2015 technology industry graveyard

2015 technology industry graveyard
Cisco, Microsoft, Google and others bury outdated technologies to move ahead with new ones.

Ba-bye
The Technology Industry Graveyard is pretty darn full in 2015, and we’re not even including the near-dead such as RadioShack and Microsoft’s IE browser. Pay your respects here…

GrooveShark
The self-described “World’s Music Library” is no more after shutting down in April in the wake of serious legal pressure by music companies whose songs GrooveShark allowed to be shared but had never licensed. Apple and Google had each kicked GrooveShark out of their app stores years ago due to complaints from music labels. Much more sadly than the 9-year-old company’s demise, however, was the death of co-founder Josh Greenberg in July at the age of just 28.

Typo iPhone keyboard
Not even the glamor of being co-founded by American Idol host Ryan Seacrest could help Typo Innovations save its iPhone keyboard, which BlackBerry said infringed on its patents. So instead, Typo bailed on the iPhone model and settled for selling ones for devices with screens 7.9-inches or larger (like iPads).

Amazon Fire Phone
With a product name like Fire, you’re just asking for colorful headlines if it bombs. And indeed, Amazon has stopped making its Fire Phone about a year after introducing it and media outlets were quick to highlight the company “extinguishing” it or remarking on the phone being “burnt out.” Amazon has had some success on the hardware front, namely with its Kindle line, but the Fire just didn’t distinguish itself and was going for free with a carrier contract by the end.

Interop New York
Interop Las Vegas carries on as one of the network industry’s top trade shows next May, but little sibling Interop New York is no more this year. The Fall show, traditionally held at the Javits Center since 2005, was always smaller and was discontinued for 2015 despite lively marketing material last year touting “More Than 30 Interop New York Exhibitors and Sponsors to Make Announcements in Anticipation of the Event.”

GTalk
Google ditched so many things in 2015 that we devoted an entire slideshow to Google’s Graveyard. So to choose just one representative item here, we remember Google Talk, which had a good run, starting up in 2005. But it’s never good when Google pulls out the term “deprecated” as it did in February in reference to this chat service’s Windows App. Google said it was pulling the plug on GTalk in part to focus on Google Hangouts in a world where people have plenty of other ways to chat online. However, Google Talk does live on via third-party apps.

Cisco Invicta storage products
Cisco has a good touch when it comes to acquisitions, but its $415 mlllion WHIPTAIL buyout from 2013 didn’t work out. The company in July revealed it had pulled the plug on its Invicta flash storage appliances acquired via that deal. It’s not unthinkable though that Cisco could go after another storage company, especially in light of the Dell-EMC union.

RapidShare
The once-popular file hosting system, begun in 2002, couldn’t withstand the onslaught of competition from all sides, including Google and Dropbox. Back in 2009, the Switzerland-based operation ran one of the Internet’s 20 most visited websites, according to Wikipedia. It shut down on March 31, and users’ leftover files went away with it.

Windows RT devices
This locked-down Microsoft OS for tablets and convertible laptops fared about as well as Windows 8, after being introduced as a prototype in 2011 at the big CES event in Las Vegas. Microsoft’s software for the 32-bit ARM architecture was intended to enable devices to exploit that architecture’s power efficiency, but overall, the offering proved to be a funky fit with existing Windows software. Production of RT devices stopped earlier in 2015 as Microsoft focuses on Win10 and more professional-focused Surface devices.

OpenStack vendor Nebula
As Network World’s Brandon Butler wrote in April, Nebula became one of the first casualties of the open source OpenStack cloud computing movement when it shuttered its doors. The company, whose founder was CIO for IT at NASA before starting Nebula in 2011, suggested in its farewell letter that it was a bit ahead of its time, unable to convert its $38 million in funding and hardware/software appliances into a sustainable business.

FriendFeed
Facebook bought this social news and information feed aggregator in 2009, two years after the smaller business started, and then killed it off in April. People have moved on to other means of gathering and discovering info online, so FriendFeed died from lack of use. It did inspire the very singular website, Is FriendFeed Dead Yet, however, so its legacy lives on.

Apple Aperture
Apple put the final nails in its Aperture photo editing app in 2015, ending the professional-quality post-production app’s 10-year run at Version 3.6. In its place, Apple introduced its Photos app for users of both its OS X Mac and iOS devices.

Secret
One of the co-founders of anonymous sharing app shared this in April: The company was shutting down and returning whatever part of its $35 million in funding was left. The company’s reality was just not going to meet up with his vision for it, said co-founder David Byttow. The company faced criticism that it, like other anonymous apps such as Yik Yak, allowed for cyberbullying.

Amazon Wallet
Amazon started the year by announcing its Wallet app, the company’s 6-month-old attempt to get into mobile payments, was a bust. The app, which had been in beta, allowed users to store their gift/loyalty/rewards cards, but not debit or credit cards as they can with Apple and Google mobile payment services.

Circa News app
Expired apps could easily fill an entire tech graveyard, so we won’t document all of their deaths here. But among them not making it through 2015 was Circa, which reportedly garnered some $4 million in venture funding since starting in 2012 but didn’t get enough takers for its app-y brand of journalism.

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Sorriest technology companies of 2015

A rundown of the year in apologies from tech vendors and those whose businesses rely heavily on tech.

Sorry situation
Despite all the technology advances that have rolled out this year, it’s also been a sorry state of affairs among leading network and computing vendors, along with businesses that rely heavily on technology. Apple, Google, airlines and more have issued tech-related mea culpas in 2015…

Sony says Sorry by saying Thanks
Network outages caused by DDoS attacks spoiled holiday fun for those who got new PlayStation 4 games and consoles, so Sony kicked off 2015 with an offer of 10% off new purchases, plus an extended free trial for some.

NSA’s backdoor apology
After getting outted by Microsoft and later Edward Snowden for allowing backdoors to be inserted into devices via a key security standard, the NSA sort of apologized. NSA Director of Research Michael Wertheimer, in writing for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, acknowledges mistakes were made in “The Mathematics Community and the NSA.” He wrote in part: “With hindsight, NSA should have ceased supporting the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm immediately after security researchers discovered the potential for a trapdoor.”

You probably forgot about this flag controversy
China’s big WeChat messaging service apologized in January for bombarding many of its hundreds of millions of users – and not just those in the United States -- with Stars and Stripes icons whenever they typed in the words “civil rights” on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. WeChat also took heat for not offering any sort of special icons when users typed in patriotic Chinese terms. The special flag icons were only supposed to have been seen by US users of the service.

Go Daddy crosses the line
Web site domain provider Go Daddy as usual relied on scantily clad women as well as animals to spread its message during this past winter’s Super Bowl. The surprising thing is that the animals are what got the company in hot water this time. The company previewed an ad that was supposed to parody Budweiser commercials, but its puppy mill punch line didn’t have many people laughing, so the CEO wound up apologizing and pulling the ad.

Name calling at Comcast
Comcast scrambled to make right after somehow changing the name of a customer on his bill to “(expletive… rhymes with North Pole) Brown” from his actual name, Ricardo Brown. The change took place after Brown’s wife called Comcast to discontinue cable service. The service provider told a USA Today columnist that it was investigating the matter, but in the meantime was refunding the Browns for two years of previous service.

Where to start with Google?
Google’s Department of Apologies has been busy this year: In January the company apologized when its translation services spit out anti-gay slurs in response to searches on the terms “gay” and “homosexual.” In May, Google apologized after a Maps user embedded an image of the Android mascot urinating on Apple’s logo. This summer, Google has apologized for its new Photos app mislabeling African Americans as “gorillas” and for Google Niantic Labs’ Ingress augmented reality game including the sites of former Nazi concentration camps as points of interest.

Carnegie Mellon admissions SNAFU
Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science School in February apologized after it mistakenly accepted 800 applicants to its grad problem, only to send out rejection notices hours later. The irony of a computer glitch leading to this problem at such a renowned computer science school was lost on no one…

Lenovo Superfish debacle
Lenovo officials apologized in February after it was discovered that Superfish adware packaged with some of its consumer notebooks was not only a pain for users but also included a serious security flaw resulting from interception of encrypted traffic. “I have a bunch of very embarrassed engineers on my staff right now,” said Lenovo CTO Peter Hortensius. “They missed this.” Lenovo worked with Microsoft and others to give users tools to rid themselves of Superfish.

Apple apologizes for tuning out customers
Apple apologized in March for an 11-hour iTunes service and App Store outage that it blamed on “an internal DNS error at Apple,” in a statement to CNBC.

Blame the iPads
American Airlines in April apologized after digital map application problems on pilot iPads delayed dozens of flights over a two-day period. The airline did stress that the problem was a third-party app, not the Apple products themselves.

Locker awakened
The creator of a strain of ransomware called Locker apologized after he “woke up” the malware, which encrypted files on infected devices and asked for money to release them. A week after the ransomware was activated, the creator apparently had a changed of heart released decryption keys needed by victims to unlock their systems.

HTC wants to be Hero
Phonemaker HTC’s CEO Cher Wang, according to the Taipei Times in June, apologized to investors in June after the company’s new One M9 flagship phone failed to boost sales. “HTC’s recent performance has let people down,” said Wang, pointing to better times ahead with the planned fall release of a new phone dubbed Hero.

Ketchup for adults only
Ketchup maker Heinz apologized in June after an outdated contest-related QR code on its bottles sent a German man to an X-rated website. Meanwhile, the website operator offered the man who complained a free year’s worth of access, which he declined.

Livid Reddit users push out interim CEO
Interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao apologized in July (“we screwed up”) after the online news aggregation site went nuts over the sudden dismissal of an influential employee known for her work on the site’s popular Ask Me Anything section. Pao shortly afterwards resigned from her post following continued demands for her ouster by site users.

Blame the router
United Airlines apologized (“we experienced a network connectivity issue. We are working to resolve and apologize for any inconvenience.”) in July after being forced to ground its flights for two hours one morning due to a technology issue that turned out to be router-related. United has suffered a string of tech glitches since adopting Continental’s passenger management system a few years back following its acquisition of the airline.

Billion dollar apology
Top Toshiba executives resigned in July following revelations that the company had systematically padded its profits by more than $1 billion over a six-year period. “I recognize there has been the most serious damage to our brand image in our 140-year history,” said outgoing President Hisao Tanaka, who is to be succeeded by Chairman Masashi Muromachi. “We take what the committee has pointed out very seriously, and it is I and others in management who bear responsibility.”

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Can’t find all the tech people you need? The Blind Institute of Technology can help

The fledgling organization says there is a large untapped pool of talent waiting in the wings

Mike Hess is the founder and Executive Director of the Blind Institute of Technology, a Colorado-based nonprofit transitioning to be a national outfit, whose goal is to find tech roles for the chronically underemployed visually impaired community. Hess, who runs the organization with 40+ volunteers, including eight C-level executives on his board of directors, recently outlined his goals for Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.

Why did you start this organization and what is it about?

Mike Hess is the founder and Executive Director of the Blind Institute of Technology

I started in technology 18 years ago in the mid-90s and most of my career was in telecommunications. I started with US West as a mainframe developer and when US West Wireless started I thought that sounded fun so I moved over and that’s when I started expanding my technical skills. In the mid-2000s when VoIP became the latest craze I went and got Cisco certified and learned how to overcome those challenges, and then ultimately I ended up at Level 3 Communications.

Through all of that I noticed I was always the token blind guy in the organization, so I started doing some digging and came to realize the unemployment rate for the vision-impaired (VI) ranged from 70% to 80%. I found the numbers just staggering and I thought, I can make a difference by bringing awareness to executives here locally in Denver.

The first six to eight months was all about proof of concept. I kept knocking on doors, talking to executives, telling them about how I was able to overcome visual obstacles in environments just like theirs, so I was bringing credibility to the story. I was talking to them about the amazing candidates they were overlooking even as they were struggling to find talent. In Denver, unemployment within IT is less than two percent.

Was the focus to encourage employers to hire visually-impaired people or were you also out to encourage visually impaired people to pursue technology careers?

My initial focus was on awareness with a mission to impact unemployment. I didn’t start out to build a staffing or placement organization. That’s kind of evolved over the last two years.

Today BIT offers multiple programs designed to enable success in the workplace for both employers and the VI community. Our Education and Outreach Program (Art of Blinders) teaches organizations the true power of listening. These workshops help educate organizations about the innate assets a vision-impaired person brings to the workplace, and helps with organizational development by having participants practice listening skills while blind folded.

Our second program is Workplace Preparation. We provide technical assistance to organizations that are interested in learning how to make software accessible to consumers, or organizations that need technical assistance for a VI employee.

The third program is Certification and Training, so it is all about education. We have partnered with the Tuliva Academy in downtown Denver to offer technical certifications that are fully accessible in the classroom.

And the fourth program is Staffing and Placements. We have signed direct placement agreements and master service agreements with organizations for full-time employment, project and contract work.

Since we’re a 501C3 Nonprofit, organizations can donate to one of our programs to help us impact the unemployment within the vision-impaired community.

When you approach a large company, is it hard to get in the door or are they receptive to the idea and just haven’t thought it through?

When I talk to CIOs or CTOs I talk pure technology. I explain that bringing in technology to support visually impaired programmers adds less than one percent to software development lifecycle costs, and suddenly you have access to this large talent pool out there. Technically minded executives get this concept. Every organization is looking for scalability. When I explain how many millions of blind people there are, it’s kind of a no-brainer to start incorporating accessible technology in the workplace because it allows you to scale immediately.

Where I get more resistance is when I talk to HR types. Their goal is to mitigate risk, but I’ve found zero statistics that show that the visually impaired are any more problematic for organizations. As a matter of fact, all the testimonials and statistics I’ve found show that companies that have embraced the vision-impaired community have some of the lowest churn in the industry because, quite honestly, once I know my way to my office, I continue to walk that path. So I think the loyalty factor is a huge win for organizations.

So yeah, it’s kind of a mixed reaction, although the reason we’ve been able to grow is because when I talk to an executive I always ask if they can introduce me to two or three peers and they’re like, “Absolutely,” because what we’re selling is this amazing talent pool that they’re probably not tapping into.

How many people are visually impaired?

In Colorado alone there are 45,000 blind people between the ages of 18 and 64. And if 70%-80% are unemployed? Do the math. And the vision-impaired community has roughly the same level of higher education degrees as our sighted peers, which is about 20% percent of the population.

Then we look for the unemployed visually impaired that have what I call the AA standard. The first A is for attitude. Is your vision impairment an obstacle or is it a barrier, because if it’s a barrier, BIT is not the right organization for you. If it’s just an obstacle, and you’ve got the attitude that you can overcome whatever is in front of you, to me that is a great asset for any technical organization.

The second A is your aptitude. Do you have skills? We literally represent double master, double bachelor’s degree candidates that are just sitting on the sidelines right now chomping at the bit, waiting for a friendly organization to say, “You know what? I’m not worried about the accessible technology. I’m not worried about the perception. I’m just looking for a talented, loyal professional to help our group.”

What was it like for you to learn technology as a visually-impaired person? What kind of obstacles did you face as you pursued this career?

I think you’ll find a lot of vision impaired people can memorize copious amounts of information. When I was coding, my learning curve in the beginning was slower because I had to memorize large COBOL programs, although give me a couple of months and I was way more proficient because I knew exactly where to go to update my data division or go to my procedure division. I could do the correlating of data elements so much faster than my sighted peers because memorizing was secondary to them because they could just see what they were doing.

And because of my sight, I use a lot of tactile representations. For network topologies, for example, I would lay a document over a hard rubber mat and ask a coworker to use a pen to perforate around the shapes, giving me a tactical, three-dimensional layout.

So I leverage all my senses, I leverage every tool and technique I can. There’s actually a lot of science that quantifies how, if you use multiple senses during your transfer of information, your retention and recall go up exponentially. I’ve had high success of getting projects out on time and on budget and that is an anomaly within the IT network space.

When you were going to school for technology, was it hard to find adequate tools to help you learn?

In the early 90s IBM provided a grant to four community colleges and the program I attended was called Computer Training for People with Disabilities. It was designed to get people with physical challenges into technology organizations. There were screen reader and early speech-to-text software and other technologies, but when I first started the software that would help me had not yet arrived. However, there was another student there who had crippling carpal tunnel and so I said “I’ll be your hands, you be my eyes,” and for the first two months of the program that’s how we turned in our assignments. Today, 20 years later, the technology is so much better, thank goodness.

When you transitioned into the corporate world, did they have adequate tools for you?

Back then the technology was a lot more pricey than it is now, but organizations could write-off the investment and they were more than willing to do that because there was this boom in IT like we’re going through now.

Today the technology is so much better. One of the brilliant things Steve Jobs did with the i-devices, he went out and talked to the blindness community and made sure the very first i-device was completely accessible to the VI community. Now, for example, you have applications from companies like Salesforce that I can use to do everything a sighted person would do. The technology is 100% percent innate within iOS.

A lot of what we do now when we go in to talk to an organization is showcase the new capabilities. We say, “Here’s how the technology looks and feels, here’s some of the code you can implement, and here’s how our devices actually respond to that code.”

Are schools doing enough to prepare visually impaired people for tech roles?

In Colorado I’ve checked out all of the major universities, and the thing that saddens me is there’s not one program that actually offers an accessible technology class or tutorial. So BIT is going to be a game changer within the educational realm. We will challenge the IT programs to offer accessibility as a portion of its curriculum. Currently, Universities are not teaching anything about accessible technology. We believe that is important not just to have accessible technology available but teach students about using accessible technology. Therefore, graduates will know what it looks and feels like to code for accessibility.

We’re also partnering with a local technology school that has the curriculum for Cisco and Salesforce and Project Management certifications, and they’re going to be the first technical school in the country that is 100% percent accessible to the visually-impaired community.

So if we have a visually-impaired person reach out to us that has, say, a bachelor’s in English, we can say, “With that degree and with this certification, you’ll be able to line up for a project management role,” or something like that. So we can help them leverage their current skills, augment them with some additional certifications that are completely VI accessible, and then place them in an industry with the lowest unemployment rate out there.

Security is an interesting opportunity. A lot of healthcare organizations, for example, are building out security operation centers, and they’ve told us, “We just want the right personality. We’ll teach them the hard skills.”

Well, Mike, anything else that’s important to know about your organization that I haven’t thought to ask about?

I just want to reiterate that we have national reach. We’re completely connected with all of the blindness organizations nationwide, and this is of national importance and I know with community effort, with organizations who are just looking for talented, loyal people, BIT can absolutely be a brand name that they can come to depend on to help them get those resources out there nationwide.

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