POLYMASH

A post on ReadWrite web today outlines the “Top 10 Failures of 2009“, and the top 2 are definitely my biggest disappointments also.

Where are the Tablets?
I was hugely excited about various tablet concepts to the point of swooning every time the rumor mill turned, and having been an early adapter of Boxee and streaming net content to your large home theater TV flat screen, I bought into some of the concepts of a flat Apple or Crunchpad tablet becoming the new  couch surfing, home media center, ueber iPhone, controller, e-reader, kindle killer gadget to own.

I’m still excited by the prospect, but Michael Arrington’s “Crunch Pad”, originally outsourced to Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan’s India company called “Fusion Garage“, evaporated at the 11th pre-launch hour, and is now relabeled  “JooJoo” as part of a completely disastrous falling out between Michael and Chandrasekar. It will likely be rendered irrelevant by years of litigation that is sure to follow the acrimonious, rapid and reality TV worthy meltdown of the US vs. India partners involved in this promising project. Rising from the ashes is not the only thing that has gone up, so has the price. (video on engadget for a high level review)

Jolie O’Dell writes in her original ReadWriteWeb post entitled “Top 10 Failures of 2009“:

All we wanted was a $200-500 flat piece of glass and plastic with some fancy gizmodgery inside so we could look at the Internet from the comfort of our couches. And what did we get? Rumors, Photoshopped gadget porn, promises – lies, all lies. We’d have been better off if we’d spent those months drawing the Yahoo! home page on an Etch-A-Sketch.

And while fresh Apple tablet rumors resurface every 3 months, all these rumors have done is to move dates from the originally expected mid 2009 time-frame into late 2010, which to me places Apple into a reactionary rather than visionary category, and by which time larger home media market shifts will dilute any innovation, novelty or wow factor.

Wipe-Out: Google Wave

I very much connected with that the web has come a long way since email, which now is 40 years old. The concept with Google Wave was to introduce a new metaphor for communication, incorporating all the collaboration successes and phenomenons of the last couple of decades. The merging of email with forums, wikis, micro blogging, real-time content generation just made so much sense.

Image via Wikipedia

The reality hits home hard, there are few use cases, waves are difficult to manage, and the marriage of asynchronous versus synchronous communication methods in the same tool, and within the same UI, just simply does not work. Is it because the UI is not usable, or is it because there is a lack of use cases? My own hypothesis is that at the center of usability there has to be usefulness, and this is where wave falls short.

Related articles by Zemanta

• First impressions of the JooJoo tablet (seattlepi.com)
• Fusion Garage JooJoo Tablet Hands-On [Joojoo] (gizmodo.com)
• Hands On With the JooJoo, Formerly Known as CrunchPad (wired.com)
• Joo Joo tablet maker says Michael Arrington had ‘flair for the dramatic’ (telegraph.co.uk)