Tech Turkeys of 2015

My Thanksgiving consisted of spending quality time with friends and family while feeling incredibly humbled and grateful for everything that I have on this crazy rollercoaster we call life. I thankfully avoided the shady shenanigans that are typically reported on Black Friday, where consumers fight for what they want but don’t necessarily need, and this tech fan now finds himself reflecting on the tech turkeys of the last 12 months. 

It’s been a great year for technology, but equally a frustrating one for the average early adopter who learned to accept disappointment after the release of the Apple watch or even their late entry into the music-streaming scene. There were also the somewhat desperate attempts from Microsoft, who were almost pleading with PC users to seize the opportunity of a free Windows 10 upgrade every single time they switched on their computer, but this was just the tip of the iceberg of what caused annoyance in 2015.

A new social app called Peeple that proudly labeled itself as ‘Yelp for people’ might have sounded like an interesting concept in a brainstorming session or a bar one night, but the reality was deemed a step to foo far by the online community. Giving people the ability to assign a star rating along with a positive or negative review for anyone that they meet was never going to end well.

Signing up to a social network to open yourself up to free abuse was never going to catch on, and the creators quickly scaled back and changed the scope of their project. However, I couldn’t help but think that this was all part of a sinister marketing ploy all along. Taking a step back from the madness, it’s easy to see that announcing outrageous features that almost trolls users into writing thousands of articles and online comments in a heated debate only to retract the features and market a new improved version to a more welcoming reception could have been part of the master plan from the beginning.

With the streaming-music wars well under way, music royalty Madonna, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and friends decided to launch the first artist-owned platform called Tidal. Alicia Keys advised the music-loving masses, “We come together before you on this day, March 30th, 2015, with one voice in unity in the hopes that today will be another one of those moments in time, a moment that will forever change the course of music history.”

A great idea in principle, but the launch came across as incredibly self-serving, rather than concentrating on up and coming struggling artists, the message being delivered seemed to suggest that these established millionaires were throwing their toys out of the pram for not being handed the millions they were used to, which made Tidal a missed opportunity,

CEO Tim Cook advised the world that the future of TV is Apps, and more and more consumers began to embrace the notion of joining the army of cord cutters who were finally questioning paying over one hundred dollars a month to cable and satellite providers.

In 2015, it suddenly became a laborious task to keep track of our growing number of direct debits from our bank accounts. Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Prime, TiVo, HBO, and Hulu were just a few of the online subscriptions we have accumulated without even realizing.

As each platform concentrated on seizing exclusivity deals, consumers felt compelled to dip their toes in most of them to have access to the content they love. After adding up all of their subscriptions, some users were discovering that the life of a cord cutter is not as cost saving as they were led to believe.

However, there is a growing community of consumers that have embraced the concept of just getting by on a cheap Netflix subscription and no longer feel the need for 200 channels of TV or 10 different apps delivering similar content, and it’s worth mentioning that these 21st-century cord cutters were the big winners in 2015. 

Serial cheaters who were using the adultery-dating website Ashley Madison received much more than they signed up for when a security breach led to their members’ details being leaked online for everyone to see, and the majority of females on the site were fembots or fake accounts.

Even those who had paid $19 to remove their details from the Ashley Maddison database were publicly shamed and forced to observe, nervously, their personal details and shady habits being spread across the Internet for all to see.

The only positive from this story arrived in the form of a wake-up call to how much of our personal data we keep online and that our digital footprint could one day return to haunt us, and many users have taken this not-so-subtle hint to clean up their act. 

Every year, we are bombarded with a new generation of smartphones that promise to be bigger, thinner, and faster, and introduce us to a whole list of shiny features that we are never going to use that can be filed under gimmicks.

Despite being constantly reminded about how each year's release is so much better than the last one, the average smartphone user only has one question: Will the battery last a full day? Or, will I be a forced to live my life as a wall hugger for another two years and be forever nervously looking for a power socket wherever I find myself at 7 pm on a school night?

We are quickly tiring of being provided with a list of new apps in one hand yet, ironically, have to disable the power-hungry features if we want the phone battery to last a full day in the other. If one of the tech giants can add a two-day battery into a handset, they will also have the power to clean up and sell handsets by the bucketload. Until then, we will awkwardly have to ask permission for a cheeky top-up charge in every room we enter.

A quick look at the word ‘unlimited’ in any dictionary will provide you with a definition along the lines of ‘not limited or restricted regarding the number, quantity, or extent’. However, in the tech world, this is usually followed by an asterisk and the ubiquitous phrase, ‘terms and conditions may apply.’

Whether it is mobile data or Internet usage, hosting, or even online storage, it seems that the word ‘unlimited’ no longer means what it used to. Microsoft seemed baffled by the fact that after they had advertised unlimited storage on their One Drive service, their users would actually believe this and start using the service that they were promised.

A dramatic U-turn from Microsoft ensued, and the removal of unlimited data from their cloud storage didn't go down very well with the online community; I expect the word ‘unlimited’ will continue to be the topic of many heated debates in 2016.

2015 was the year that wearable technology was going to revolutionize our lives, and the reality is we just became frustrated with a number of notifications appearing on our wrists or smartphones.

Most users agree that e-mail often stops their productivity in its tracks, but it’s notifications that have an increasing dominance over our lives. It seems our devices are always lighting up with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, e-Mail, or messaging notifications, 24 hours a day, and we have become slaves to the technology that was supposed to set us free.

Maybe our New Years’ resolutions should be about regaining a little control over our daily routine by disabling pointless notifications from our always-online devices. These are just a few of my tech turkeys for 2015, but I am conscious that these choices will be purely subjective. What technology has frustrated and disappointed you in equal measure this year? Let me know your thoughts by commenting below.

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