Feature

Best and worst products, 1996-2006

Staff ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 13 Jul 2006

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WORST PRODUCTS, 1996-2006

Microsoft Smart Display
Wi-Fi-connected tablet-style PC monitor

This product left its mark on everyone who saw it -- so much so that when we discussed what to include in this article, everyone shouted out its name in unison. There was so much wrong with it it's hard to know where to start. Slow, unreliable, insecure, hard to use and expensive, it may be the only peripheral of recent years that could require a complete operating system upgrade in order to run. The basic idea was fine -- a wireless tablet that let you browse around the home or office -- but everything else was disastrously, almost comically, incorrect. It even broke the Health and Safety Act.

Our conclusion then -- and now -- was that a tablet was the wrong medical analogy: given the amount of pain it caused us and the action we hoped Microsoft would take with the whole idea, a suppository was far closer to the mark.

We'd also like to give a special mention to Microsoft's PR agency, Waggener Edstrom, who read our review and interpreted it as a call to action: they tried to 're-educate' our editor with a remarkable campaign of phone calls telling him how wrong he was and how he needed to learn the correct Microsoft way of thinking. Thanks, guys.

Ultra Mobile PC
Small form-factor Tablet PC

Microsoft and Intel's Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) initiative, codenamed Origami, got off to a bad start earlier this year and went downhill from there. First, Microsoft's Web-based teaser campaign rather gave the game away in its source code by identifying Origami as 'the Mobile PC running Windows XP'; then Intel stole more thunder by showing off some concept Origami designs on at its IDF conference in San Francisco, prior to the official launch a few days later at CeBIT in Hanover.

The first UMPC, unveiled at CeBIT, was Samsung's Q1: we weren't impressed with this overpriced, under-featured and under-powered mini-tablet then, and we remained under-whelmed after we'd had one in for a longer evaluation. UMPCs may get better in time, but at the moment the jury's distinctly unimpressed.

Itanium
64-bit server processor

More than ten years and billions of dollars in the making, this epic HP-Intel co-production has all the hallmarks of Hollywood at its worst. Designed in the beginning to take up the reins from the x86, providing 64-bit supercomputing power as the old-school 32-bit designs ran out of steam, it has instead been a long story of delays, failure and indifference. Although the old designs have improved in every way, Itanium seems stuck in a time-warp of slow development and missed opportunities.

Each year, it has failed to hit performance and sales targets -- sometimes by magnificent amounts -- and each year, Intel turns its sorrowful eyes to the press and murmurs 'why don't you believe us when we say it's getting better?' That's because it isn't, Intel.

The market knows what it wants: 32-bit compatibility, low power, low price, high performance -- and Itanium can deliver just one of these. Perhaps Montecito, the new dual-core Itanium 2 with acres of cache, will be the breakthrough product. Perhaps the rumoured Japanese consortium of mystery supercomputer makers will take the chip off Intel's hands. Or perhaps this year's missed figures will be the iceberg that finally sinks the 'Itanic'.

Symantec Norton AntiVirus
Virus-buster

Norton is a revered name among long-time PC users: before his company was bought out by Symantec, Peter Norton supplied the tools that DOS and then Windows users needed to get right under the bonnet of the operating system and tweak it until it purred rather than rattled along.

Symantec seems to have retained the propensity to insert deep hooks into the OS, while slowing down all but the most powerful of PCs and making the software extremely difficult to completely remove from your system. Competing products cost less and catch viruses just as well. Check out the reader ratings and comments for Norton AntiVirus 2005 if you want blow-by-blow accounts.

Microsoft Active Desktop
HTML desktop

This scores a perfect ten on the bad technology scale: it would be useless even if it worked, which it didn't, and worse than useless if it was broken, which it was. But it was never supposed to work.

The idea was that your Windows desktop would constantly be refreshed by incoming information (news tickers, pictures, advertising) whenever the information provider wished it. Broadcasting to your desktop -- you know, the place you're trying to get some work done. But the technology wasn't up to it; these were the days of Windows 98 and dial-up modems, of broken networks and slow computers. It made everything run at a crawl, at least for as long as it took to crash.

So why was it there? Because Microsoft was in court trying to prove that Internet Explorer was an essential part of the operating system that couldn't be removed. It had to come up with something that bolted IE really tightly to Windows, regardless of whether it was a good idea. Or even whether it worked. It didn't -- and until we learned where the tick box was to disable it, neither did we.

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