Best and worst of the noughties

WITH 2010 ON OUR DOORSTEP, earlier this week we asked you for your thoughts about the best and worst technologies to come out of the last decade.

As always you guys rose to the occasion and, with some of the industry's most knowledgeable staff at our disposal, we also tapped the Inquirer staff for their views on the tech highs and lows of the noughties.

We'll start the some of our own INQpressions.

For Stewart Meagher, top of the pops was Sky+ while the dedicated Twitter device Tweet Peek, tweaked his nose well out of joint.

"Sky+ has taken the control of television out of the hands of the Tarquins and the corporate advertisers and placed it in the hands of the users. Gone are the days when you watched what you were told to watch when you were told to watch it. And gone are the days when you were forced to sit through excruciating adverts for feminine hygiene products and hemorrhoid treatments. Vive la revolution!

The Tweet Peek flies in the face of modern thinking where everything is about convergence. We want our pocketable tech to do more, not less. To come up with a gadget which has just one trick up its sleeve is madness, especially when the vast majority of the target audience already has the ability to tweet built into their mobile phone handset. Unfathomable."

For Dave Neal Samsung's popular NC10 notebook was both a highlight and disappoint of the decade.

"Like many relationships, I had a definite honeymoon period with my Samsung NC10. Three months of shared bliss as we went everywhere together, went shopping for things together, and listened to music together. But those halcyon days did not last. Now, the netbook, or notbook as it has come to be known has More missing keys than a blind jailors keyring, and a mousepad that seems to be so naturally oversensitive that it wouldn't be out of place on a programme about teenage girls with low-self esteem."

Topping the naughty list for Egan Orion was Microsoft Vista, released in 2006 and replaced this year by Windows 7.

"Even before Windows XP came out, the Vole hinted that it was already working on an even better OS. I'm no Microsoft historian, but the names Longhorn and Blackthorn come to mind. The hype was that it would be the best PC OS ever, and would achieve quantum leaps in every dimension. It would have a new, super secure and blindingly fast file system that would let you find any document or file almost instantly. It would have revolutionary new display technology, possibly even 3D. And it would be totally 'trustworthy', which most people assumed meant completely secure - but a few less gullible observers warned that promised to lock down content to pander to Big Media. It was also supposed to come out in just a couple of years, and Microsoft sold corporate subscriptions promising large companies price breaks on it when it appeared.

Then it was delayed, and delayed again, and most of the promised new features were dropped along the way in a desperate attempt to finish the OS and finally get it launched. The new file system fell by the wayside, as did the 'revolutionary' display technology and several other features. When Vista finally came out in late 2006 to early 2007, it was a disappointment."

Dean Pullen concurred with Stewart on the choice for top trumps, but sided with Egan's selection of Vista as the worst.

"Sky+ has revolutionised the way I, and others, have watched TV. The simple interface accentuates the feature-complete STB, allowing even complete luddites the luxury of on-demand TV.

Vista was one of the worst debacles of the decade - years late, crushingly slow, buggy as hell, and an annoyingly unintuitive interface. Windows 7 still hasn't proven any much better in my eyes."

Nick Farrell seems to have a longer memory opting for Windows Me as his lowlight.

"Before Vista there was the Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me which was released on September 14, 2000. It was supposed to be a continuation of the Windows 9x model, but with access to real mode MS-DOS restricted in order to speed up system boot time. This killed off any applications that needed real mode DOS to run which made the OS extremely unpopular.

To make matters worse it was unstable and froze more often than an Antarctic nudist. In short it was hard to install, difficult to get to run, hated other software, snarled at hardware and sometimes to get it to stop running involved switching the power off. Its system restore had a friendly habit of replacing malware. Vole realised it was a lemon and kept it on the shelves for a year when it was replaced by the Windows NT-based Windows XP, which was launched on October 25, 2001. Vista was no where near as bad as Me."

For Ian Williams mobile data was a clear choice for one of the top technologies of the noughties.

"Although mobile data access has been around since the mid-90's, it's only really since the development of GPRS towards the beginning of this decade that mobile data has begin to see any serious traction.

In an incredibly short space of time, the technology has come on in leaps and bounds, in terms of adoption, speed, bandwidth and price. Going hand in hand with the adoption of smartphones and USB dongles, the Internet accessible just about anywhere - although connection quality and cost still vary widely."

Other honourable mentions include flat-panel displays, Li-ion batteries, Google search and services, social networking and WiFi. Some dishonourable mentions included Office 2007 and its hateful ribbon, Sony's rootkit and Microsoft Live search.

Meanwhile it seems your responses were as varied as our own.

Topping the reader response included the humble USB key, which according to bob is "a fairly reliable storage medium that has replaced all sorts of removable storage media (Zip, SparQ, CD-RW, floppy disks, etc)."

The Blackberry and multi-core CPUs also made the list of top tech to land since 2000.

Perhaps unsurprisingly Vista was a common theme amongst commenters as a candidate for worst tech from this decade.

"Worst: Windows Vista? While Vista works ok now with SP2 and I'm actually using it both on my desktop and laptop, it certainly took its time to mature, and all in all must've been one of the biggest commercial failures as well," wrote Tuomas.

Several themes made it onto both lists. Rather controversially the open sauce operating system Ubuntu came up with praise coming from bob who said "Ubuntu would come a close second, it's an amazing bit of software but it just hasn't changed the landscape enough yet. Maybe in a few more years Ubuntu will be worthy of the title." However Doug Glas slammed it "for becoming increasingly like a Microsoft marketing machine and rushing poorly written software out the door."

Intel's Atom processor was another such product, garnering praise from Doug Glas "for opening up the world of the netbook" and disdain from bob who says "it may have made the netbook more accessible, but I just can't forgive the awful performance, poor chipset choices, lack of 64 bit support (at least in the early models), and the piss poor linux support due to the closed source PowerVR."

Meanwhile popular online game World of Warcraft was nominated by the same person for as both best and worst with Sonkut writing: "Worst Tech nomination: WOW - for most time wasted. Best Tech nomination: WOW - for MOST TIME WASTED!!!!"

Another 'technology' that was rated both best and worst was our own humble Inquirer, whom according to regular commenter interested_party is rated for its "vicious, humourous and well informed articles," but "seems to have almost died. Each week the amount of friction and humour is greatly reduced."

The Inquirer certainly has undergone several changes in the last ten years, evolving in ways that have perhaps not best pleased some of our long standing readers. The Internet and the industry have both changed radically over that time and we've had to change with them, but you may be assured that we continue to strive to deliver the best technology news and commentary around. µ