Worst Tech Sequels Ever

[doron]

I've used firefox, safari, chrome, ie (ofc) and firefox is my choice. Very good browser.

I agree about norton, although i didn't have this particular software all they do is trouble lately.

Regarding the hd-dvd and dreamcast - As others said, I believe you've failed to perform a throughout research regarding these products and just said what the market "told" thinking it would be accurate.
My opinion is that the best-sellers iPhone/iPod products/sequels deserve to be on that list for the simple reasons:
Every sequel (iphone / ipod) is a tad different in external design, probably only in order to sell more accessories, and does not offer much more than its predecessor.
Software support is very bad - itunes only offers "Sync" ability and with the iphone the "sync manually" option does not work. Also if you sync your product with a mac u can only use macs for it.

I really don't understand how iphones / ipods became so popular. I believe their popularity will end when a worthy competition will rise - just like firefox did to explorer. Until then just don't waste your money unless you know how to hack these products yourselves, or you'll find yourself spend enormous amount of money just for a phone / mp3.

 

[r0x0r]

Office 2007 took me all of 10 minutes to learn, and there's now way I'm going back.

 

[tipmen]

I still want to see the Gamecube up here. You can't deny that it was a major let down from the N64.

 

[thegh0st]

[citation][nom]Tomsguiderachel[/nom]Yes--good call, Lara is correct, I fixed this in the article. Thank you.[/citation]
you're welcome.

(on the predecessor thing I didn't mean the first part I typed to sound rude & vulgar, I meant it to sound surprised & questioning but it didn't seem to read that way after I posted it - apologies if offended)

 

[knoxtenor]

A golden oldie, but one that I still fume about: WordPerfect 6.0. WP5.1 was probably the best word processor ever written. There are things it did (e.g., inserting charts and graphs at their callouts and have them show up--in order--on succeeding pages) that even long-time Word users (like me) long for. But WP6.0 was a complete mess. It attempted to bridge the gap between DOS and Windows, but ended up just pissing off everyone. Oh, well. WordPerfect Corp., then Novell, learned their lesson the hard way, and I suspect that, given a do-over, Corel might rethink their purchase of the once-venerable word processing platform. Of course, I pine for those heady days of $1.00/gallon gas, too, and I've yet to see a PC game that was as much fun to play as the original Wizardry on the Apple IIe. Guess I'm just an old phogey.

 

[quantumrand]

Now now...the Dreamcast was by far the most advanced gaming console of its time! In fact, it had the performance capabilities of the PS2, 2 years before it was even released. It was really a shame that it failed, due mostly to licensing, not to any fault of the console itself.

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

Firefox 3.0 doesn't belong on this list. Most everything about it other than the "Awesomebar" was an improvement over 2.5, especially the memory management.

I wouldn't put the Dreamcast ahead of the Saturn as "worst sequel," I'd say that the Saturn was that worst sequel. NiGHTS, yes, cool... not enough to save it, though.

Any of the Phillips CD-i Zelda games belong on this list. In fact, most of 3D Sonic games should be up there come to think of it. Bomberman: Act Zero probably takes the cake, though.

 

[wayneepalmer]

As far as OS"s, Windows 2000 was probably the best that MS ever did. It would run everything and it was rock solid. XP is basically 2000 with all the pretty-ing up of ME but.

Unfortunately, SP3 has been a pain - I lost a number of otherwise functional pieces of software (ST-Klingon Academy stopped working and the TV program for my AIW 9800 Pro finally imploded completely) after SP3 came out.

You are right about FireFox - several of my online banking accesses won't even work on FF.

Another one you should have included was ATI's TV Tuners (and CATALYST!!) - their hardware was good but the software was awful from day one.

ABIT LGA 775 motherboards - almost $1,200 in unusable and/or damaged parts, 8 months non-operational, and it almost wrecked my marriage.

SyQuest Optical drives. If anyone remembers these, they were one of the first large external storage units (mostly for laptops). They were really fast, blowing away the ZIP drives and being encased they were much more rugged than CD's, but their was some real bugs in their software that locked them into only accepting (one or the other) the C: or D: drive slots and it completely crashed a couple of computers I tried to install it on due to the conflicts.

 

[Balshoy]

The whole thing feels more like a rant than an article... And having firefox classified as a "worst tech sequel ever" is something that deserves at least a "wait, what?" from the reader.

 

[bladefist]

my proposals:
1) ATI drivers od Linux platform
2) IE 8 ... sooo sloooow specialy compared to FF/Chrome/Opera (specially opening a new window/tab)
3) Norton Antivirus Software - I use it @ work ... it's so damn slowing my computer .....it's really a burden to OS
4) apple 'family' products - why the updater repeadetely prompts me to install such software like bonjour for example? I've got quicktime because from time to time I use it, by I'm not interested in installing rest of the apple software .. I've got unchecked the option to periodicly install updates @ control panel. - so annoing!
5) my personal: creative drivers for XFi sound card - for lack of the Stereo mix recording device (I use it much @ the Realtek instead, but why they dont include this device?)
6) durability of CD Discs ... as experiment shows .. much less that 10 years...
other thoughts:
w2000 is not that great .. it got it's issues ... corrected in XP (but that's another story)

referring to SONY, it's a pity that this corporation has it's own ideas about everything .. like MemoryStick cards ... thy are not that bad, but why do we need another standard completely incompatible with everything else ..

 

[wayneepalmer]

Even though XP is a lot better than it was in the beginning, neither of the PC's I had W2K on have ever worked as well as they did before, no matter what I have upgraded in the way of hardware.

Sony MemorySticks - Sony doesn't want you to be able to use anything other than Sony and compatible memory would defeat the purpose.

Here's one that will join the list in the near future: Kindle - with certain companies going back and deleting data after it was purchased, folks are going to drop this tech like it was made by Chrysler.

 

[pender21]

How does Firefox make this list and not Internet Explorer. I call BS. Also, Atari never had a good system to begin with. Why not put game cube instead - something people know because no one remembers the atari 7800.

Why not put 13" Unibody Macbook, before 13" Macbook Pro - the one that lacked firewire instead of 3GS battery, which is obviously a defect and not really a design flaw.

 

[techguy378]

The author of this article needs to stick to writing fact and not his personal opinion about products. Firefox 3.0 and later browsers are less buggy than any other web browser ever invented. They're also a lot faster than other web browsers and use less memory.

As for MS Office 2007, this is one of the easiest to use and most stable office suites on the market. Maybe some people love wading through menu after menu and window after window trying to get their work done but I'd rather just click a couple of buttons on the amazing new ribbon bar to edit my documents and be done with it. As for making changes to the ribbon bar, you don't have to enter complex XML code. I use Office 2007 at work every day and there is actually a menu option that lets you add additional functions to the ribbon bar with a few clicks.

 

[Chetou]

[citation][nom]mitch074[/nom]Firefox 3.0 actually used less RAM than any other browser out there (I could run it on a 256 Mb system without any problem, any other product caused swapping) while still being extremely fast and nimble; it reduced by half RAM use over Firefox 2.[/citation]

LOL! FF2&3 are huge memory hogs. I can't remember the last time it used less than 300 MB if left open with several tabs overnight. Maybe 3.5 finally fixed that.

[citation]Opera is TEH FAILORZ 4: while it's available on multiple platforms and reasonably fast, it has so many bugs in its UI or rendering engine or interpreter that one can't use it for a long time.[/citation]

This is just plain wrong. I'm a Firefox user since it came out, but changed to Opera when I grew tired of constant memory leaks. Never looked back.

 

[oldscotch]

Firefox3 but no IE6?

Vista SP1 is fine, XP suffered a lot of trouble until service packs fixed it too.

Office 2007 is working fine for me...I found the interface is a big improvement actually. I've yet to experience any trouble with it, not sure what the article is going on about.

And where is each and every update to MS Works since 3.0 for DOS?

 

[Miharu]

When I read the title of this article I was thinking "Worst tech-support". I remember bad time with Epson and EA. This could be a great article.

But anyway, I agree most of those 15 top.
Os and software doesn't ALWAYS evolve...
Windows Vista just add aero and remove some custom feature in XP.
ME was 98 but with more bug...

I feel the same about Win7. They fix few thing but many custom feature was removed from Vista (At least on RC)...
Win7 is just a fixed version from Vista (it's not really a improved OS).
People will upgrade just for support drivers, direct x and tech support.

 

[Guest]

Going way back, I would nominate the WordPerfect 6 upgrade from WordPerfect 5.1 and 5.2. WordPerfect 6 is what opened the door to Microsoft Office, as well as Microsoft's 'undocumented system calls' in Word for Windows. Remember when it was dBase, 1-2-3 and WordPerfect?

 

[Honis]

If MS fixed the crashing of ME I would rate it hands down better than win 98 SE. But they didn't >_

 

[FriendlyFire]

There are enough clichés in this "article" to get lost in the lot of them. I strongly disagree with quite a few of them.

The Dreamcast shouldn't be there; it wasn't a bad system for its time, but the competition was downright ferocious. Firefox 3.0+ should not be there AT ALL. What the hell? I've been running 3.5 for a long while and it's as snappy as it ever was or moreso. I couldn't live without AdBlock, NoScript and X-Marks as a user, but on top of that Firebug, FireFTP and Web Dev toolbar are ESSENTIAL tools for me, not including the good integrated error console. HD-DVD just lost the war. What you're writing sounds extremely one-sided, since Blu-ray wasn't all that more accepted and it was actually more expensive until the PS3 came in (and movies still were more expensive on Blu-ray).

That just looks like a cheap shot at taking advantage from trendy opinions.

 

[FriendlyFire]

There are enough clichés in this "article" to get lost in the lot of them. I strongly disagree with quite a few of them.

The Dreamcast shouldn't be there; it wasn't a bad system for its time, but the competition was downright ferocious. Firefox 3.0+ should not be there AT ALL. What the hell? I've been running 3.5 for a long while and it's as snappy as it ever was or moreso. I couldn't live without AdBlock, NoScript and X-Marks as a user, but on top of that Firebug, FireFTP and Web Dev toolbar are ESSENTIAL tools for me, not including the good integrated error console. HD-DVD just lost the war. What you're writing sounds extremely one-sided, since Blu-ray wasn't all that more accepted and it was actually more expensive until the PS3 came in (and movies still were more expensive on Blu-ray).

That just looks like a cheap shot at taking advantage from trendy opinions.