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Of COVID-19[female[feminine from economic roller coasters to electoral chaos, 2020 is a year we would all rather forget. But before we start to envision a brighter and better 2021, and with Thanksgiving this week, it’s time for Jason Cipriani and I to present our annual Tech Turkey awards. In other words, technology products and services that broke their promises, exaggerated the hype, or simply failed.
- Facebook, Twitter and Parler fail on human decency and controlling the spread of toxic disinformation
Last year, the two major social networks ranked No.2 on the Tech Turkey list for failing to limit the way their respective user bases disseminate misinformation and toxicity. They managed to eclipse this poor performance in 2020, with information linked to both the coronavirus pandemic and the presidential election that followed. These services have taken no responsibility and failed to protect their networks from potential authoritarianism, racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, hatred of LGBTQ people and toxic conspirators. And, this year, we can also add Speak to that list, which feeds totally on this content under the guise of free speech. It wasn’t until the last few months of 2020 that social media took corrective action by posting advisory posts about the posts of prominent disinformation agents and dismissing them from their services when they should have been. do years ago.
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2. Microsoft Duo and Motorola Razr 2
I think the Microsoft Duo was the wrong phone at the wrong time. Even in the best years, when people are mobile and commute to work, this device would have a lot of issues. Despite an impressive industrial design, the hardware was outdated when it was released due to the number of lags this thing had. It was underpowered, with not enough memory to drive those two screens, so the device was slow. It was just too expensive for what it was getting. Some people have said that the screens are too big for a smartphone and too small to be an efficient tablet. I know Ed Bott, who recently sent his back, wants one with bigger screens so he can replace the iPad.
The Motorola Razr 2 is the same story: great industrial design, but arguably with mediocre hardware, especially if you’re comparing much lower-priced devices like the Samsung S20. Expensive and underperforming is a bad combination, especially in 2020. Those two phones were big tech turkeys.
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3. Quibi burns $ 1.75 Billon and ignites in six months
My Jason Squared co-host Jason Cipriani said: “What is it? No, really, I must have missed it.” Indeed, because no one has used the service. Quibi was the failed-targeted subscription video streaming service for smartphones formed by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. The content was offered in bursts of 10 minutes. The company burned $ 1.75 billion in a year thanks to investments from major Hollywood studios, and the service was shut down six months after its launch in April. In the socially remote era of COVID-19, people wanted long-lasting conventional content from services they were already paying for, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu, or if they wanted to snack on videos, they wanted it. for free on YouTube. A terrible idea and a big waste of investment.
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4. Facebook portal, the IoT device you would be crazy to install
I think people find Facebook to be an extremely unreliable business, so the idea of using hardware that the business has its filthy tentacles in, placed in the sanctuary of your home, is a bit disturbing. It’s not like Google or Amazon doing this is fundamentally better, because these other companies have similar products. Still, I think people want the option to stay away from Facebook if they want to. It’s one thing to have Facebook as an app that you can delete; it’s another to put it on a hutch in your living room or on your kitchen counter, always listening, and with a camera that tracks your movements at all times. There are just a lot of scary aspects, data manipulation and privacy intrusion in the business that I think people can’t get over, and for good reason. Burn the Facebook portal with fire.
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5. The Amazonian Ring (of Fire)
Speaking of burning with fire, the Johnny Cash Award goes to the Amazon Ring. Literally some models were on fire, so Amazon had to launch a product recall in November. This is basically a problem with the way devices are screwed into the wall, and if not done right, with the correct screws used, the batteries built into the device can overheat and catch fire. . Apparently, there were 85 incidents of improperly screwed doorbells, and 23 of them ignited, causing minor property damage, and in eight cases, some people were burned. Ouch.
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6.Google, which reneged on the agreement on the storage of photos in the cloud
After years of providing free, unlimited cloud storage to anyone who uses their Google Photos, the company has decided to no longer make it unlimited. This is an extremely aggravating problem for some of us who are legacy users of the service. I have about a year of storage based on the tool released by Google. Unless you own a Pixel, you’ll pay after you hit that free 15GB barrier.
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7. Apple misses the boat on USB-C
Look, overall I think Apple has done exceptionally well this year. However, migrating iPad Air to USB-C like it was with iPad Pro and then not migrating low-end iPhone 12 and iPad Gen 8 to USB-C is simply ridiculous. He has redesigned all other aspects of these products; I don’t see why he wouldn’t want to simplify things, especially when they didn’t include chargers with these products for environmental reasons. It is more environmentally friendly if the products use the existing standard.
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8. Hydroxychloroquine and Remdesivir Flop in clinical trials
Do we want to go? Yes, I think we have to do it because it’s biotechnology. Hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malaria drug repositioned for use with COVID-19 treatment. It has been widely touted by the Trump administration and millions of its supporters as a wonder drug that would reduce hospital death rates faster. It did not work. Clinical tests from the FDA and other global health organizations have shown it to be of no value. Still, members of the Trump administration and the president himself continued to talk about it anyway as if it worked when it was proven to be totally ineffective. Remdesivir, on the other hand, was believed to have real promise. Yet again, it turned out in clinical trials that it had no impact on patients and was a bummer as even Fauci hoped it would be beneficial, but it didn’t.
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9. COVID-19 contact tracing in iOS and Android fails to take hold in US despite efforts by Apple and Google
While Apple and Google have put considerable effort into cooperating and developing shared APIs that allow their mobile operating systems to exchange COVID-19 contact tracing data, few U.S. states have adopted the technology. at the height of the pandemic. This was due to several reasons, including underfunded, overwhelmed and poorly managed local health systems that found themselves unable to implement the solutions and total political obstruction in some states to use the technology. Fortunately, towards the end of the year, some pre-built solutions that are relatively easy to deploy, such as the Linux Foundation’s open-source COVID-Green and COVID-Shield, and Apple / Google’s Exposure Notification Express, began to appear. be deployed. . However, only 16 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia are currently implementing these solutions, when we really should have a national solution in place, mandated by the federal government.
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10. The Pariah Treatment Granted to Huawei and Other Chinese Companies by the US Department of Commerce
Locking down Huawei from our domestic 5G networks and denying the company access to the key intellectual property license is detrimental not only to our international and business relations with China, but also to American consumers. The Huawei P40 Pro and Mate 40 Pro were arguably among the best mobile hardware devices to release in 2020. Yet, they have been made obnoxious and effectively inaccessible to US consumers due to the company’s inability to concede a Google Mobile Services license for their Android devices. because they were placed on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List by the Trump administration. I have to think that our mobile device industry would have been much more competitive, in terms of price, if these products had been allowed to land on our shores, with a full Android stack blessed by Google. Hopefully the new Biden administration will take a more proactive approach to dealing with China than just declaring it a pariah nation and penalizing Chinese companies that make good products. Are all these Chinese products perfect in their security and malware-free implementations? No. Is China carrying out activities that are against our national interest? Yes. But there are other ways to deal with it.
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What were your choices for Tech Turkeys in 2020? Talk to me and let me know.
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