Tech Industry Hall of Shame – the Dumbest Moments in Tech History

We are surrounded by failure in the tech world, and some of those failures are big enough to sit in our memories for years. After the latest news from Google, we were reminded of many other shameful moments in tech. We put together our own RWW Hall of Shame to see if we could learn any lessons from these sordid tales of woe.

Google’s Street View brought the concept of “payload data” to the forefront: While those nifty cars with cameras were cruising our communities, Google was purposely collecting data transmitted over open Wi-Fi networks to which it could connect. First Google said it wasn’t intentionally doing this, then the word leaked out that many project teams within Google had access to this information. Google should have come clean on its intentions, and the executive who authorized the project should come out of the Googleplex and take responsibility for being “evil.”

But Google is hardly alone in acting shamefully. Consider:

• Amazon should be chastised for patenting one-click shopping. Leave it to Amazon to have gotten one of the most annoying software patents of all time: the ability to purchase something with a single click online. Lately, it has been very unresponsive to its customers and has suffered lengthy outages with its Web services. The company needs to swallow a huge antihubris pill and come out with better support mechanisms if it wants to keep its customers.
• Last year, Netflix tried to split itself into two companies,