Top 10 technology flops of 2008

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By Tim Danton

Posted on 24 Dec 2008 at 12:50

3. Yahoo's game of bluff

Now we like making Steve Ballmer angry just as much as the next man - it's like bear-taunting, only with scarier eyes and more devastating consequences - but Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang took things a little too far when he declined Microsoft's generous $33 per share offer in May 2008. Since then, Yahoo's share price has been falling faster than the number of George Bush dinner party invites.

Right now, it's hovering at the $12 mark, and you can't help feel that the only reason it's still that high is because Microsoft keeps on coming a-sniffing every couple of months. The worst news for Yang is that if he'd rubber-stamped the offer then he might still be worth the $2.3 billion tag Forbes.com attached to him earlier this year. Must be tough to only be worth around $1 billion.

2. Nvidia's overheating GPUs

Now I like Nvidia, mainly because most of the people I know who work there are very funny people indeed. Even when they're angry at me... which they probably will be after reading this article.

Because Nvidia was dominant early this year and now... well, it's not. Both its desktop and mobile graphics were the fastest, and for a while back there people really were seriously thinking about having three graphics cards inside their system. What could be simpler than stacking them up and reaping the - sorry, what's that, slower with three cards than with two, you say? Drivers don't work, you say? Diminishing returns, you say?

But it wasn't the false dawn of triple SLI that hurt Nvidia most, but its overheating GPUs. In total, it expects to pay somewhere between $150m and $200m to system makers, with Nvidia alternating between annoyance with the manufacturers ("...we have obligations to our partners... [Nvidia] would like to be more upfront about [the overheating problems] - but we can't be") to acceptance ("we have a responsibility to our customers and will take our part in resolving this problem").

The end result was bad news for the 360 Nvidia employees who lost their jobs between September and November, while Nvidia's share price slumped from a 2008 high of $35 to its current $8.

1. DRM for music

Could 2008 be the year that finally did for DRM? We certainly hope so. In a theoretical world DRM has its merits, as most people agree that if you produce a piece of music or writing then you have the right to make money from it. However, this is the grubby world where people are lazy and DRM stinks.

David Fearon wrote a detailed blog about exactly the sort of problems DRM causes and the absurd steps he had to go through just to try and listen to the music he bought a few years ago. And he isn't alone.

Thank goodness, then, that Napster, Apple, Sony et al have moved away from DRM (some in late 2007, some in early 2008), no doubt realising they were fighting a losing battle.

So it was a terrible year for DRM and music, but sadly those lessons haven't been learnt everywhere.

Once you step back, it seems amazing that we're still being sold Region-limited DVD players and discs. We wouldn't accept this with music CDs, so why are we still allowing ourselves to be bullied by the movie makers?