Microsoft crappy products

This logo program for services and devices that used Windows Media DRM may have been the single most inaccurately named item in the history of personal technology. At the time, a Microsoft representative explained the distinction to me, but I barely comprehended it even then—it was as if the company wanted Windows 95 to be called 95 Windows in certain instances.

What it should have been called: Microsoft Office They would live on, but as free downloads, known collectively along with other apps such as Windows Live Writer as Windows Live Essentials. Even in the DOS era, it was unclear why the name of this venerable disk-checking utility skipped all its vowels; even with the eight-character filename limit it could have at least been Checkdsk or Chekdisk. All Microsoft products called Messenger. Microsoft Office Word. Nobody noticed. The Road Ahead.

Windows Yes, seriously: By the time it finally shipped, was two-thirds of the way over, leaving the blockbuster new version of Windows sounding slightly stale from the get-go. Or maybe even names you think are really good? Sound off in the comments. The product was killed in early TerraServer succeeded in accomplishing its intended purpose. The USGS imagery was used because it was a mass amount of data which would help test the limits of the system. Windows Mobile was the most popular mobile OS for several years.

It laid the ground work for the smartphones of today. Yes, Microsoft has virtually disappeared in the mobile market but the innovation was a success. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Sign in. Forgot your password? Get help. Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Windows Mobile. Windows ME. Windows Vista. Microsoft Portrait. AOL is now busy rebranding itself as a content provider, not an access service. Real annoying: The RealPlayer of the late 90s worked fine, but its entourage included aggressive installations, uninvited popups, and insidious Registry rewrites. In order for your browser to display the following paragraph this site must download new software; please wait.

Sorry, the requested codec was not found. Please upgrade your system. Smith discovered that the software was assigning a unique ID to each user and phoning home with the titles of media files played on it—while failing to disclose any of this in its privacy policy.

But less than a year later, Real was in hot water again for tracking the habits of its RealDownload download-management software customers. And even then, the performance boost was negligible. After releasing a handful of other bad Windows utilities , the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in It will not be missed. This might be the worst version of Windows ever released—or, at least, since the dark days of Windows 2.

Shortly after Me appeared in late , users reported problems installing it, getting it to run, getting it to work with other hardware or software, and getting it to stop running. Aside from that, Me worked great. To its credit, Me introduced features later made popular by Windows XP, such as system restore. Forget Y2K; this was the real millennium bug. Photo courtesy of Geek. Any moderately clever cyber attacker could then use the same rootkit to hide, say, a keylogger to capture your bank account information, or a remote-access Trojan to turn your PC into a zombie.

Security researcher Dan Kaminsky estimated that more than half a million machines were infected by the rootkit. Since then, the record company has been sued up the wazoo; a federal court judge recently approved a settlement in the national class action suit.

When parents loaded the Lion King disc into their new Presarios on Christmas morning, many children got their first glimpse of the Blue Screen of Death. But this sad story has a happy ending. And the team behind DirectX went on to build the Xbox—restoring holiday joy for a new generation of kids.

Fortunately, Bob was soon buried in the avalanche of hype surrounding Windows 95, though some of the cartoons lived on to annoy users of Microsoft Office and Windows XP Clippy the animated paper clip, anyone? Mostly, Bob raised more questions than it answered. Like, had anyone at Microsoft actually used Bob? Did they think anyone else would? Full of features, easy to use, and a virtual engraved invitation to hackers and other digital delinquents, Internet Explorer 6.

How insecure? In June , the U. Their reason: IE users who visited the wrong Web site could end up infected with the Scob or Download. Ject keylogger, which could be used to steal their passwords and other personal information.

Microsoft patched that hole, and the next one, and the one after that, and so on, ad infinitum. Digital music is such a great idea that even record companies finally, begrudgingly accepted it after years of implacable opposition.

In , two online services backed by music industry giants proposed giving consumers a legitimate alternative to illegal file sharing.

Several billion illegal downloads later, an outside company—Apple, with its iTunes Music Service—showed the record companies the right way to market digital music. In July the company merged with Borland, which eventually discontinued dBASE in favor of its own database products and sold the rights in to a new company, dataBased Intelligence, Inc. The name-your-price model worked for airline tickets, rental cars, and hotels—why not groceries and gas?

Fuel customers had to pay for petrol online, wait for a Priceline gas card to arrive in the mail, and then find a local station that would honor it—a lot of hassle to save a few pennies per gallon. In less than a year, WebHouse Club, the Priceline affiliate that ran both programs, ran out of gas—and cash—and was forced to shut down. In place of surfing the Web for news and information, push apps like the PointCast Network would deliver customized information directly to your desktop—along with a healthy serving of ads.

Companies began to ban the application from offices and cubicles, and push got shoved out the door. Ironically, the idea of push has made a comeback of sorts via low-bandwidth RSS feeds.