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2007: A Retrospective Who scored (other than Christina Aguilera), who looks forward to the future (like J.Lo), who almost scored.. (non names here) and who joins Paris Hilton...
(Author: Michael Schuette, January 13, 2008)

Sucks To Be You

AMD’s Tahoe Event

Much has been written about the beauty of Tahoe and we don’t want to reiterate the abysmal PR move by AMD. Suffice it to say that it happened. And maybe they will learn from their mistakes.

Microsoft Vista

The long-anticipated release of Longhorn, a.k.a. Vista has left the consumer world gasping for air (not aero) in view of the lack of compatibility with not-so-legacy applications and hardware. By the end of the day it is possible to achieve similar performance with Vista as with WindowsXP, provided that literally everything is turned off that differentiates Vista from XP. It still leaves the stale taste of non-working applications with a side dish of paranoia in the activation, not to mention the rude behavior of Microsoft customer support who transfers users to the corporate attorneys issuing threats rather than providing help. The overall lack of enthusiasm is reflected in a rather low acceptance rate of approximately 39% of all new computers, just a bit more than half of the acceptance rate of WindowsXP in the initial release year.

Hewlett Packard Printer Tech Support

HP’s printer customer support truly deserves the award for the single worst tech support in the world. Imagine, you buy a $500 printer that develops problems just about 2 weeks after the expiration of the warranty (coincidence?) and the first thing you get is the question about your credit card because HP will charge you just for talking to you, even if they just tell you that the equipment is broken and you should seek help somewhere else. The negative experience is reinforced by subsequent multiple emails with questionaires that are heavily biased towards positive feedback.

Most Useless Implementation

ReadyBoost, the technology to cache certain application files on a dedicated USB thumb drive to increase access speed is, at least technically, the probably worst flop of the year. While it helps speeding up simultaneous opening of multiple files in a PC running Vista on a meager 512 MB system memory, we found performance degradation in memory intensive applications of up to 70% slower than without ReadyBoost caused by the interruptions of memory transfers by DMA requests of the USB interface. Well done, ReadyBoost is above shooting yourself in the foot.

Worst Company Move

Corsair letting go of Vivian Lien .....

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