2010 - and where are they now?

I've been thinking a lot about user experience lately and how it ultimately underpins every aspect of adoption in the tech space today - from platforms through to internal government applications, our users are increasingly picky, intolerant and bring realistic, informed and high expectations to the table for what they want.

You have a choice - make it work, keep your promise, and help people get stuff done - or fade away forever. It's never the whole story, but bringing a pure internal, ivory-tower, self indulgent, ICT-lead thinking approach to new products and strategies ensures you will have more of a chance to fail than ever before.

On that note, I was following a Google Buzz outburst on "where are they now" and it netted out a random collection of links to stories and posts about the new new thing that was not to be. In no particular order (and I will let someone else rant about the benefits or bonkers-ness of each) some of the ones that came up were:

• Virtual Boy
• Sinclair C5
  
• Consumer surface
• Palm Foleo 2.0
• Microsoft Courier
• iPhone tethering
• JooJoo
• XOXO OLPC laptop
• Duke Nukem Forever
• Microsoft's Cairo
• Apple's Taligent
• The CueCat
• CDN iPhone tethering
• Joost
• KnockaTV
  
• Vidoop
• CD-i
• Wikia
• Tipjoy
• Pownce
• Flowgram
• AllPeers
• Delver
• UMTS 3G video calls
• Modu
• The CueCat
• Two year battery for cell phones
• Teledesic

I know there's way more...what are they? Should some of these not be on the list? Why?

Someone else reminded me of the connection to this thread that sits squarely in Daniel Gilbert's book "Stumbling into Happiness" <-official site, not buy now link talks about our inability to predict the future. I love this quote from Gilbert's site, "Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn't work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan."

While we are not total failures, as evidenced by all our successes in improving the life of our peeps, I think we may cloud our view of the new new thing simply by focusing on the success of others sometimes. Call this a reality check...users will protect us from ourselves.

Now let's hope someone can turn this nonsense into an actually useful article.