Should technology learn from history? 
Saturday, March 28, 2009, 09:10 AM
Posted by Administrator
For those of you that have been around the technology arena a while, you might remember the CueCat. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat ) Yep, that little cat-shaped bar code scanner that could seemingly scan anything and immediately take you to some web site that was related to the item you scanned. This brought all kinds of thoughts to mind, like price shopping from your phone for items while you were in a store, to immediately being able to get nutritional information for almost anything, even stuff it isn’t printed on. There were all sorts of reasons why this failed…but the bottom line was it failed miserably. In fact, it was listed as one of the top 25 worst tech products of all time. Pretty pathetic. And now if you’re lucky you can by a CueCat on eBay for a dollar. (Although without software to use it as a barcode scanner, it won’t do much, and the software that used to work is not longer functional.)

Enter Microsoft…in their infinite wisdom, they now are putting ‘TAGS’ on their advertisements that you can use your cell phone to ‘read’ and then you will be instantly taken to a website with your in-phone browser. My reaction: Cool technology…but, what a waste. My next thought…it’s CUECAT all over again. So, now our brains aren’t good enough to remember SQLServerEnergy.com, so we should rely on our cellphone to read a fancy barcode and take us there automatically. ( http://gettag.mobi )


Give me a break. Computers have already been blamed for helping to turn out a generation of students that struggle with basic arithmetic without a calculator. Anything that makes us lazy (mentally or physically) concerns me. We already have a nation of overweight children and middle-aged adults that die of heart attacks. (I must admit I worry about myself in that latter) Can’t technology be used in ways that helps us, without making us more lazy?

I don’t really think Microsoft Tags are going to ruin the world, but I just wonder if this is one of those times that people with new bad ideas should look to history at old bad ideas and make sure they aren’t repeating mistakes. Maybe technology solutions are seasonal and what works at one point in time might not work at others. I hope for the Microsoft Tag people, this is the season for this technology to blossom. I’m not holding my breath…

-BEH


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