Join Christian Guyton for a walk down memory lane as we recall the 20 biggest computer industry flops of the last 20 years

Christian Guyton

THE CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY field is, without a doubt, an absolute hotbed of technological innovation. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen computing make incredible strides in processing power, graphical capability, and data storage. There have been inspired new moves, like the introduction of simultaneous multi-threading and hyper-threading to double the available threads of CPUs, as well as improvements to software, hardware, and network infrastructure that have made things like 4K video streaming a reality. It wouldn’t be an overly bold claim to say that the PC hardware industry and community are in the best place they’ve ever been (any global pandemics notwithstanding, of course).

© GETTY IMAGES, MICROSOFT, SEAGATE

However, it hasn’t always been happy faces and full coffers in the computing industry. There have been mistakes, bad judgements, humiliating missteps: Some tragic, some hilarious. It’s not uncommon for a brand to release a product or service they firmly believe is going to be the Next Big Thing, then throw all of their marketing resources behind it only for it to fall flat on its face, selling like a Boyz II Men Christmas album in early April.

The past two decades have brought us some incredible innovations, but plenty of flops as well—and they are what we’re going to focus on today, in pursuit of comedy and perhaps a few cautionary tales.

20 Windows Millennium Edition

It seems fitting to start with Microsoft’s turn-of-the-century blunder, Windows Me. That’s “Millennium Edition”, in theory. In practice, it was dubbed the “Mistake Edition,” with a cavalcade of issues plaguing it after release. Sometimes it would refuse to function with existing software; sometimes it would refuse to start up at all. Microsoft scrambled to fix the stability issues and numerous glitches, releasing patch after patch, but the damage was done, and Windows Me was immortalized as one of the worst operating systems ever to be released.

19 Seagate Barracuda 7200.14

There was an awful lot of drama around this one. In 2008/2009, customers around the globe reported drive failures and data loss using Seagate’s 7200.11 hard drives. The issue was identified as a firmware problem, and led to a demonstrably higher rate of failure in the 7200.14 and other drives in the family. Seagate did release a firmware update and offered free data recovery services for affected drives, but the damage was done. The manufacturer was also accused of censoring posts on its forums that discussed the failing drives, leaving many customers angry.

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