Mark Pickavance covers some of the less than triumphant moments that technology brought us in 2015
For many companies, it seems, failure is always an option. Some of these are failures of management. Others are failure to communicate to the customer, and a few are just the sorts of disasters that modern tech businesses seem to naturally attract.
In many respects, 2015 has been a classic year for technological fails. Here are just a few of the moments that those involved would undoubtedly prefer to forget.
Volkswagen
Let’s start with a story of greed that led the world’s largest automotive company to do something so stupid and with such massive implications that its reputation will probably never entirely recover.
Across the world, but possibly especially in China, people are very conscious of how cars contribute negatively to air quality, so people are attracted to vehicles that offer less of an impact on their environment. But owing to the price of fuel, they also want economy, and to a degree the two ambitions don’t sit well together.
Volkswagen found a way to square that circle using software. When one of its vehicles sensed it was being emissions tested, it went into a special mode where it performed badly but put out limited pollution. And, conversely, on a normal road it would go further on a tank of fuel but put out anything up to 40 times as much emissions.
It got caught because, ironically, an organisation that wanted to promote clean diesel cars got involved with a US university so they could run some tests and then package that information in a white paper. The disparity between what the vehicles did in the lab and on the road was so great they were forced to inform the standards enforcers, and Volkswagen’s house of cards came tumbling down.
Initially it was sold by the company as just a couple of rogue engineers and only Volkswagen diesel cars in the US, and then it spread to Audi and Porsche, and petrol, and in Europe and across the world.
The idea that this was a handful of rogue engineers now seems completely untenable, and so does the notion that these things weren’t sanctioned at a much higher level.
The stock value of the company has crashed, it’s sold at least 20% fewer cars this year, and its reputation is sitting bewildered in the gutter.
The calculations for what this will ultimately cost are still growing, but it could be the most expensive intentional software error in the history of computing.
Microsoft Upgrade-gate
Considering this story broke at least four months ago, as I’m writing this, there are still developments continuing, which is rather disturbing.
If you missed the hoo-ha, even before Windows 10 launched, Microsoft managed to annoy plenty of its customers by installing an app onto the taskbar of all Windows 7 and 8.x installations. The purpose of this tool was inform people about the new version, tell them it was free, and even allow them to pre-order their copy.
That last bit seemed odd, because it wasn’t like Microsoft would be running out of a digital download, would it?
After Windows 10 went live, it altered to enable users to download the files so they were ready when they chose to make the switch, but not long later, the amount of choice started to be systematically beaten out of this message. For starters, those who didn’t select to have the files downloaded found that they downloaded anyway – anything up to 10GB – even if they were on a metered connection with Windows 7.
Like Ahab and his white whale, Microsoft was prepared to hunt its customer down, whatever the cost in either good will or reputation. And since then, this view has been only reinforced by the increasingly aggressive methods Microsoft has employed to strong-arm Windows 10 onto people’s computers come what may.
In addition to being harangued every time they log into their systems, Windows 7 and 8 users have recently been presented with a new panel that offers them the choice of upgrading immediately or later that evening. There isn’t a choice of not upgrading, and the whole thing seems reminiscent of a joke animation that went around about Florida voting booths where when you tried to vote for a Democrat, the buttons swapped so you always clicked on the Republican choice.
But Microsoft isn’t done yet with trying. No, starting on the first day of January 2016, the Windows 10 upgrade will be elevated to ‘Recommended’ status, meaning that if your system is configured to install those, you’ll come back and find it’s replaced your existing OS, even if that’s not a choice you explicitly made.
This course of action has failure written all over it, because we generally wouldn’t accept a local business breaking into our home and refurnishing it, because ‘it needed it’, would we?
The increasingly desperate nature of these moves perhaps suggests that the dramatic numbers Windows 10 did at launch haven’t been sustained and, since Microsoft gave this version away for free, that it’s running out of ideas as to how to make it a success.
Some people are also starting to question the legality of altering people’s computers without their consent, implied or otherwise.
Apple Watch
Given the profile that Apple has with the Watch, one might be drawn to conclude it has been another huge success. And when you consider that it sold seven million of them between May and November, it sounds very impressive. That’s more than all the other competing wrist-worn devices combined, so how can the Apple Watch be considered a failure?
Well, for starters, the sales of wrist devices have generally been very poor, because many people migrated away from wearing a wrist watch about ten years ago.
The Android devices also generally work with all Android phones, and even they don’t sell well, whereas Apple’s only works with the last two generations of its phone technology.
If proof was needed that not all is well with the Apple Watch, then consider that the company has been very keen to tell everyone how well the new iPhone is selling, yet it won’t release any sales figures at all for the Watch.
Market watchers (sorry…) have concluded that most of that seven million, if that’s how many it actually sold, shipped in the first couple of months, after which time the sales fell off a cliff entirely.
The Wall Street Journal said that the Watch, “is not selling nearly as well as some analysts expected,” in July, when some analysis revealed that the initial flood of 200,000 units a day had already decreased to fewer than 5,000 units.
When asked about the Watch in a stockbrokers call, CEO Tim Cook said that the product had, “exceeded [Apple’s] expectations” but without outlining what those expectations were and how it had exceeded them. Apple is expected to revamp the Watch in 2016 and make it less reliant on the iPhone, in an attempt to exceed its already exceeded expectations.
At Apple, it seems failure is not an option – or rather admitting it exists isn’t.
The Reverse Selfie
No story about technological failure would be complete without mentioning Evan Griffin’s dad. Mr Griffin senior borrowed his son’s GoPro for a holiday in Vegas, and walked around with it on the end of a selfie-stick for much of his break, filming all the amazing things in sin city.
However, he didn’t film any of the spectacular views in Vegas, because he didn’t understand the way round the camera went. As a result, he filmed himself for the entire time, not the locations he was in.
In what was to become a YouTube sensation, Griffin demonstrates what people who have little or no interest in technology can do with it at their leisure.
For those who’d love to see a man narrate pictures of himself looking at a big city, search for ‘An Irishman In Vegas’ on YouTube.
Google Glass
Google Glass came, saw, and left stage left. After a very highprofile launch, where developer versions of Glass were distributed widely and people managed to annoy others using them for a short while, Google withdrew Glass. It was the sort of retreat that technology companies hate, because despite numerous obvious problems with the technology and the ethics of wearing one in public, it still garnered plenty of interest.
However, Glass seemed unable to shrug off the general perception of being a gimmick, and it was heavily criticised by many developers for being very limited in both what you could do with it and in respect of battery life.
In January 2015, Google ended the ‘Google Glass Explorer’ program, as it called it, and you can no longer get the beta hardware it had previously made available.
A month later, a story circulated in the US that an ex-exec and designer of Apple, Tony Fadell, was working on the project and that Glass wouldn’t be available again until it was deemed ‘prefect’.
Since then, Google hasn’t talked about Glass, and many in the industry are considering the project to be effectively dead.
Microsoft Hololens
I can’t believe I’m mentioning Microsoft again, but it’s effectively double dated with failure this entire year, it seems.
When the Hololens was first revealed, lots of people got very excited, because it was something new. Excited American journalists shown the prototype systems tweeted that this product was revolutionary and ‘a game changer’. Microsoft promised that Hololens would be made available after Windows 10 launched, and that people would be amazed at what it could do.
Having buffed the Hololens brand to a mirror-like finish, everything that’s happened since has succeeded in taking the shine entirely off it.
About two months after the initial demonstrations, journalists in the US were shown the pre-release version of the hardware and were shocked as to how it wasn’t remotely like the prototype in respect of field of view. Where the prototype was immersive, the supposedly near-finished product had a very small viewport that made it appear like a VR world through a letterbox simulator.
A few who’d experienced the earlier demo asked Microsoft people if the hardware was broken, only to be told that this is what Hololens would be like.
What really annoyed people what that at least three times since then, Microsoft has given stage demonstrations that don’t show the clipped view and has had numerous journalists call it out for misrepresenting the product.
This it’s entirely ignored, and it’s also moved from a situation where Hololens would be coming soon, to a much longer timescale, with CEO Satya Nadella now saying “This is going to be a five-year journey.”
The development kit is due to ship early in 2016 to those Americans who can stump up $3,000 to peer through a digital letterbox.
That sound you can hear, Mr Nadella, is the audible deflation of the tech community that for a brief moment in 2015 you’d managed to enthuse before you brought it down to earth with a mighty bump.
The inability of this company to communicate effectively is entirely encapsulated by the Hololens project, because not only could it not do what it had promised technologically, it couldn’t even tell people about it in an honest and proper fashion.
Batman: Arkham Knight
Anyone who saw the pre-release trailer for this game and was remotely a Batman fan couldn’t help but be excited by this title, given that it was the latest in the excellent Arkham game series. Or rather they would have been on the Xbox One or Playstation 4, because the game’s developer, Rocksteady, outsourced the PC version to another team, Iron Galaxy Studios.
Almost immediately after release, it became apparent that this had been a huge mistake, and on many computers the title was virtually unplayable. Many reviewers who covered the title tore it to pieces, some even suggesting that it had been launched without any optimisation or polish whatsoever. The problems were so serious that Warner eventually suspended sales of the game on the PC, while it awaited a critical software patch.
It’s since had a series of patches, but problems still exist in regard to the fluidity of play even on high-end systems.
In October, it went back on sale, but the number of reported problems eventually caused Warner to offer a full refund to anyone who wasn’t fully satisfied. Rocksteady and Warner Bros have promised that further patching will continue until the title is of the standard that it should have been, although how long this is likely to take is unknown.
Apple Music
When you consider that iTunes was the first big digital distribution service, you’d think that Apple might understand what those who buy music want. But when it launched Apple Music, its all-you-can-eat streaming service, many people wondered if it was the same company, or one just pretending to be it.
Actually, technically it was a relaunch, because Apple previously offered the same service called ‘Beats Music’, which it acquired from Beats Electronics in 2014.
The unique angle that Apple took was to provide much less than the entry-level Spotify, but at the cost of that company’s Premium service, through a remarkably clunky interface, with no free access whatsoever.
It also managed to mess around with the way that music locally synced with iPhones and iPads in a way that really mucked up lots of its users.
As if to add insult to injury, it also welded this service into the appalling iTunes PC application – a tool that is now so poor and disjointed that many people refuse to install it on their computers.
Apple spent lots promoting the service, but even it couldn’t suppress the abuse the service was given by the music listening fraternity. The Apple Music service has just a fraction of the subscribers Spotify can claim, and it has yet to provide any compelling reasons for even the most ardent Apple fans to use it.
Despite being available in more than 100 countries worldwide, Apple Music has fewer than seven million subscribers and no appreciable growth on the horizon.
Ashley Madison
Setting up a website specifically to have extramarital affairs was always going to be controversial, but Ashley Madison gained even greater notoriety in 2015 for entirely different reasons.
A group identifying itself as ‘The Impact Team’ hacked the company’s servers in August, taking 25GB of company data that included personal information of its customers and internal email correspondence. They subsequently published much of this data online, to the general embarrassment of all those involved.
However, the public naming of people using Ashley Madison was only the start of this operation’s troubles, because the data also revealed many fascinating facts about Ashely Madison that have called into question the authenticity of the business model those behind the website had built.
It’s been determined that of the 5.5 million female user accounts, only 12,000 were actually used, and therefore the chance of any man getting a reply from a women he contacted was incredibly small. Ashely Madison charged for direct communication, so it was taking payment for men to mostly send messages to accounts that had either never been used or, in many cases, were entirely fake.
It has also been reported that many women found their identity registered on Ashley Madison despite having never had any association with it. This led to the conclusion that in an attempt to rebalance the massive excess of male customers, the company had generated large numbers of accounts automatically based on personal data it had bought.
At this time, a $576 million class-action lawsuit has been filed against the company. And while the website still exists, amazingly, the long-term viability of the business is now severely in question.
Lenovo Superfish
For a long time, system reviewers have complained about the amount of junk that some brands put on their computers. There’s so much of this junk that users need to go through a de-gunking exercise after buying a new PC.
Lenovo is a big embracer of crapware, but even by its own standards, the Superfish debacle took it into uncharted territory for customer abuse.
For those who missed this particular train wreck, it started with a company called ‘Superfish’, which developed ad-supporting software based on a visual search engine. This was something that Lenovo decided it would subject its customers to, and it preinstalled it on a number of its branded PCs. But Superfish had a dirty secret: it used a universal self-signed certificate authority. This could be used to fashion a man-in-the-middle attack that could insert malware into any web page, even those encrypted using a valid certificate.
What made this much worse was how the company reacted when news broke that it made all its customers vulnerable to attack. First, there was the denial, then the mitigating it-isn’t-so-bad phase, before CTO Peter Hortensius finally accepted that, “We messed up”.
From what I’ve seen of Lenovo installations since, it’s still messing up, just not with Superfish at the moment.
BBC Atos Fiasco
In 2004, the BBC signed a huge contract with Siemens to provide it with IT that was worth £2bn. This deal was called Atos, and it was supposedly intended to bring the broadcaster into the 21st century.
Yet despite that unprecedented investment of public money, the past 11 years have seen a succession of expensive IT failures at the BBC. Some of these have been Siemen’s fault, others the BBC, but the vast majority involved both parties and were characterised by lack of cost control, vague objectives and failure to deliver within pre-agreed timescales.
Of these, the worst example by far was the Digital Media Initiative, a grandiose project that intended to replace existing tape archives with a completely digital system, enabling rapid searches and retrievals.
On paper, this sounded a laudable exercise, given the stupidity of the corporation in managing its existing archive, where many valuable and unique early recordings were erased in the 70s in a misplaced drive to reuse video tapes.
When the development of the Digital Media Initiative was finally halted, some £100m had been spent, with not one single operational component or service to show for it.
In 2015, having had the big stick of cost control waved at it by the treasury, the BBC finally ended the Atos contract, and it intends to outsource many of the IT infrastructure as part of a new project called Aurora.
These will be smaller and shorter deals than Atos, and the first of these was due to be awarded in the coming year. However, Aurora is already delayed, so Atos has now been extended until March 2017, at an additional cost of £285m. This seems a large sum of money for a service that on one occasion left the news room so poorly networked that a newsreader live on air was forced to read the headlines from her iPhone off the BBC website.
Other Notable Tech Fails
Apple certificate lapse: Apple let a digital certificate it had issued lapse, stopping many Mac users from running software they’d purchased through the Mac App Store. Users were forced to delete and reinstall many apps to fix this problem.
Sony Hack: Poor internal security allowed hackers to get into Sony Entertainment’s internal computer systems, and steal movies and corporate emails. This was a huge embarrassment for Sony’s executives, partners and the company as a whole.
Blackberry Priv: Blackberry went Android, and the smartphone world shrugged in unison.
Amazon Fire Phone: This poorly received phone failed to ignite any customer interest and was extinguished.
Microsoft Windows Phone: Two new flagship phones, but a smaller market than it had when Nokia was a separate company.
Microsoft Surface 4 Pro and Surface Book: Just months after a razzmatazz launch, Microsoft was forced to make a public apology to those who bought its latest expensive technology. It admitted that there are faults with these devices that it’s struggling to remedy.
Hoverboards: They don’t hover, but they do barbecue a treat
Apple TV: No actual TV, again, but the streaming box was revamped once more and still managed to disappoint. The most entertainment it delivered was Tim Cook’s demonstration at the launch, when he tried to operate it using the Apple Watch and it didn’t work.
RBS: It’s not enough that this bank messed up so badly it’s now publicly owned; 2015 proved to be a very poor year for the IT side of this business. In June, it suffered a fund transfer glitch that disappeared 600,000 payments, many to those living off tax credits or disability benefits. This came just months after it was fined £56 million for a previous IT disaster in 2012, when 6.5 million customers were locked out of their accounts for days.