Top 10 most overhyped products

Companies don't come out with new products, they come out with "innovations" and "solutions." New products are often rolled out with rock star-level hype and grandiose predictions from executives and analysts.

While the marketing folks no doubt love all the hype given to products, it can also turn somewhat embarrassing for the company when the product fizzles. Even when a product succeeds we still remember the hype.

Here's our top 10:

10. The Segway

Iain Thomson: The Segway launch was shrouded with secrecy, so like good journalists we begged, borrowed and bribed our best to try and find out what it was.

According to some in the tech industry the Segway was going to change the way cities were built, and lead to a carbon free future. In fact what we got was a transportation platform that made you look silly and wasn’t much cop.

Now I know Steve Wozniak loves the Segway, that they are undoubtedly geeky machines that are treasured, but the fact of the matter is that they are a toy for people with more money than sense. The mileage per recharge is pitiful, governments don’t know whether to ban them or embrace them and even George Bush can’t ride one safely.

Shaun Nichols: The problem with the Segway is that it solved a problem nobody really had. Manually powered scooters and bikes are more popular than ever, and they have the pleasant side effect of making you healthier. If you don't want that, there's the bus, car and train.

Sure, the tech behind the Segway is very cool, but the market for people with a lot of disposable income and the desire to get somewhere slowly without having to exercise much doesn’t go much further than old, wealthy geeks.

9. Antivirus software

Iain Thomson: OK, this is a tad controversial but the fact is that for much of its history antivirus software has not lived up to the hype.

In the early days viruses were passed backwards and forwards on floppies, and the only precautions you needed to take was to make the disc read only. Then email and the internet came along and viruses became a much bigger problem.

The fact of the matter is that most antivirus software is retroactive – the virus needs to be in circulation before an antidote, in this case a signature file, is found. So if you’re the first recipient of a virus then you’re out of luck.

Even more worrying is custom viruses – if some script kiddie gets hold of a virus building engine and sends you a virus without propagating it in the wild you’re out of luck in the protection stakes – there’s no way an antivirus package will detect it.

For all the talk of heuristic engines to detect virus-like behaviour we’ve seen precious little action and the industry is still wedded to the idea of signature-based virus identification. Until security software gets a lot smarter we’re going to be seeing the same old problems coming up again and again.

Shaun Nichols: I'd also add the problem of social engineering to that list. As comedian Ron White once said, "you can't fix stupid." You can't really patch against it either. All of the detection tools and warnings won't make much of a difference if the user ignores them in hopes of free p0rn.

The industry is slowly moving towards heuristics, particularly the smaller vendors who don't have the resources to maintain a huge library. Unfortunately, many users still see AV software as clunky, intrusive, and unreliable.

8. Apple TV

Shaun Nichols: Nobody does hype like Apple. They do it so well that even their lesser projects get hyped to ridiculous proportions. This was the case with the Apple TV.

Though it was quickly put on the back burner for the iPhone and OS X Leopard, the Apple TV was the star of the show in late 2006.

These days, Apple TV is somewhere between the external hard drive and the mouse in terms of the company's priorities. While it was never a terrible product, it lacked a true "killer app" until iTunes movie downloads really came into force, and by then it was already stuck in the shadows of the iPod, iPhone and Mac lines.

Iain Thomson: When we got the invite to this the initial thought was that Apple was to remake the TV in the same way it had the personal computer or the media player. How wrong we were.

In fact, what we got was a digital video recorder in a shiny new wrapper. It wasn’t even that good – it had very limited codec support and needed several updates before it rivaled other players on the market. And still Apple fans bought it; proof, if any were needed, that the Apple fan will buy anything if Steve Jobs tells them it’s cool.

7. Zune

Shaun Nichols: The more I think about it, the higher I want to place the Zune on this list. It is one of the few examples of Microsoft bringing its huge marketing and development budget into an arena and getting laughed out of it.

Zune was supposed to be the iPod killer. It was a device Microsoft had spent years crafting and many expected it to do to the media player market what the Xbox did to the gaming console market.

Though the Zune had some interesting features, none of them were very good. The interface fell short of the iPod's. The wireless features had potential, but got badly limited by a lacking music service and restrictive DRM. The Zune just never had any compelling arguments to overcome the popular and fashionable iPhone. In the end, Microsoft's hype machine was no match for Apple's hip machine.

Iain Thomson: The Zune, proof positive that Microsoft will never be as cool as Apple.

At the launch Microsoft was touting this as the iPod killer, a device that would stop people contributing to Steve Jobs’ retirement fund and start putting their money where Bill Gates thought it should go – his capacious pockets.

Why anyone at Redmond thought this was a great device is beyond me. It sucks, plain and simple. I’ve owned many media players over the years and, while I’ve bought some stinkers, I’d never consider handing over hard-earned cash for this piece of junk.

6. 3D Worlds

Shaun Nichols: The story of the 3D online worlds is proof that sometimes a cool technological idea and a good business idea aren't always the same thing.

Lead by Second Life, 3D worlds peaked in popularity around 2006, but have tapered off since then. At the peak of the hype, big media names such as Reuters and Cnet went as far as to set up bureaus and assign reporters to cover Second Life as a beat. Sun and IBM bought their own in-game islands which were used to host products releases and press meetings.

The problem is, there wasn't a whole lot of a reason to do so. The enterprise benefits of those online worlds were and still are minimal. Having experienced the meetings and press conferences firsthand, I can tell you that they fall well short of an in-person briefing and the distractions of a 3D world and lack of access to other applications makes them far more inconvenient than a phone briefing.

That's not to say that online worlds aren't successful in other markets. World of Warcraft is among both the most popular games and online communities right now, due to the fact that the gameplay actually gives people a reason to be there beyond simply walking around a 3D map. Second Life also maintains a loyal core of users, though the gambling ban did cause many to flee.

3D worlds, though still a niche, have fallen short of their promise for a new generation of internet hubs and revolutionary way to interact with people.

Iain Thomson: If Second Life and its ilk are the future then hang me now.

We got bombarded with press releases talking about how Second Life had a bigger population than Bolivia etc. In fact, it was all rubbish – there are a dedicated core of people who inhabit 3D worlds but the majority of users try it out and decide they prefer the real world.

There’s also the nutjobs who patronise these environments. While there are perfectly normal people who use 3D worlds, some of whom I count as friends, there are also a lot of people who are a few flying buttresses short of a full cathedral. You know the type I mean, those who have avatars of genitalia or sundry other tasteless personas. Sadly 3D worlds attract these people like flies and they, more than anything else, make 3D worlds a busted flush.5. Voice recognition

Iain Thomson: No pun intended but voice recognition sounds like a great idea, but sucks in practice.

The processing power needed to accurately translate the human voice is huge, and the software to do it isn’t ready either. Yet voice recognition companies still insist that it is, and users everywhere are disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a working voice recognition system on my computer. It would make life so much easier and spare me arthritis as the years go on. But there isn’t one, and isn’t likely to be one available for some time to come.

There’s also the problem of what happens if we do get a working system. Can you imagine an office where everyone was talking to their computer? It would make work life so stressful people would be going postal trying to get away from the din.

Shaun Nichols: Voice recognition got second place on our list of most last week, so that should give some indication of how we feel about it. Whoever it was that convinced so many companies to adopt voice recognition software should be given a medal for his or her marketing genius, and then a public flogging for crimes against humanity.

Perhaps it’s a classic case of a product that was ahead of its time. Voice recognition is an interesting concept, but so many attempts at it have failed miserably that all of the hype has just become annoying.

4. Itanium

Shaun Nichols: Companies often talk about their "bridge" programs that show the roadmap from one big step in technology to another. Most will groan at this gratuitous example of PR-speak. However, as Intel's Itanium project proved, those sort of "bridge" plans are actually pretty important.

The problem with the Itanium chip was that Intel didn't think that support for 32-bit code was necessary. Instead, Itanium went exclusively with 64-bit code and customers went with other chips.

Itanium was supposed to be Intel's next generation of server chips, a powerful new processor which would help lead the company to a dominant position in the enterprise market. Instead, the project is still struggling to take flight and the fallout from the Itanium project landed Craig Barrett on our list of the of all time.

Iain Thomson: Itanium caused a lot of red faces among the analyst community, who predicted stellar sales when in fact they were tiny.

Itanium was the big thing at several Intel Developer Forums – Barrett raved about it, claiming that it would revolutionise computing. In a way it did, by giving AMD the whip hand in the processor market for a few years.

While Itanium is a powerful chip it is also a dog for the IT administrator, since the only way to use it to best advantage is to shift the entire network to 64-bit computing. Since that hasn’t happened yet, years after Itanium’s launch, you can see why this made the list.

3. Windows Vista

Shaun Nichols: It's pretty safe to say that Windows Vista has become the single biggest software flop in the last ten years. The story is almost a "what not to do" guide for rolling out an operating system.

Vista was supposed to carry Windows to another level. The sleek interface, built-in security features and speedy performance were supposed to blow away Windows XP.

The problem was that after six years, people had learned to really like Windows XP. It was a familiar interface, it didn't require expensive hardware to run and years of patching had hammered out most of its flaws.

Vista, on the other hand, sported a new interface to learn, a fresh set of bugs to deal with and a notoriously demanding set of hardware requirements. This created a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The company was forced to extend the lifespan of XP, promise customers a replacement in Windows 7 and even slip Vista into people's computers by disguising it as "Windows Mojave."

Iain Thomson: Vista could well be the nadir of Microsoft’s influence.

The company hyped the hell out of the operating system, claiming it was going to revolutionise the industry. Instead it is proving a persistent thorn in Microsoft’s side.

For me Vista is so high on the list because it was frequently promised and so lately delivered. This bit of code than Douglas Adams and, by some counts, came out four years late. Now you can get away with that kind of behaviour if a product is worth waiting for. Vista isn’t.

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Iain Thomson: AI has been researched for years and some believe it will be the ultimate panacea of computing – but the fact is it’s no-where near coming to pass.

What is undoubtedly true is that in the next decade we’ll build chips with the same number of neural connections as the human brain. Some consider this to be ‘the Singularity’, when computers become self-aware. Tosh I say.

It doesn’t matter how many transistors you pack onto a computer chip. At the end of the day, the key to artificial intelligence is software. Without software that mimics the human brain, which no-one has worked out how to do yet, AI will remain a distant dream.

Plus, to be frank, I’m not sure we really should build AI systems. After all, if a computer is self-aware how is it going to cope with being switched off occasionally? Will it resent performing mundane spreadsheet programs and decide it would be much more fun to muck about with the phone system instead? I’m not predicting a Terminator-type situation but we should be careful what we wish for.

Shaun Nichols: I've always thought that the biggest hurdle for artificial intelligence was the fact that we're not yet completely sure how our own natural intelligence works. Many parts of the biology of the brain are still unknown, and until we can figure those out, how is it even possible to build a blueprint for reliable AI?

Then there's the question of whether the binary system computing is built on could ever fully handle the subtleties and variables that are required to properly comprehend and reason the way the human brain does.

1. Videoconferencing

Iain Thomson: In 1994 I did some work for a videoconferencing company and wrote endless press releases about how this was the year that the technology would take off. I’m still getting similar press releases and they are all rubbish.

Back then you could get video conferencing on a PC, if you had a dedicated ISDN line and a special board inside your computer. And it was rubbish – lousy frame rate, very poor images and the amount of time spent encoding and decoding the transmission made the conversation sound like you were calling from the moon.

The latest videoconferencing systems are a lot better it has to be said. Images are clear, there’s a lot more processing power and they’ve finally sorted out a way to make people look at the screen rather than the camera, so you feel like you’re having a conversation directly not looking over someone’s head.

But these systems are stunningly expensive. You need dedicated networks to carry the data and powerful processors to run it. Only the richest companies can afford it and even then no-one uses them much. The reason? Well guess what, people like meeting face to face in expensive restaurants or flying to exotic locations for business meetings. Until that facet of human nature is solved then videoconferencing will remain in the technological ghetto.

Shaun Nichols: Despite decades of endless commercials and movies depicting a seamless videoconferencing system in every office, the technology is still quite poor.

While things such as webcams have come a long way, the true videoconferencing systems we've been promised for years are only now taking shape. And those that do work with a broadcast TV-quality picture and sound require so much money and bandwidth that they're hardly available outside of and show-floor demonstrations.

Honourable mention - The Flying Car

Iain Thomson: It’s one of the most plaintive cries of the techie – “Where’s my flying car?”

The fact is we’ve had flying cars for decades now, but the marriage of flight and automobile is not a happy one. Cars are heavy and planes are not, cars are fuelled with petrol while planes require more specialised fuel. It will be a long time before the two are melded together.

Nevertheless people still try and build the things. Sadly they miss a key point. Given the state of most people’s driving should we even allow flying cars? Given the amount of times I get cut off on the freeway I think it would be safer for all if cars stayed firmly groundside.

Shaun Nichols: Flying cars, entire meals in a pill, cities on the moon. Man, the future was cooler in the past. It's quite sad when you think about it: Ask for a flying car, get a skinny TV and a phone that can play clips of monkeys riding bicycles.

Iain is correct in regards to safety. People have enough trouble driving in two dimensions. Add flight to that and you could get some truly terrible accidents.

Honourable Mention. Amazon Unbox


Shaun Nichols: Yet another one of the "killers" that wasn't. Amazon's Unbox service was supposed to take on iTunes in the video download market.

Unbox would appear to have a lot going for it. Amazon was a big name in the industry, and the service had recently snagged a stable of programs from NBC after the studio had a with Apple over episode pricing.

The service never did catch fire, being pinched both by iTunes and by online services such as Hulu. In September, Amazon was forced to remake Unbox with the generic "Video on Demand" label.

Iain Thomson: There are few things we journalists like more than a good old fashioned platform war. Headlines just write themselves and we get great quotes from frustrated executives when tempers run hot.

So when Unbox came out, going up against iTunes, it looked good. War! War! unleash the dogs etc. Instead we got the most unequal fight since Gulf One and a service that was about exciting as a damp weekend.

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