*
Looking for a bargain? – Check out the best tech deals in Australia

5 Times We Were Very, Very Wrong

Over 40 years, we've usually been right about spotting trends and picking winners and losers. But not always.

Looking back on our 40 years, we're happy to say that we've been right more than we've been wrong. Much of that is because we tend to stay away from grand predictions and instead focus on ground-level assessments based on testing.

Still, there have been misfires. Over the years, we've occasionally been too enthusiastic about something doomed to failure, or we really tried to tear down something that ended up becoming a big deal. From being a bit too keen on Microsoft to...um, being a bit too keen on Microsoft, we really missed the mark with these five big calls we made.

1. Wild for Windows Vista (2006)

PCMag's biggest institutional failures came straight from our mission. Although we've always covered personal computing in general—our first Mac cover story was in 1985—we focused on IBM and Microsoft. So when Windows Vista won our Technical Excellence award for 2006, we devoted an entire issue to it in 2007.

Windows Vista was hugely anticipated. There had been a long, five-year gap since the last major version of Windows, which was XP in 2001. Vista had a fresh new design, integrated instant search, a ton of new built-in Microsoft applications, and a focus on multimedia.

Our magazine had always been a little biased towards thinking good things about IBM and Microsoft products, but we had our critical moments. Those faculties were just unfortunately suspended for Vista. We were right to dismiss Windows ME and Microsoft Bob, but we went all in with Windows Vista, swallowing Microsoft's line that it was the true successor to Windows XP and devoting a year's worth of coverage to it.

Vista was widely considered a failure, with most XP owners declining to upgrade due to bugginess, high system requirements, and poor performance. By August 2008, like the rest of the world, we wanted to talk more about Windows 7.

(On the same page of that 2006 magazine above, you'll also find two more big stinkers: MediaFLO and DVB-H, two ways to deliver TV to cell phones that completely failed.)

2. All-In on the IBM PCjr (1984)

Yeah, so, we were PC Magazine, right? All about the IBM PC. And IBM was breaking into the consumer computing space, right? With the PCjr. So we created an entirely separate magazine for PCjr owners, which was supposed to be part of the PCMag empire.

In 1984, the Commodore 64 and Apple II dominated the home computing market. Things were about to change based on cheap PC-compatible clones, which became the home-computing standard in the late 1980s. But good PC-compatible hardware just wasn't cheap enough and didn't have the graphics and sound chops to compete with the 8-bit machines for home users in 1984.

The PCjr was a disaster, with a legendarily horrible "Chiclet" keyboard and poor compatibility with IBM PC software. We shuttered PCjr Magazine within a year and went back to giving serious advice to serious PC Owners.

So both the PCjr, and PCjr Magazine, were too early. By its heyday as a computer magazine publisher in the late 1990s, Ziff Davis had spun off or purchased a bunch of other magazines for home computer users: MacUser in 1986, Family PC in 1994, Yahoo! Internet Life and Electronic Gaming Monthly in 1996, and others.

The excerpt above is our editorial announcing the first spinoff from PC Magazine called PCjr Magazine. Notice how deferential we were to IBM in those early years.

PCjr Magazine isn't on Google Books, but it's on the Internet Archive. The magazine wasn't bad, but the very concept of devoting an entire standalone magazine to the PCjr platform was bad. (The PCjr even made our list of the Biggest Hardware Flops of All Time.)

The embed above is really small, but if you click on "PCjr Magazine 1984 Volume 1," you'll get a link for a downloadable version. The new magazine had much more about educational software and games than the core PC Magazine did at the time.

3. Underwhelmed by the iPhone (2007)

PCMag had been covering smartphones for years when the iPhone was first released, and our reviewers were, let us say, insufficiently impressed by the world-changing device. It didn't help that the first version of the iPhone cost more than twice as much as other smartphones, didn't run apps like the Palm Treo, Motorola Q, or the latest BlackBerrys, and had a horribly slow data connection. There, our bias towards assessing the present rather than predicting the future led to some pretty bad takes. My favorite is from then-editor-in-chief Jim Louderback, who predicted: "The true trendsetters will move on quickly to Helio's Ocean or Nokia's N95."

They did not.

Louderback wasn't the only PCMag pundit to pooh-pooh the iPhone. I was pretty critical myself in an editorial where I declared the expensive, carrier-locked phone to be a "revolution for the few." The truly transformative aspect of the iPhone (in my opinion) wasn't the phone itself but the APIs and App Store, which completely changed how people use and perceive mobile applications—making smartphone apps consumer-friendly (and easily profitable) for the first time. That didn't appear until 2008.

In the print mag, our editor-in-chief had a "first-word" style column for years where he would opine on the tech issues of the day, an example of which is embedded above. The editor-in-chief wasn't always a specialist in any particular product category, though.

4. Windows Phone Will Win (2017)

Longtime columnist John Dvorak always swung for the fences. Sometimes he'd hit a home run. Sometimes he'd whiff. Sometimes he'd hit himself in the face with the bat. Dvorak liked calling a lot of things either dead or not-dead. In 2017, he insisted that Windows-powered handhelds were critical to Microsoft's future plans, a thing that never happened, much to Microsoft fans' dismay.

"What the heck is happening with Windows phones?" has been a running question at PCMag since Satya Nadella took over that company in 2014. He declared Microsoft to be a leader in a "mobile-first, cloud-first world," which meant more focus on cross-platform applications and cloud services than on a specific proprietary mobile OS. Microsoft stayed out of the mobile hardware market for years before returning in 2020 with the dual-screen Surface Duo, a strange handheld widely considered to be a failure, yet one that generated a second version. Dvorak was still wrong, though—however the Surface Duo figures in Microsoft's strategy, it's not a key focus.

Windows Phone
Windows Phone

5. Print Your Own Processor? (2001)

The year 2001 marked the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC, and we commissioned a story looking at what technologies PCs might use in 2021. We were almost entirely wrong. What's amazing about the piece is that some companies, to this day, are still trying to make these concepts happen, like cell phones that dock to become desktop PCs, or rollable displays. Some good ideas are far harder to make work than people initially think, and some bad ideas seemingly never die.

It's fascinating to see the specific blindnesses that pops up in this 2001 feature, embedded above.

Point 1 promises "a 1-billion-transistor, 20-GHz chip." At the time, PC processors were single-core affairs and clock speed was paramount; the multi-core revolution was still five years away. Since then, the trend hasn't been to soup up clock speeds but to make processors work in parallel, parceling workloads up between multiple cores and specialized blocks. Point 2 promises a "half-pound PC" in a "PDA-size package" by 2006. That happened, but not in the way PCMag expected; it's basically describing an iPhone.

Point 7 is the most baffling one to me. Printing microprocessors at your desk? Who would want that? Maybe there's something vaguely relevant to 3D printing there, but the idea of people buying specialized machines for home microprocessor printing is just really bizarre.

Scroll through this issue of the magazine above to find more fun predictions around the 20th anniversary of the PC, 20 years ago.

About Sascha Segan