Acer.

In a great rewriting of history, Intel and Microsoft execs will explain that they were really talking about netbooks the whole time ("Oh, you thought we meant things like the Samsung Q1 Ultra? How sweet"), but the sad reality is they will indeed have the last laugh: the dominant netbook OS is Windows XP, that dog-eared software Microsoft will still pick up a few quid for with every sale, while Intel's Atom processor (and supporting chipset) powers virtually every netbook on the planet.