Gadgetory

you know every year a few things happen in the world of tech that leave us scratching our heads like why Apple redesign final cut for four-year-olds why Quicken no longer works on the Mac or why a Roku box has a genes tab but those are trivial compared to this list the top 5 tech turkeys of 2011 blunders that someone just had to get fired over number 5 the flip camera Cisco paid 590 million dollars to buy flip in 2009 they got the brand the cameras the company all of it and then in April 2011 they killed it all they didn't scale it back they didn't license the technology didn't even sell it as a loss they just shut it down yes smartphones are bearing down hard on flip cameras but flip was the dominant brand in a still decent category synonymous with Lowe's kind of cameras it doesn't require any more R&D at this point how much money did they leave on the table with that one number for webOS and HP personal computers we started checking the dumpsters outside of HP for empty booze bottles when they announced in August they were suddenly killing off the webOS mobile platform and devices and selling or spinning off their PC division don't those deserve to separate press releases it was a bolt out of the blue and made HP look like it never got mobile and it gave a good case of the willies to its PC clients and partners and that's not a small business the whole debacle cost the CEO his gig and HP a lot of its cred as a Silicon Valley visionary number three the Sony Playstation network breach in a year of unprecedented hacks and attacks the Sony PSN breach was perhaps the ugliest in early April PlayStation Network was brought to its knees and the customer records of some 100 million users were pinched largely stored unencrypted all in PSN and Sony Curiosity were down for like three weeks blackberry gets hell with their network goes down for three days oh and that also happened this year Sony made amends by tossing you there's some free games and stuff which is kind of like the croupier buying you breakfast when you just lost your car at the baccarat table number two rim just rim the BlackBerry maker didn't have any one product or moment that its fate turned on this year and maybe that was the problem just 12 long months of 2011 in general was a year that the question what's up with blackberry was on everyone's lips app will retain the title for most popular smartphone Android took over as most popular platform Windows Phone as most promising and RIM got kudos for having a good keyboard not much to work with there okay our number one tech Turkey of 2011 Netflix when you hear folks say your company's strategy is gonna be studied in business schools for years to come that's either real good or real bad for Netflix check the latter box in July the company raised the cost of a DVD plus streaming plan from 10 bucks to 16 dollars overnight a 60% bump the backlash was big subscriber cancellations and nasty headlines sent the once darling of home video in a u-turn then they fixed it by announcing Qwikster a new company to handle DVD rentals separately from their streaming because nothing takes a users mind off a 60% price hike like a 100 percent hike in hassles well they reverse that quickster idea a few days later but the price hike stayed and the worst part of the story is Netflix is still a great service had a great price but no one notices that anymore because it's now a banged-up brand all they had to do was handle it right but I guess they didn't want to give up this coveted number one slot to rim for more top fives like this head over to top-5 cnet.com i'm brian coulis thanks for watching