Worst tech innovation you’ve seen over the past 10 to 15 years?
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So, to date myself further, I worked at MP3.com in 2000, pre-RIAA. So, I think, as bad as iTunes and iPod was, it took out the Diamond Rio player and other even more proprietary things and Apple ultimately solved the RIAA lock on music rights. And at least the person I know that did this should give some kudos on unlocking those rights because music and video rights is such a dog-eat-dog world. I would change out iPod for Zune, for a deprecated device. Not that any of us ever bought one.
I still have an iShuffle, which is just a flash drive with music.
Ransomware. If you use the definition of innovation as bringing an existing solution to a new market then you have to accept the bad as well as the good.
From an ethical tech perspective, ransomware would have to be the worst innovation
There seems like there are lots of middle of the road bad ones for me that I've dealt with. I would say that, in general, the worst tech I've dealt with is actually not a particular company but service provided by an industry. As a deployer of global infrastructure, it was WAN service providers. I went a decade and a half before I had a company that could tell me when there was a problem on the network before my customers told me and that company was Masergy and they're still one of the only companies that will actually tell you before your customers tell you that there's something wrong with the network.
Do you feel like SD-WAN has helped solve that or not?
I think SD-WAN has helped but the problem with SD-WAN is that there are almost SD-WAN exclusion zones. We're creating silos of SD-WAN depending on who you buy from and where you buy, and everybody's got a technology for it now. And so, I'm a little worried about where that's going and how easy it'll be to manage, but from an opportunity standpoint, it's what I told Huawei in 2011 after a Cloud Expo event when they asked me what networking had to do to be more cloud-like is I said you have to be able to provision the way the cloud provisions; if you can't do that, then people are not going to want you.
The modem. I mean, for me that was painful, just the whole concept of dial up and you had to have two landlines in your house. What was a landline? And then if you were on the modem and somebody picked up the phone and ended your call that's probably where I would start.
So, I'm going to say the iPod, and this is really an answer based on any single-use device because they're obsolete within a year. So, there's a number of different examples of this, but I think in the early days we saw a lot of these single-use devices that were a little bit glitchy and basically spun out after 12 months. And likewise, iTunes, I mean that was the music library... from the beginning.