The PCWorld.com – The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time
is interesting but as usual I don’t agree with all their choices.

These two products I would put on “best of” not a “worst of” list:

12. Pointcast – the first “push” app and I thought it was great. Yes,
it was a bandwidth hog but only because it was downloading
something useful (unlike screen savers that were popular at the
time) to your computer.

15. Iomega Zip Drive (1998) – a very economical way to store
information inbetween the time of floppy diskettes and writable
CDs. I never had a problem with mine.

Some quibbles:

Some of the items (e.g. 11. Priceline) are not even tech products but
services.

8. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 – it may be a security nightmare and
non-standards-compliant but it still makes it simple for users to read
web pages. Its ubiquity causes most of its problems and I don’t
think you can say it a “worst” product despite the fact that I haven’t
used it since firefox 0.8

2. RealNetworks RealPlayer and 1. America Online – I don’t think
either of these “products” (i.e. the software) is bad. The Realplayer
makes it simple to view the media it supports and AOL made it simple
for people like my father to get online without knowing much about
computers. I do agree that the services were terrible: Real for adding
all that extra, useless software to the download and AOL for a)
covering the planet in floppies and CDs, and b) its cloistered,
overprotective view of the internet.

With these choices I am in agreement:

7. Microsoft Bob – yes a truly bad product. Poorly designed and
executed. You can add that stupid paper clip agent from MS Word to
their hall of shame, too.

5. Sony BMG Music CDs – yes the “root kit” software was as
anti-consumer as you can get

4. Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (ME) – I had no problems with
it but it certainly was a waste of money for what it added to
Windows 98

3. Syncronys SoftRAM – I have to admit that I either didn’t know about
this or forgot about it. But if what they say is true in the article
it was pretty terrible. Nonetheless, there have always been products
like this that promise to soup up, tune up, fix up, etc. your computer
when all they do is adjust some operating system parameters that are
easily accessed by someone with a little knowledge.