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The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 8:17 AM Category: Meryl's Notes Blog 4 comments

The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time and #1 is AOL. I second that. Although, I’m sure something else that I don’t remember could top it… but that’s tough to do. AOL continues to have a rep of a “non-tech-savvy person’s Web.” I admit that AOL has gotten better, but it still has some nasty business practices in place like making it almost impossible to unsubscribe to it after a free trial.

I remember CueCat. The Dallas Morning News was one of its sponsors as well as the local Tandy Corporation’s Radio Shack and I thought it was a good idea, but I was wrong. Then its users’ information was exposed to really kill the product.

Remember any lousy products?

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4 comments

Posted by Elaine on June 8th, 2006, 12:44 PM
I have a cuecat hanging in my office!

I was at FreeGeek in Portland last summer and went into their thriftshop. I saw it hanging behind the counter and kinda flipped out with dot-com nostalgia. The guy at the counter was so blown away that he either gave it to me for free or sold it for a buck. (I don’t remember which now.)

It hangs off of the mystery dial. Seriously…there’s this dial, like a dimmer switch, on the wall of my office, and in five years I haven’t been able to figure out what it’s supposed to do. Which seemed to make it the logical spot for the cuecat.
Posted by Elaine on June 9th, 2006, 3:08 PM
Here’s the photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/epersonae/163644509/
Posted by meryl / @merylkevans on June 9th, 2006, 4:00 PM
Intriguing! My guess would be someone used it to manage their ceiling fan or light dimmers. They look happy together — Cuey and Dimmy.
Posted by Lee Brewer on September 7th, 2006, 7:32 PM
Sony VAIO computers are very bad and the latest Sony product to burn me is their NW-E507 MP3 player – which uses their terrible Sony software to transfer all files from my computer to the MP3.

It turns out they can only play some wma files, although they don’t say that in their tech info. I needed a wma file they can handle – so $100 wasted again on Sony – but NEVER, EVER again.