Doh! The top 10 tech 'fails' of 2011

Doug Gross, CNN Thu December 29, 2011
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/29/tech/web/2011-tech-fails/index.html
Netflix's short-lived plan to split itself into two services didn't go over so well this year. Qwikster?

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
The highs were high but the lows were lower in the tech world in 2011
U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner makes our top 10 list for using Twitter to send lewd photos
PlayStation outage, "Duke Nukem Forever" and failed tablets also made the cut
It was a rough year for RIM and its BlackBerry, with a handful of "fails"

(CNN) -- Can't win 'em all, can you?

The highs were pretty high in the tech world in 2011, as new gadgets, updates and advances delighted the masses. I mean, Facebook made a change that most people (so far) seemed to actually like. What are the odds?

But the lows were lower. For every moment of digital bliss, it seemed, there was a clunker of equal or greater magnitude.

So, who are we to not rub salt in the wounds of those who got it oh-so-wrong this year?

In fairness, some of these "Doh!" moments came from folks who had otherwise good years. And nobody, not even perennial tech darling Apple, is perfect. (One hard-working journalist even had to write this very story twice after he accidentally deleted it and was forced to start over. Sweet, sweet irony.).

Sure, tech successes are nice. But these social-media miscues, foot-in-mouth e-moves and other digital duds gave us more to talk about in 2011.

Here are our 2011 "Tech Fails of the Year." Feel free to jump in the comments and let us know what we missed.

Weiner on Twitter

In a crowded and competitive field, former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner grabs our "What Were You Thinking?" award for this one.

The congressman (we're staying away from name jokes because ... well ... too easy) was being talked up as possibly the next mayor of New York City when his Twitter account was apparently hacked by someone who sent lewd photos to some of his female followers. That's the story Weiner gave, anyway.

Except, as it turned out, that someone was him.

Many of us gave Weiner the benefit of the doubt in the scandal's opening hours. I mean, what public official would be dumb enough to get raunchy on a platform like Twitter, where anyone who wants to can follow your every tweet?

Turns out ...

He wasn't alone. Comedian Gilbert Gottfried tweeted jokes about the Japan tsunami and earthquake that killed more than 15,000 people. Actor and Twitter pioneer Ashton Kutcher posted a hasty tweet defending Penn State coach Joe Paterno -- before, he says, learning the full extent of the school's child-sex scandal. The resulting backlash even led him to quit Twitter, at least temporarily.

But for so badly misunderstanding the public nature of Twitter, for the whirlwind of lies that followed before he fessed up and resigned and ... yes ... for thinking women like it when you send them closeup pictures of your crotch on the Internet, Weiner earns this bulging "Fail."

Go Daddy's SOPA misstep

When the vast majority of the Web's most active players are against something, and when your livelihood depends on the Web's most active players, it's probably best to either go along or keep quiet about it, right?

Not so for Go Daddy, the Web registrar and hosting company known for its titillating TV ads. In December, the company made the ill-fated decision to come out in support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Google, Yahoo and Facebook are just some of the Internet heavyweights that have lined up to stop the proposed federal law, which would penalize websites that host pirated content. The bill has come under fire from Web-freedom advocates, who say it could dampen online expression.

Go Daddy, which had submitted testimony to Congress in support of the bill, issued a public statement supporting it -- even doubling down with a stronger statement when the Web backlash began.

Fast forward 24 hours and the company -- which had already earned ire in some quarters for its racy (some might say sexist) TV commercials and its founder's penchant for elephant hunting -- changed its mind amid a rash of defections.

Tens of thousands of domains, including more than 50 owned by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, were moved from Go Daddy, and that's before a Reddit-organized boycott planned for Friday. Oops.

'Duke Nukem Forever'

When video gamers wait 14 years for a follow-up to one of their favorite titles, they sort of expect it not to suck. In the minds of many, "Duke Nukem Forever" failed that important test.

First announced in 1997, "Forever" was to be a follow-up to a game that got lots of love for good-heartedly pushing the boundaries of sex, violence and naughty language in the emerging field of shooter games.

It was delayed. And delayed. And delayed. What finally emerged in June hit with a thud.

"At best, it can look a few years out of date; at worst, it is a blurry, stuttering mess," wrote CNN's Ravi Hiranand, in what actually was one of the kinder reviews of the game "Playing the game feels like being thrown back into the mid-'90s, and not in a happy, nostalgic sense."

In a post-"Grand Theft Auto" world, maybe waiting "forever" would have been a better idea after all.

The other tablets

As 2011 dawned, it appeared that Apple had created a thriving new space in personal computing with its iPad.

Beginning in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, a host of competing companies stepped forward with their rival tablets. The Motorola Xoom. BlackBerry's PlayBook. Samsung Galaxy Tab. The HP TouchPad.

One problem: Nobody bought them.

Most of the new tablets, many running Google's Android operating system, came in at roughly $500 -- about the same price as Apple's new iPad 2. And the public showed that at that price, they were happy going with the industry leader.

Some tablets got pulled. Others never made it off the production line. HP had some luck selling TouchPads -- after throwing up its hands and slashing prices to fire-sale levels.

One exception. Amazon may have cracked the code late in the year with its Kindle Fire, a smaller, simpler tablet that, at $199, is $300 cheaper than the least-expensive iPad 2.

Game off at PlayStation Network

When roughly 70 million users lose access to your gaming and entertainment network, it's a "fail."

In April, a hacker accessed account information for users of Sony's PlayStation Network, ultimately knocking the network offline in late April. It wasn't completely restored until early June and some gamers lacked access for weeks.

While getting hacked was bad, some users were even madder after Sony took a week from the time of the attack to let them know what happened.

Another, much smaller, attack happened in October. In the end, it looks like most of the network's fans stuck around -- a fact no doubt aided by multiple blockbuster game releases this year.

iPhones and bars don't mix

Seriously, Apple employees?

No ... seriously?

In 2010, the tech world was aflutter after an Apple employee, reportedly celebrating his birthday, lost a prototype of the unreleased iPhone 4 in a California beer hall.

Tech blog Gizmodo bought the phone, showcased it on their site, and touched off a firestorm that included everything from police raids to legal threats.

Well, at least we know that after all of that, it could never possibly happen again.

No ... wait. It happened again.

Tech blog CNET reported that an Appler left a prototype of the iPhone 4S in a Mexican bar and restaurant in San Francisco.

As our John Sutter wrote: "Here's a theory: Maybe there's some sort of connection between drinking and losing things?"

Netflix-Qwikster

Netflix, the Web's most popular movie-rental service, first rattled some customers by raising prices in July.

Then, in September, the company announced it was, basically, splitting itself in half. Web-streaming video would still come from Netflix. DVD-by-mail rentals would come from a separate company.

Called ... "Qwikster."

Where to start here? Customers who wanted both services complained about having to set up and maintain two different accounts on two different websites. Then there was the new name, which felt dated (Napster and Friendster, anyone?) and like it was spat out by some zany-misspelled-startup name generator.

Oh yeah ... and there was the fact that the "Qwikster" Twitter handle was already owned by a guy whose avatar was a weed-smoking Elmo muppet.

Chris Taylor, of Mashable, questioned whether Qwikster was "the worst product launch since New Coke."

It didn't even last as long as that syrupy mistake. About three weeks later, Netflix announced that Qwikster was dead.

PayPal plays Scrooge

Shutting down a fund to give presents to children in need at Christmas? Sounds like something one-percenter Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" would endorse.

But that's essentially what Web-payment titan PayPal was doing before getting popped in the nose by the Internet.

Snarky blog Regretsy, when not mocking regrettable craft projects, has long maintained various charity funds. With the holidays approaching, actress and blog runner April Winchell (who writes on the site as "Helen Killer") announced a fund drive to buy toys for 200 children submitted by community members.

It was hugely successful, meeting its fundraising goal in the first 24 hours. Then PayPal, which was processing the donations, stepped in and froze the fund because it said Winchell used a "Donate" button that's supposed to be for nonprofits only.

The Web wasn't pleased.

Winchell used her popular blog to blast PayPal in less-than-friendly terms. Twitter users and other sites amplified the outrage.

A day later, PayPal said it "recognized our error" and even offered to donate to the fund.

God bless us ... every one.

iPhone 4S battery life

OK ... this one never reached the fever pitch that the iPhone 4's antenna problems did last year.

And maybe it's a sign that, when millions of people buy your product in the first few hours it exists, there are bound to be problems.

Despite not being the mythical iPhone 5, the 4S flew out of Apple stores when it was released October 14. But within hours, users started flocking to Apple's support forum to complain their batteries were running out of juice faster than Herman Cain's presidential campaign.

Apple publicly ignored the complaints for a little over two weeks. Then the company issued a statement saying that "a small number of customers" had complained about the battery and that an update to the phone's operating system was on the way.

As with the iPhone 4 "death grip," we'll call this a modest "fail" wrapped inside an epic win. The battery gripes didn't stop Apple from selling an iLoad of the new phones.

Bad year for BlackBerry

Alas, poor BlackBerry.

Research in Motion's crack-like gadget was once synonymous with "smartphone," effectively ushering in the era of messaging, e-mail-checking and other Phone 2.0 behavior.

But, 2011 wasn't kind.

It's bad enough that the iPhone and the rise of the Androids continue to muscle BlackBerrys out of the limelight. Then the BlackBerry PlayBook, RIM's effort in the burgeoning tablet space, arrived with a thud in April.

The capper, however, was an October outage at a data center that caused users to lose messaging ability in parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America and North America. (To their credit, RIM ultimately gave away a pile of free apps to the folks affected).

The outage lasted for several days and was the final straw for some users, who abandoned ship for other phones.

The Top 10 tech trends of 2009

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/22/top.tech.trends.2009/

The Top 10 tech trends of 2009
John D. Sutter
December 22, 2009
On the go, yet still connected: Smartphones and portable gaming devices entered the mainstream in 2009.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
CNN lists the 10 biggest tech ideas of 2009
This isn't the year we changed technology; technology changed us
At the end of 2009, we're more digitally connected than ever before
Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and smartphones matured this year

Engineers didn't make huge improvements to technology in 2009. The year's big tech names -- Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon -- all existed before January.

Instead, this is the year technology changed us.

At year's end, we're connected to each other and to the Internet like never before. In 2009, we carried tiny computers in our pockets, through which we fed the Internet constant real-time info about where we were and what we were doing.

Our app-laden phones helped us manage our on-the-go lifestyles; our books fell off the shelves and into e-readers; our televisions and video games unchained themselves from home entertainment centers; and our mobile updates helped organize protests and even threaten governments.

We could have done any of these things in 2008. But we embraced in unprecedented numbers a digital-centered life in 2009.

Here's a look back at how it happened. It's CNN.com's 10 biggest tech trends of the year, listed in no particular order. Think we missed something? Please let us know in the comments below.

Smartphone craze

By the end of 2009, having a basic cell phone wasn't good enough anymore. Now the standard is a smartphone -- a mobile phone that also acts as a computer -- and links its users to Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the digital universe.

Despite the economic recession, the smartphone market expanded. It was fueled in part by the popular iPhone but also by an increasingly diverse set of smartphone choices, including the Droid, BlackBerry and Pre. Smartphone sales worldwide for 2009 were up 24 percent compared with 2008, according to Gartner Inc., a research company.

Thanks to these phones, people this year grew accustomed to sending e-mail, uploading photos and videos and posting status messages from anywhere, at almost anytime.

Facebook grows up

This was the year of the Facebook mom and grandma. Founded in 2004 for college students, the online social network exploded in 2008 and might have been expected to level off this year. Instead, it went global and expanded into new and older demographics.

About 70 percent of Facebook's users now live outside of the site's home base in the United States, according to statistics released by the company.

The site's importance in our lives grew in tandem with these demographic shifts. Facebook now has more than 350 million users -- that's more people than live in the United States and is more than double the 150 million people who were on Facebook at the start of the year. Half of Facebook users log on to the site at least once on any given day; the average Facebook user spends nearly an hour a day on the site.

Bloggers threaten regimes

Individuals became publishers in 2009, using the micro-blogging site Twitter to post instant, bite-sized updates to the world. The site was founded in 2007 but grew exponentially this year.

The political ramifications of the micro-blogging trend became evident in June when Iranians used Twitter to organize and publicize protests of a disputed presidential election. The protests grabbed the world's attention. Terms related to the Iranian election made up 3 of the Top 10 news trends of the year on Twitter.

Books go digital

Sick of lugging hefty books with you on vacation? Portable, electronic readers -- with their easy-on-the-eyes displays and ability to carry hundreds of titles without gaining weight -- started to make inroads on their hardback cousins in 2009.

E-book sales brought in $13.9 million in revenue in the third quarter of last year, according to International Digital Publishing Forum, a trade organization. The same time period this year saw $46.5 million in e-book revenue -- a 235 percent spike.

The Amazon Kindle, originally released in November 2007, found some competition this year with the release of the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook. Meanwhile, libraries, authors, publishers and Google continued to haggle out the details of a settlement that could give the Internet giant permission to create the world's largest library -- online only.

Info in an instant

In 2009, it's no longer enough to search for information that was current 30 minutes or an hour ago. Now, Internet junkies look for their news, Tweets and links to be updated in "real-time," just as they are on Twitter.

Search engines bought into this idea in 2009. Microsoft and Google struck deals with Twitter to pipe in or replicate its real-time search function. The micro-blogging site lets authors post short bursts of information, which become searchable the moment someone clicks send.

App mania

In 2009, mobile phone customers made a strange realization: The phone isn't as important as the applications that run on it. Droves of iPhone owners downloaded games, widgets and tools for their phones from Apple. By September, just over a year after the company started selling apps through its iTunes App Store, 2 billion of the applications had been downloaded.

App mania was far from limited to Apple products, though. Research in Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry devices, launched its own app store. And smartphones that run on Google's Android system started campaigning around Android apps, which are not subjected to Apple's rigorous and somewhat controversial approval process.

Games leave the living room

Remember the days when people played video games on huge TVs in their living rooms? That was so 2008. This year, gaming became mobile and social.

Instead of hovering around an Xbox or a Wii, it was cooler this year to plant virtual vegetables in FarmVille or run a mobster empire in Mafia Wars -- two games that run through the social network Facebook.

The iPhone and its cousin, the iPod Touch, also became popular mobile gaming platforms, shaking up the idea that video games must have great graphics and be backed by huge entertainment companies to succeed. Many of the year's popular phone-based games cost less than a buck.

Government gets techie

Government has a reputation for lagging behind the technological curve. But in 2009, the Obama Administration tried to prove that bureaucrats could be hip and tech-savvy, too.

The administration launched DATA.gov, a clearinghouse of information on how the federal government works and how tax money is spent. It also backed digitizing health care records, held the country's first online town hall meeting and moved toward the more efficient cloud-computing model, which essentially outsources some storage and processing of government files to companies such as Google.

Search engine wars

Google is still the world's dominant search engine, but it faced its first real challengers in 2009 as smaller search companies came up with new ideas about the way people can and should find information online.

An oddball search engine called Wolfram-Alpha made big news in the spring when it debuted as a tool that calculates the answers to user queries instead of sending Web surfers to lists of Web site links, as Google does.

But the major newcomer was Microsoft's Bing, a "decision engine" that introduced new ways to sort through photos online and to search for products. Bing quickly grabbed a foothold, gaining 10 percent of the search market by the end of the year.

'Smart' electricity use

The economic recession and a federal stimulus package prompted a old-ish idea in frugal gadgetry to take off in a new way: "smart" technology invaded homes and public works projects in hopes of making our use of fossil fuels more efficient.

Smart-grid technology monitors energy use and helps steer consumption to times of day when other people aren't using much electricity -- a time when it is cheaper to power appliances and more juice is available.

The federal government invested billions in a smart grid in 2009 that connects homes and apartments with power plants. Consumer-level devices took off, too. Google released a PowerMeter service that gives homeowners reports on their energy use on the Web or on mobile phones. General Electric and others promoted smart appliances, such as hot water heaters, that help further help control energy costs.

Most homes didn't have smart meters in 2009, but that leaves room for plenty of expansion next year.

Tech Predictions for 2008

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140802-c,technology/article.html

Tech Predictions for 2008
We predict good times for Linux, Windows XP, and green vendors; challenges for social nets and mobile technologies; and some surprises in the new year.
Nancy Weil, IDG News Service
Thursday, December 27, 2007

The predictable flood of information technology prognostications for 2008 has been rolling in, and we have listened to analysts, vendors, consultants, and our geek friends, accepting some forecasts and rejecting others. Turns out we did pretty well culling the wheat from the chaff last year and gazing ahead, though maybe we weren't bold enough in our declarations. So, this year we'll stretch a little and predict:

Windows XP's Reprieve

Microsoft will announce an extension until the end of 2008 for Windows XP availability, instead of cutting it off on June 30.

In September '07, the company pushed the extension from the end of January until June after corporate users complained. Not to mention that many companies had decided to put off moving to Vista. The migration will continue to be slow for at least the first half of 2008.

Who's Hacking Whom?

A major international incident will erupt when Chinese hackers compromise the defense or security system (or both) of another government. Classified documents will be breached. Accusations will be traded. Relationships will be tense and ugly for a time.

The Greening of IT

"Green" IT will become a sustainable model in the enterprise. The bottom line will be the primary force in the greening of data centers and offices.

Environmental concerns (spurred by weird weather occurrences and alarming reports about polar bears) coupled with a woeful economic scene globally will be dominant themes in 2008, leading to corporate, consumer and government action that will include serious penny-pinching as more of us come together to try to save the planet and our budgets.

The European Union will again be the main governmental force behind pushing green regulations in 2008.

Network Evolution

Mobile networks will not only open up to outside handsets, devices and applications, but will increasingly offer Wi-Fi and a plethora of location-based services. Media content, search, social networks, shopping and a variety of services will all be standard parts of the mobile network experience.

Networks "have to evolve in very radical ways," says Jake Seid, Lightspeed Venture Partners general partner, mobile. How radical has yet to be seen, but analysts aplenty envision 2008 as a watershed year for networks to be opened and for big changes on the mobile landscape, partly owing to the iPhone effect.

A Linux Year

As Vista continues to limp toward wider adoption, Linux will make major inroads into the enterprise, as well as in government IT. At the same time, the leaner OS will become a more attractive option for home users and in consumer electronics, spurred by the Open Handset Alliance and the advent of Google's Android mobile platform, which will be built on the Linux kernel. Jim Zemlin, the president of the Linux Foundation, sees 2008 as a "really interesting, breakthrough year for Linux," and we think he's right about that. Expect assorted open-source applications to follow along.

Growing Pains of Social Networking

Social networking will invade corporations by year's end. Services akin to the Salesforce.com offering that lets salespeople share leads and information will become standard in that market segment. But increasingly, social-networking applications will seep into all manner of companies, whether the IT department likes it or not. "It will be driven more by individual adoptions," predicts Konstantin Guericke, co-founder of LinkedIn and CEO of Jaxtr. "We're social beings -- we like to see what our peers are doing."

Privacy issues will have to be sorted out. The brouhaha over Facebook's Beacon ad system won't be the last situation to cause outcry by any stretch, because social-networking sites will continue to push the envelope. Users will push back. Legislation and regulations will be proposed and enacted. Which leads us to ...

Blurred Lines

Distinctions between consumer and corporate IT will continue to blur, and the social-networking phenomenon is but one element of that.

iPhone-buying employees will bring that device into the enterprise in ever-growing numbers, forcing IT departments to deal with it. Security and protection from hackers, spam, phishers, and the lot of cyber miscreants will continue to pose a huge headache for network administrators as home IT merges with corporate IT.

The Consolidation Drumbeat

Pure-play software vendors will increasingly be a thing of the past as Oracle and other monoliths swoop in on more acquisition targets in the new year.

And IDC has predicted for 2007 and again for 2008 that Salesforce.com will be bought (though '07 isn't over yet ...). That seems like a good guess. We don't expect Palm to make it through '08 without being bought, and that long-rumored Microsoft-RIM deal could come to pass, too.

Virtualization Comes to the Desktop

We didn't want to make a virtualization prediction, but we would be remiss not to. Many prognosticators are gazing into their crystal balls and seeing virtualization on desktops. While some analysts are predicting that will be a sort of Thin Client 2.0, Barry Eggers, Lightspeed general partner, enterprise infrastructure, envisions something different. "Thin clients were about reducing up-front capital costs with a slimmed-down hardware client. Desktop virtualization is about intelligently provisioning applications to desktop users," he says.

He envisions a more successful model will find IT shops using desktop virtualization in conjunction with virtualized servers. Early adopters are finding that users weren't so keen on that model because the "user experience [is] much less satisfying than a full desktop," he says, but that will start to change in the new year. How? And where will it lead? We'll leave that to the 2009 predictions.

Vote Early and Often

Although we realize that the U.S. is not the center of the universe, the upcoming election seems more important on a global scale than others in recent memory. So, we predict historic levels of turnout at the polls in November, and that will give rise to historic levels of problems with electronic voting. Ohio will be a mess in that regard. Florida won't be appreciably better. While the outcome of the presidential race won't be imperiled by e-voting issues, some state and local races will need manual recounts owing to problems with machines.

Sorting out how to regulate e-voting (again) will keep the new Congress (with Democrats in control of both houses) busy in the first quarter of next year. The new president might not directly affect IT, though the president's views regarding the use of technology have certainly had an effect in recent years. On that note, we'll make our boldest prediction for 2008: President Obama.