The FAIL Feature

Posted at: Friday 10th October 2008 by Stuart Andrews

We were promised the moon on a stick, but we received less than a pebble. Stuart Andrews investigates nine technologies that were hyped into the stratosphere, but in reality, brought us crashing down to Earth.

Hype is the engine that drives the technology industry forward. Talk of groundbreaking, world-changing features makes a product irresistible on paper; nobody can imagine the finished product being less than successful. Enthusiasts are easily wowed by talk of high performance and capabilities beyond that of any existing product. Then the product goes on sale and is a disaster. Perhaps we don't have the features or the performance we expected, or a service doesn't provide what it should. In other cases, a promising technology dies from lack of support, or just drifts into well-deserved obscurity.

The technological graveyard of history is littered with the corpses of failed products and concepts, from discrete PhysX physics processors to the first AMD Phenoms, although some turned out even more disappointing than those woeful bits of silicon. In this feature, we cherry-pick the worst of the dodo devices, applications, APIs and gadgets, and wonder what and whom will be next on our list.