What's the Most Annoying Product of All Time?
Psssst--in the grand tradition of such PC World stories as The 25 Worst Products of All Time, we're secretly working on an article on the most annoying tech products in world history (or at least since our founding in 1983). We'll publish it real soon now.
But first, we wanted to tap your collective wisdom (or should that be collective irritation?). Please take the poll below, which lists a bunch of annoying products (some are probably in our story, some probably aren't--but I'm not tellin' you for sure).
Vote for the product that's ticked you off the most over the years--and if it's not on the list, choose "Other" and enter a write-in vote in the field below.
We'll draw one winner from among all voters and present that person with a gift-wrapped copy of Microsoft Office 97 with Clippy permanently turned on. (Just kidding!)
Thanks in advance for complaining--and stay tuned for our article, which'll report on the results of this poll....
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What is the most annoying product in the last 20 years. This may not be the most annoying but it certainly ranks right up there and it is the IPod. The cheesy little white headphones that are far from discrete. The users who walk around listened to music have become a public nuisance as they pay too little attention to what is going on around them. Thanks Apple, while you have created a great product, you have also increased the level of tackiness in America and the world by an order of magnitude.
Adobe Flash...ugh! I love it for creating animation, but this is the program responsible for millions of annoying, bouncing, flashing, wiggling web ads. I don't mind having advertising on web sites, I just hate it when I accidentally mouse-over one and it springs to life and takes over my web page.
I don't know which is worse: the old blinking text, or the new flash-based ads.
The most annoying product out their is the IMac because of their advertising. Apple's current line of advertising is terrible and the most obnoxious I have seen in a decade or more.
It's not easy picking the most annoying product. At least for me anyway. I've used many applications over the past twenty years. For the DOS era, I'd say WordPerfect was most annoying to me - the interface was horrible, if not intimidating, and I hated those pernicious formatting codes! Jumping to Windows, I found CorelDRAW to be the most intimidating graphics software I've ever used. Adobe PageMaker had a clunky interface. Microsoft OneNote was useless, and Adobe Acrobat PDF toolbars in the Office applications were almost impossible to remove unless you removed Acrobat entirely. But the one most irritating thing I've used is Windows Explorer: (1) the schizophrenic Windows Explorer window, (2) the fact that folder windows don't retain their settings like they do on a Mac, (3) the file type properties dialog has a mind of its own, and (4) the lack of a New Folder icon on the toolbar! (why, Microsoft, why?).
You forgot the most ANNOYING thing of all cd copy protection I HATE that I have to put my game cd in to play I have over 100 games where I have to put in the cd to play COME ON they think this will stop WAREZ but all it does is screw up the people that buy it I have had many of these games screw up cause of the copy protection
There are some beauts but to me it has to be our "digital" Cable TV STB - it reminds me of the response from an overloaded timesharing computer system. Press a button on the remote and nothing happens... but the LED on the remote *did* flash; try to change channel and half the time a number isn't seen by the box and you end up on the wrong channel. Add the button lag/ignore to the "live" TV Guide and its unnavigable menu system and this is a nightmare.
*** JAVASCRIPT !!!!! ***
THIS IS HANDS DOWN THE WORST.
Javascript is responsible for POPUP ADS, JAVASCRIPT POP-UNDERS, JAVASCRIPT ON-LOADERS, JAVASCRIPT ON-UNLOADERS, BROWSER CRASHES, LOCKUPS, BROWSER HIJACKERS, SPYWARE INFECTORS, IMAGES that won't display, PAGES that won't open, Links that fail to work, # links, STUPID TRAILS that follow your MOUSE POINTER, WINDOWS that have NO Scrollbars, Windows without MENUS, MODAL Dialogs that can't be closed, JAVASCRIPT WINDOWS THAT RESIZE THEMSELVES and EXPAND to FILL your entire screen, JAVASCRIPT WINDOWS that move their position to put the [x] box OFF the clickable area of your screen, JAVASCRIPT FORMS that don't submit properly, JAVASCRIPT AJAX CRAP that bogs down your whole machine, NEXT buttons that fail to work, JAVASCRIPTS that load malicious ActiveX controls, JAVASCRIPTS that load infectious porn dialers, JAVASCRIPT is the SCOURGE of the entire internet, HANDS DOWN THE WINNER OF the WORST THING IN EXISTENCE. Voting is done.
To gundark, above, those flash things you mention, you wouldn't see 1/2 of those ads if it weren't due to--- JAVASCRIPT--- which is the main culprit loads the Flash activex control in the 1st place.
OH, and I almost forgot:
-"Scripting flaw hits Hotmail and Yahoo"
-'Cross-site Scripting Flaw in webalizer'
-"Shell scripting flaw opens OS X to attack"
-"Adobe scripting flaw unearthed"
-"Scripting flaw leaves sites vulnerable | CNET"
-"Scripting flaw threatens Web servers"
-"Scripting Flaws in Financial Sites Aid Scammers"
-"BetaNews | Guninski Uncovers XML Scripting Flaw"
-"Google Desktop flaw allows data theft"
-"A cross-site scripting flaw exists with Novell GroupWise"
-"Scripting Flaw Leaves Servers Vulnerable eWEEK"
-"Gentoo Linux KDE libraries is prone to a cross-site scripting flaw"
-"Debian: New zope2.7 packages fix cross-site scripting flaw"
-"CiscoWorks Wireless LAN Engine Cross-Site Scripting Flaw"
-"FIREFOX vulnerable to Scripting exploit"
ALL JAVASCRIPT!
RealPlayer got my vote, for past horrors, but what plagues me now is FlashPlayer. I declined to install FlashPlayer on my work computer as an extra safety measure, but now I refuse out of principle. What infuriates me more than anything is my explorer window crashing because I do not have Flash to play the *advertisements* on the website.
DRM is unquestionably the worst, but you left Flash off the list. Flash would definitely be the second.
I have problems with media player codecs, in some cases when they download spyware to my PC... thank goodness for System Restore.
I voted for Colour Dot-matrix Printers. Remember these things that you bought as a more-expensive replacement for an older dot-matrix, then you bought the expensive colour ribbon, then you got a couple of slow, noisy, badly-banded pages out of them, and then the yellow part of the ribbon was contaminated. And this was when these printers were 'new'! When HP brought inkjet printing to the masses, I think we realised what a waste of time the colour dot-matrix had been! :-)
Getting sound cards to work under DOS (particularly for Windows 95 with cheap sound cards) was one of the worst technologies for not-working, and I also find that Windows Networking is still unreliable to this day!
-Alex
The most annoying tech product of all time is, without a doubt, WINDOWS VISTA. And not just one version of the Operating System -- ALL VERSIONS. And just when you thought that Windows Millennium Edition was bad...talk about your bastard offspring.
I upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate from Windows XP Pro. Because of ONE DRIVER (Sonic DLA, considered a Spyware product), it totally RUINED my entire system. I kept getting all sorts of error messages about how the driver was incompatible with Vista.
And that's just the beginning: Updating and configuring updates is WAY TOO SLOW. Product activation is a nightmare, and the OS just doesn't work.
Windows Vista deserves to be in the Technology Hall Of Shame. It is worse than AOL, worse than Windows ME, and worse than ANYTHING I HAVE EVER ENDURED IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. Windows Vista is not an OS -- it's a POS.