Full Disclosure: How 2001's Bad Ideas Saved You Money

The crummy economy spells trouble for dumb technology products.

Stephen Manes

I hated the movie 2001, but the actual year is turning out even worse. Still, I like to look on the bright side: All sorts of stupid concepts we were supposed to spend good money on are now moribund or just plain dead. In this bum economy, it's a cheap form of entertainment just to think about all the money you've saved by passing up innovations such as these:

Internet appliances: This was supposed to be the year manufacturers were finally going to make cheap, easy, instant-on Internet appliances a mass-market miracle. The reality is, nobody wanted to buy them. 3Com's Audrey and Sony's E Villa were only the most prominent of several lame models that were quickly yanked from store shelves.

Internet gizmos: Somebody at Sony must have thought people would clamor for the EMarker, a gadget with a single button you were to press when you heard an interesting but unidentifiable song on the radio. All you had to do after that was take the device home, plug it into one of your computer's USB ports, and launch some software to discover which tune you were hearing--provided that the radio station on which you'd heard it happened to support Sony's service. It would have been faster to call the station and hum. The EMarker flopped.

So did the amazingly moronic CueCat. The premise was that, upon seeing an article or ad that whetted your interest, you would shlep the magazine to your PC and scan a bar code with the device to reach a related Web site. The technology was even supposed to work with specially encoded TV shows. When publishers and broadcasters pulled out, millions of CueCats became depressing paperweights.

Connected homes: Did my new refrigerator come with an Internet connection and LCD screen like those on the display models I've been seeing at demonstrations the past couple of years? Are you kidding? It doesn't even have a bar-code scanner designed to reorder my favorite foods via the Web whenever I run out. Maybe that's because appliance makers realized that fruits and veggies don't have bar codes. Or maybe it's because most of the major online grocers have gone kaput.

Remember the hype about home appliances that were supposed to talk to one another via the Sun-backed Jini protocol or Microsoft's Universal Plug and Play? So far, I haven't seen one, though Windows XP supports the latter protocol. Apparently blenders and dishwashers don't have that much to say to each other.

The wireless Web: This big idea was supposed to turn up on every cell phone in the universe and usher in a new era of mobile connectivity. Turns out that it's good mostly for stock quotes and baseball scores. And the high-speed, always-on, packet-based third-generation cellular data services we were all supposed to be using by now are just crawling into existence, slower and less pervasive than originally contemplated.

And those cellular services won't come cheap, either, with users likely to pay for every byte that they transmit or receive. It's not exactly the scenario that led to the widespread adoption of the wired Internet--nor one that will make people want to watch movies on their wireless phones.

In times of economic downturn, people rethink what they need in their lives. Keeping up with the latest in technology no longer seems as important as keeping a few bucks in the bank. And making do with a two-year-old PC that hasn't gotten any slower seems like plain common sense. For a while, this economy's only growth market may be pirated MP3s.

Contributing Editor Stephen Manes, a cohost of the public television series Digital Duo, has written about PCs for nearly two decades.