The Biggest High-Tech Flops Of 2008

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
Holy **** Pierre i'm not sure about what you really smoked these days....Vista COMMON, Vista is a pretty mature OS right now and the only thing wrong about it is that it requires more ressources than XP...Why not talking about MAC's Leopard, which is a piece o crap compared to Tiger (Still on tiger right now) full of bug, slower than ever, compatibility issue, and so on, so we're good for the OS part.

So lets talk about Sony's OLED TV, yes its expensive but its an high tech device for sure it got to be expensive its one of the few on the market.......think about that, just a lil.

Can you really see a flop in the Microsoft - Yahoo transaction....No cuz nothing happenned, i know you don't like MS but i can't really see the flop here.

The only thing i agree is the GTA IV flop, yeah for sure its a piece of crap and it should be free, at least for PC users (Who deserves better than crap).

So next time can we say the BIGGEST "FRENCH" High-Tech flop, than we're good.

Thank You,
 
"Windows Vista? ...i cant fault it! ... And as for GTA IV - i repeat, it worked from day one with no hassles"

So because you like Vista everyone should? Because GTA IV worked for you it obviously must work for everyone? Look up "solipsism" some time, and figure out how avoiding it can make your posts more relevant.

"Vista COMMON"

Unfortunately it is becoming more common, yes.


 
Xperia a flop? Hardly true. What else offers WVGA screen with all the features of Windows Mobile, hardware keyboard and more? it all depends on what you want/need. For me the iphone was the flop of the year: Finger operated ONLY....what's that all about. Try to use that on-screen keyboard for longer texts - NO THANKS.

I've used/reviewed a fair number of phones for business purposes incl several HTC models, Blackberry's and the 3G IPhone and the Xperia beats all of the hands down. Only the HTC Touch Pro comes close.

Just My 2c
 
[citation][nom]apache_lives[/nom]Iphone - i own one but i hear no complaints about it? I cant MMS people? I cant bluetooth someone an image or anything? I cant store stuff on it? I cant use it for more then 2 days without draining the battery? I can make it crash listening to music and browsing the web? I get poor performance playing the games from the app store??? Not to say nokia is any better...Half assed article.[/citation]Did you read the whole page on that? The iPhone wasn't the flop, it was the competitors that were supposed to knock it off it's pedestal.
 
I have Vista on 2 different machines. Vista is solid. I have had less problems with Vista than XP. Someone is watching too many mac ads.

GTA4..... are you kidding? The game looks and plays great. I have also played it on the Xbox360 and prefer the PC due to the enhanced detail. The game may be hard on older hardware but I can't think of a better reason to upgrade your video card. If they dumbed it down ( so that older systems could play it) everyone would complain about the graphics.

Far Cry2 and Red Alert 3 are bigger piles of crap by far. Far Cry 2 is boring and the command and conquer series has not put out a good title since RA2. I currently rest my coffee mug on the FarCry2 Dvd.

 
[citation]right-click on the installer and choose Vista compatibility mode[/citation]
Thanks for the suggestion. Of course I tried that (for Win XP SP2 and Vista compatibility mode). Some publishers just refuse to support a Beta OS. Including the title GTA4.
The biggest fustration for me was "Games for Windows - LIVE". I got it to work, but way too much trouble to just play a game.
 
The problem with saying that Vista or the Xperia weren't flops is that you don't understand the definition of a flop. A flop is something that was expected to do well in the marketplace and didn't, regardless of if the product is any good. So even if Vista is a great OS, if nobody buys it, then for M$ its a flop.
 
The vista as a flop is hilarious. I have had all microsoft OS since 98,except for the lite foriegn version I mean the year '98 as well...vista, starting at the premium version has the best guts ever...xp and notebooks would seem synonymous, its a tiny hearted os. Take it back to 256kb l2 cache 900 thunderbirds for all I care. xp is all done in my world.
 
The X3 failed because amd was too stupid to clock them right. Ofcourse they're going to be slow at 32ghz compared to a 3ghz X2. Overclocked at 3.2Ghz the X3 is 49% faster then my 3.2ghz X2 according to synthetic benchmarks. AMD SHOULD have clocked them in the 2.6Ghz+ range with the top model being 3.0-3.2Ghz
 
Blaming Mac ads for Vista's terrible reception? That's like blaming Geico for lizard stereotypes. Microsot didn't counter the Almighty Mac with "Hey, Vista's good" ads? They still own a large portion of the market share (although that's been shrinking).

It annoys me every time I see someone bitching that the Netherlands have 100Mbit connections. The Netherlands aren't 3000 miles across. And we have the capacity, I currently have Verizon FiOS, we just needed enough demand in the market place to create a situation in which upgrading the speeds became a profitable venture for the providers. Our GDP dwarfs the Netherlands GPD. They're only benefiting from the fact that their country is infinitesimal. The same goes for France. Patooee!
 
"CUDA, which in fact served as the basis for OpenCL, is much easier to implement than AMD’s solution." You guys have no ideea what you're talking about. CUDA is easier than squat. OpenCL is the same thing. It's the other stuff that AMD tried to impose that was not so popular like Brook+. But still they were not bad either. Anyway OpenCL and CUDA are almost the same thing and code can easily be ported from one to another. Both are very difficult to code in and they are "close to metal" (i mean that the language and coding style are a bit too close to the hardware)
And talking about flops of 2008...how about the textbox from this site :) wich i see that now is fixed (yay).
 
[citation][nom]randomizer[/nom]Did you read the whole page on that? The iPhone wasn't the flop, it was the competitors that were supposed to knock it off it's pedestal.[/citation]

What i ment was they didnt fault it when it its self has its own issues, and i know the others failed to compete, and i my self own the iphone and like it, but it has issues. Still a great phone tho.
 
[citation][nom]MamiyaOtaru[/nom]"Windows Vista? ...i cant fault it! ... And as for GTA IV - i repeat, it worked from day one with no hassles"So because you like Vista everyone should? Because GTA IV worked for you it obviously must work for everyone? Look up "solipsism" some time, and figure out how avoiding it can make your posts more relevant."Vista COMMON" Unfortunately it is becoming more common, yes.[/citation]

Haha so your saying you would rather stick to your current obsolite dinosaur operating system? Do windows 3.11 lovers of there day still use windows 3.11 now? Hell No.

GTA IV - have you tried it? obviously not, so why do you comment about it?
 
why is it that the first thing that came to mind when i saw the title of this article was AMD. thats preety sad, escpecially from an AMD fanboy
 
PC gaming will continue to die as long as games require ultra high end vid cards and are full of bugs....case and point, I updated my video card so I could play Heroes of Might and Magic V for the PC... turns out the game is so buggy, it won't run consistently anyway.
 
Ah, memories. How nice it is to reflect.

If there was any issue I would take here though, it would be with the inclusion of the "iPhone killers" as a flop. While it's abundantly clear that the iPhone remains, in many people's minds, the standard for consumer smartphones, and while it will continue to sell in droves, it's hardly fair to call the "iPhone killers" a big ol' flop because of this.

In particular, the T-Mobile G1 is an interesting case to look at. Aside from it's technical innovations and the huge potential of Open Source on the phone, we could look at pure popularity at and around launch. Despite being available on the 4th place carrier among the "big four," the G1 reached over 1.5 million units in pre-orders. It far exceeded T-Mobile and HTC's sales expectations for the year and managed to single-handedly boost HTC's overall revenue from phone sales by 22%! That's hardly the failure it's made out to be here.

Yes, the iPhone will continue on to record sales, but if the iPhone killers proved anything, its that not everybody wants, let alone needs (as many gadget sites have suggested), an iPhone. What people want is a big, touch-screen, full HTML internet, a media suite, and customizable applications on their phone. The "iPhone killers" may not have killed the iPhone, but they've done what they've set out to do; sell.

The iPhone is not alone.
 
Pierre Dandumont is a moron!

GTA 4 runs great and no problems once Nvidia and ATI released updated drivers. I'm sorry if your 500Mhz Duron and TNT2 doesnt doesn't run it. Update your PC jackasses.
 
I fully modern, built from scratch around the Q9450 when it came out. I have no doubts that I could run GTA4 passibly well. I will not even CONSIDER purchasing it, despite having purchased GTA3, VC, and SA. Reason? I won't "purchase" a game that requires online activiation. Because I sometimes go on nostalgia trips and play games from the 90s and even 80s. What to do when, say, 10 years from now I got to install GTA4, only to find the server I need to connect to no longer exists? DO NOT WANT.
 
Boohoo! No 100mbit in France. Take a teaspoon of cement and harden up. Some of us haven't got even a 20th of that speed available to us but you don't see us whinging.
 
Boy does it feel good not to be the only one who openly defends Vista. I love it. I think the only problem with Vista is consumers. This happens every time a new OS comes out. When XP came out, every one hated it. It's garbage, give us our '98 back. When 7 comes out, the public will run back to Vista. People hate change. Vista Ultimate x64 is solid.

Vista has already been defended on this thread so moving on. My point is OLEDs. OLEDs imo are not a flop. They are the future and are in their infant stage the same as solid state HDDs. Are solid state drives a flop? Heck no! Everyone knows they will come down in price and go up in speed. OLEDs will also become many times better.

The problem with saying that Vista or the Xperia weren't flops is that you don't understand the definition of a flop. A flop is something that was expected to do well in the marketplace and didn't, regardless of if the product is any good. So even if Vista is a great OS, if nobody buys it, then for M$ its a flop.
Click to expand...

This definition is right and wrong. Right in saying the flop refers to its sales and not whether its a good product or not. Example: Vista is a good platform but has bad sales. But in my mind its a wrong definition because one thinks of a flop as something that will never return to the marketplace because it's dead. HD DVD is a flop consumer wise, its never coming back. But OLEDS and solid states are not. Did they sell bad this year? Yes. But will they sell better in years to come? Heck yeah they will! So overall are they a flop? Absolutely not!

If overall, OLEDS are a flop. Then any technology then didn't catch fire immediately in the marketplace is a flop; example: LCD monitors, plasma tvs, hybrid cars.
 
[citation][nom]mikus42[/nom]PC gaming will continue to die as long as games require ultra high end vid cards and are full of bugs....case and point, I updated my video card so I could play Heroes of Might and Magic V for the PC... turns out the game is so buggy, it won't run consistently anyway.[/citation]

Remember Doom 3? Not too many machines could play that game on it's highest setting when it first came out. Far Cry is another title. 4 years from now when the machines are playing Crysis at 110 FPS people will complain about it's lousy graphics compared to COD 9. Doom 3 may be considered old school like Pitfall. Pitfall was amazing when it first came out. I couldn't believe that the guy's pants were a different color than his shirt. That was awesome.

Back to the point... GTA4 was not a flop. For each person who can't get it going on older hardware there are 15 people who are too busy having fun with the game to bother with forums.
 
Heh i laugh at the people waiting for Windows 7 to come out, sure ill prolly get it, but i dont think people realize that its based on VISTA, and will most likely be even heavier again (consuming more resources to start quicker aka expect a big system) - good one idiots, and as far as "getting the bugs out of the system" - (first - what bugs? i know of two that are very hard to detect and have no consequence) but with windows 7, doesnt the bug hunt start all over again?

Microsoft should have scrapped all XP sales years ago and force Vista 64 bit only to force people to buy new rigs etc
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom