Biggest Tech Flops of 2015

What Went Wrong in the Tech World This Year?

Hoverboards, the self-balancing two-wheeled electric scooters that are the skateboard plague of the 21st Century, have been selling like hotcakes - and bursting into flames or even exploding. Amazon and Overstock have banned most models. Airlines won’t allow them on flights. The Consumer Products Safety Commission says it’s working “non-stop” to figure out what the problem is. Hint: cheap foreign knockoffs often use faulty lithium batteries and lack protection against overcharging.

Volkswagen was caught cheating on pollution emissions tests with software that disabled emission control systems except when a car was being tested. About 11 million diesel vehicles are affected worldwide, including 500,000 in the U. S. where Volkswagen has canceled all diesel sales plans for 2016.

Chrysler had to recall 1.4 million Jeeps after hackers demonstrated to a Wired magazine reporter that they could remotely take control of a vehicle’s dashboard functions, steering, transmission, and brakes - leaving a terrified reporter nose-down in a ditch. Jeep owners won’t have to taket their hapless vehicles to dealers; the software patch will be sent to them on a USB drive that plugs into the car’s diagnostic port.

The car industry isn’t the only one with shameful security scandals this year. The U.S. government’s Office of Personnel Management let the in-depth background checks of 20 million job applicants and their spouses get out the door. The Stagefright flaw discovered in Google Android put nearly a billion users at risk.

Over 30 million people, not all of whom were actually cheating on their spouses, were betrayed by lax security at AshleyMadison. Just last week, Juniper Networks discovered a three year-old hidden backdoor in the software that powers its high-capacity routers, widely used by the U. S. government. Essentially, everything we own that has an IP address allows hackers to own us.

Microsoft managed to mess up critical software updates, causing headaches and heart attacks among many users. MS had to recall and re-issue four patches, in January, February, November and December. Windows 10 upgrades disabled user-installed applications, drivers, and settings, prompting widespread anger.

Consumers fell out of love with “daily deals” sites such as Groupon, which plans to lay off 1,100 people in 2016. Amazon shut down its deals site, Amazon Local. And LivingSocial, one the oldest players, announced layoffs of 200 workers, or 20% of its workforce. Amazon also closed its Amazon Destinations hotel booking site only seven months after it opened. Seems folks don’t want to pay full price for weekend getaways within driving distance of their homes.

The Apple Watch’s sales are down 90% from its first frenzied month, indicating that early adopters are not convincing mainstream consumers to buy. Apple won’t even talk about Watch sales figures. The two things that have made Apple wildly successful - simplicity and elegance - simply aren’t up to snuff in the Apple Watch.

Peeple is supposed be “Yelp for people,” an app that lets anyone rate your personality, professionalism, and dating skills for all the Internet to see. Oh, and you can’t approve or rebut what’s posted, and you can’t opt out if you don’t want to be rated. Needless to say, Peeple is still “in beta” and unavailable to download. Meanwhile, the other Peeple, the nifty digital door peephole, is catching undeserved flak for a horrible idea it has nothing to do with.

The Coolest Cooler, a $499 ice chest tricked out with Bluetooth speakers, WiFi, a blender, and more geekery, raised $13 million from 60,000 Kickstarter contributors who were supposed to receive their coolers starting in February, 2015. So why is the cooler selling on Amazon before contributors’ orders are filled? “To keep the lights on,” says Coolest CEO Ryan Grepper, who vows all contributors will have their units by April, 2016.

I wrote about the “Final” credit card project in October, 2014, calling it “at best a gag, a joke, a troll.” The revolutionary payment card was supposed to launch in February, 2015; it hasn’t. Don’t sign up to receive email when it’s available; you’ll probably end up sold to spammers.

The HP Sprout, a gorgeous all-in-one desktop PC that combines a 3D scanner, projector, and keyless keyboard, looked pretty enticing when it debuted in late 2014. But today, I can find only 1 customer review on Amazon, 3 on BestBuy.com, and none at Newegg.com.

The Firefox browser is all but dead, though though its bloated corpse staggers on. The federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP) reports that Firefox’s share of visitors to government sites dropped to 9.7% in December, 2015, down from 11% in October. Political infighting at the Mozilla Foundation and a horribly mistaken attempt to make FireOS an alternative to Android and iOS contributed to the browser’s decay into irrelevance. (FireOS was officially killed this month.)

In the category of “comedy is tragedy that happens to someone else,” I found two winners this year: The much-hyped biopic “Steve Jobs” was dumped by over 2,000 theaters just three weeks after it opened having earned just over $16.7 million. And PC World magazine published “How to stop autoplay videos” on January 1, 2015. Today, despite dozens of derisive comments, that Web page still sports an autoplaying video.

Your thoughts on these topics are welcome. Can you think of any websites or tech gadgets that flopped, or failed to live up to the hype? Post your comment or question below...