IT and Technology Turkeys

Now that Halloween and talk of Zombies has past (at least for now), that means next up on the social or holiday calendar topics in the U.S. is thanksgiving which means turkey themes.

With turkey themes in mind, how about some past, current and maybe future technology flops or where are they now.

Roast Turkey
© 2006 Peggy Trowbridge Filippone

A technology turkey can be a product, trend, technique or theme that was touted (or hyped) and flopped for various reasons not flying up to, or meeting its expectations. That means that a technology turkey may have had industry adoption however lacked customer deployment.

Lets try a few, how about holographic storage, or is that still a future technology?

Were NEXT computer and the Apple Newton turkeys?

Disclosure: I have a Newton that has not been used since the mid 90s.

Is ATA over Ethernet (AoE) a future turkey candidate along with FCoE aka Fibre Channel over Ethernet (or here or here), or is that just some peoples wishful thinking regarding FCoE being a turkey?

Speaking of AoE, what ever happened to Zetera (aka Hammer storage) the iSCSI alternative of a few years ago?

To be fair how about IPFC not to be confused with FCIP (Fibre Channel frames mapped to IP for distance) or iFCP not to be confused with FCoE or iSCSI. IPFC mapped IP as upper level protocol (ULP) onto Fibre Channel coexisting with FCP and FICON. There were only a few adopters of IPFC that used it as a low latency channel to channel (CTC) mechanism for open systems before InfiniBand and other technologies matured.

Im guessing that someone will step up to defend the honor of Microsoft Windows Vista, however until then, IMHO it is or was a Turkey. While on the topic of operating systems, anyone have an opinion on IBMs OS2? Speaking of PCs, how about the DEC Rainbow and its sibling the Robin? Remember when IBM was in the PC business before selling it off to Lenovo, how about the IBM PCjr, turkey candidate or not?

HP should be on the turkey list with their now ex CEO Leo Apotheker whom they put out to pasture, on the technology front, anybody remember AutoRAID?

How about the Britton Lee Database machine which today would be referred to as a storage appliance or application optimized storage system such as the Oracle Exadata II (or Oracle Exadata I based on HP hardware) among others. Note that Im not saying Exadata I or Exadata II are turkeys as that will be left to your own determination. Both are cool from a technology standpoint, however there is more to having neat or interesting technology to move from announcement to industry adoption to customer deployment, things that Oracle has been having some success with.

Speaking of Oracle, remember when Sun bought the Encore storage system and renamed it the A7000 (not to be confused with the A5000 aka Photon) in an attempt to compete against the EMC Symmetrix. The Encore folks after Sun went on to their next project and still today call it DataCore. Meanwhile Sun discontinued the A7000 after a period of time similar to what they did with other acquisitions such as Pirus which became the 6920 which was end of lifed as part of a deal where Sun increased their resell activity of HDS which too has since been archived. Hmmm, that begs the question of what happens with Oracle acquiring Pillar with an earn out scheme where if there is revenue there is a payout, if there is no revenue then there is a tax write off.

What about big data, will that become a turkey following in the footsteps of other former high flyers such as cloud, virtualization, data classification, CDP, Green IT and SOA among many others. IMHO that depends upon what your view or definition along with expectations of big data is as a buzzword bingo topic. Depending on your view, that will determine if the above will join others that fade away from the limelight shifting into productive modes for customers and profitable activity for vendors.

Want to read what others have to say about technology turkeys or flops?

Here is what ibitimes has to say about technology flops (aka) turkeys, with Infoworlds lineup here, Computerworlds list is here. Meanwhile a couple from mashable here and here, Cnet weighs in here, with another list over at investorplace found here, and checkout the list at Money here with the telegraph represented here. Of course you could Google to find more however you would probably also stumble upon Googles own flops or technology turkeys including wave.

What is your take as to other technology turkeys past, present or future?

Ok, nuff said for now

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

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