Some of the biggest disasters in IT were simply good ideas gone wrong, but others were ill-advised to begin with, says Jack Wallen.
I recently offered a list of events that I believe were pivotal in shaping today's IT industry — things such as the development of Cobol and the creation of Unix. This time, I have set out a few of the biggest failures in IT, although I tried to avoid the tired old items trotted out by everyone.
1. Windows Vista
Could Microsoft have designed a bigger failure if it had tried? Possibly, but it was not trying to make a failure. It was trying to make the best of the best. The result was the worst of the best.
2. NeXT
I have to qualify this entry, because NeXT did inspire a lot of software for the Linux desktop, such as AfterStep. And the NeXTStep did eventually become the foundation for OS X. So NeXT was not a complete flop.
3. BeOS
Although BeOS has been resurrected as Haiku, the BeOS and all the hardware it promised never really got off the ground. The PC that was supposed to be the dream machine for the media crowd fizzled out before its fuse could really be lit.
4. Cobalt Qube
The Cobalt Qube looked good. If you are lucky, you can still find one on eBay a bargain price. Underneath that tiny blue exterior lay a beefy 64MB of RAM and an 8.4GB hard drive that could serve up your website, mail, DNS or anything else you needed.
But those were the glory days — and they were short-lived at that. The serious IT crowd quickly realised that function held sway over form. However good the blue Qubes looked, they went nowhere. Even after Sun bought Cobalt, these devices did nothing.
5. Y2K
I cannot resist including the millennium bug. The entire world was supposed to collapse as a result of this little bug. I even read plenty of sci-fi books based on that premise.
But nothing happened. Banks did not lose your money, the world's security did not fall to pieces and all IT professionals woke up the next morning collectively saying: "Was that it?"
6. MP3
I know, I know — it is not a flop. Exactly. But the MP3 format makes this list because of all the licensing issues it has caused. On the Linux operating system alone, MP3 is not installed on most distributions, by default, because of licensing issues.
As a result, users scramble to have MP3 support built into their various tools. Their attempts cause as much hair loss as MP3 causes audio-quality loss. There are far better formats available without the licensing issues.
7. Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman was supposed to be the champion of open source, but he now endangers it at every turn. Instead of making ridiculous claims, Stallman should stand down and let someone with a modicum of tact and sense take over as the voice of open-source software.
8. WordPerfect
In fact, what I should actually cite here is Corel, the maker of WordPerfect, rather than the software itself.
WordPerfect was an outstanding word processing tool. Corel, however, was not outstanding in its ability to market and sell something as good as WordPerfect.
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So instead of becoming a piece of software that should have single-handedly toppled the Microsoft juggernaut, WordPerfect died.
That failure should never have happened. Any other company could have pulled off a win.
9. IPv6
Should IPv6 not already be in place? Should something so simple really be that hard? The internet could run out of IP addresses and there is no solution in place yet. Why? Because we do not yet have a problem.
But given the panic created by the prospect of the IP sky falling in, surely it would have been smarter to put IPv6 in place? Perhaps the 'powers that be' are waiting until the last IPv4 address is issued and we have to say: "We have no more."
At that point, no-one will really know how to implement the solution and it will be Y2K all over again.
10. Mesh networks
At one point, wireless was going to cover the entire planet and everyone was going to have free wireless networking, thanks to wireless mesh networks. It did not happen.
It sounded like a great idea, and sites popped up all over the place trying to get users to set up their own mesh networks to further expand the net. It was a grand idea, based on a grand ideal, but it just never got off the ground.
That failure is a shame, since a mesh Wi-Fi would have enabled anyone to be online anywhere. Of course, I am sure the telecoms providers had nothing to do with the fall of mesh networking.
Your turn
Do you agree or disagree with the items on my list of biggest IT failures? What do you think is missing?
Talkback
It's a bit US-centric to include IPv6. The US has bagged most of the IPv4 addresses, so the real problem of a lack of IP addresses has already hit the developing world and AsiaPac.
IPv6 is the answer to a real problem that's hurting now. Just not in the US...
Peter Mandleson Tyrant of digital Britain, Gorden Browns hit boy.
For a second I thought Jack Wallen had turned over a new leaf and was presenting something genuinely interesting that was not just over-biased Microsoft bashing. I would have liked to have seen the genuine top ten IT disasters. e.g. Denver Bagging system, Ariane 5 etc.
Half the stuff I have not heard of. Maybe calling it the top ten famous disasters for people who are interested in open source (incl. the pointless necessary Microsoft side swipes)
Vista is rubbish, but I don't think it will be mentioned in CS classes for years to come. It will hardly be remembered as historical. Its a bit weird to see Stalman in there. Why are you being so brutal to him? I hardly think Stallman is a disaster. He wrote the GNU stack, regardless of his late politics he is THE man. And that will be famous historical fact for a long time.
In my view word perfect was a pig of a WP program. Accidently delete the 'switch off italics/bold/etc' and all of a sudden the rest of your text was italised/enboldened/etc. It was no match for MS Word, then or now.
I don't think Corel owned WordPerfect when the MS GUI was introduced and Word became the number 1 word processor. Every other word processor was effectively killed off by Word's early start in Windows. Weren't there stories of MS withholding code for competitors for a while...?...
In my opinion WP is still superior to Word. The previous poster's comment suggests he never really understood it. It is precisely because of the way it handles formatting code, and the way it can be seen (Reveal Codes), it is so much easier to handle and troubleshoot. In the comparison Word 2000 v WP 2000 (I have to use Word because almost everybody else does) I find Word constantly telling me how to do things and reacting oddly, whether it is in the way it forces bullet-point numbering or insertion of headers and footers. Or its limited file managing system.
No, I am not anti-MS. I happily use PowerPoint and am getting comfortable with Excel, even though my complicated -- and ancient -- spreadsheets are still in Lotus 1-2-3.
Goodness me, didn't think anyone was still using it. Is it the copy protected version from 1989?
1999/2000 or thereabouts. What do you mean by copy-protected in this case?
Bubble memory - never made it.
Apple Lisa was a dog.