Category Miscellany
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PC World magazine has released a list of what they consider the 25 worst tech products of all time. What qualifies? As they put it...

Picking our list wasn't exactly rocket science; it was more like group therapy. PC World staffers and contributors nominated their candidates and then gave each one the sniff test. We sought the worst of the worst--operating systems that operated badly, hardware that never should have left the factory, applications that spied on us and fed our data to shifty marketers, and products that left a legacy of poor performance and bad behavior.

I generally agree with most of them, although I am embarrassed to admit that at least one of them was exciting to me when it first came out. I actually liked Pointcast when it was first released; that is until it began hogging all the bandwidth in the company as more and more people used it.

And I must agree with the abomination that is #1 - AOL (or as it is known around here, "AO HELL"), and we can all universally agree with others such as MS Internet Explorer 6. I personally hope there is a special place in hell for the people who morphed the RealNetworks player into one of the works spyware/malware apps on the planet - and then convinced many companies to only provide content in Real format. I must say that they seem better lately, but it is still a royal PITA to go through all the steps to prevent it from taking over your system and spying on your every move.

Oh, and of course I must mention that the notorious Lotus Notes Hater, the Guardian UK, has taken another cheap shot at Notes once again. On their blog they have added their own products to the top 25 list, including Notes...

But can we do better? Some obvious clunkers are the IBM PC Convertible, Apple's Lisa, the Sinclair QL, the Commodore 1541 disk drive, Sun's 386i workstation, Philips CD-i, Amiga CDTV, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Nintendo Powerglove, etc. (The Sinclair Black Watch is too old for PC World -- 1975.) What about the Nokia NGage?

The worst software includes Lotus Notes, of course, IBM's TopView, WordStar 2000, Netscape 4-6, Word Perfect for Windows, Star Office, and all versions of Microsoft Windows before 3.0. (Windows Me was fine -- as long as it started with a clean installation.)

You know, they lose credibility before they even take their swipe at Notes - how? Well, they question the inclusion of AOHell on the list!

AOL? Really? Was AOL worse than CompuServe or Prodigy or, especially, Prestel? PC World's writers and contributors are clearly too young and too US-centric to have seen enough of the world's worst tech products.

Oh PUHleeeze. AOHell has continued to prove worse than any of the others mentioned, simply for the way they continue to practically destroy a computer once installed, and then making it virtually impossible to remove it once it's there. And how can you mention Compuserve? Before the internet was widespread, many a geek solved computer problems via Compuserve, which had a very robust support community on it. Hell, when I was at Lotus Word Processing tech support we even had a person dedicated to nothing but answering tech support questions on Compuserve. One of the 25 worst? Hardly.

So, what do you think? do you have some piece of software or some clunker hardware you want to add to the list? Personally I think Outlook should be included with the mention of MS Internet Explorer because it was equally culpable at disseminating virii and trojans.

Let me know your list!

Rock
**When you do a good deed, get a receipt in case heaven is like the IRS.