Failed Internet Technologies Examples

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

Goran — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:44:32 GMT

Netscape comes to mind when I think of failed/obselete Internet technologies. I remember the browser wars where Microsoft came out as the winner. Who uses Netscape today?

Now it's Firefox and Internet Explorer.

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

MarcoM — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:57:33 GMT

IMAP4 is quite widely used, I would not call it a failure.

CORBA, IIRC (I might be wrong) is used internally in the Gnome desktop architecture, but not used on the internet anymore.

For me, the single most backed technology with the biggest failure were Java applets.

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

Sriram Krishnan [MSFT] — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:44:41 GMT

VRML. Imagine SecondLife today if VRML had stuck around. :)

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

Mark Hildreth — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:43:38 GMT

How about client-side VBScript as opposed to javascript? Or dare I say, ActiveX?

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

Ed — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:37:55 GMT

Generating a list technologies that no one ever used is going to be tricky.

Gopher was a great way of publishing actual information. WebDav is better than FTP and IMAP is better than using a dodgy HTML mail reader - they're just not consumer level solutions I guess.

CORBA / IIOP failed because it was a bit over ambitious / complex. WMS/WFS (OpenGIS mapping protocols) are a bit stalled because proprietary systems (Google Earth, Virtual Earth etc.) are generally better written. (WMS/WFS is what NASA World Wind is based on).

I've vague recolections of using an 'archie' search engine which trawled FTP sites at uni.

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

Wolf Logan — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:18:03 GMT

I think the thing that jumps out at me most from comparing the two lists of technologies is that the failed ones are much more "centralised" than the successful ones.

Gopher failed not so much because it lacked the richness of HTTP (though it was certainly clunkier), but because any content-level changes to a Gopher server required manual filing and structure updating, which was a centralised activity. It was fine for relatively static collections of heirarchically organised information, but the kind of ad-hoc delegation of content management that was so prevalent in the early days of the web was nearly impossible.

Ditto WAIS, which was a great search technology -- as long as you had some kind of centralised control over the content. Offering indexing of content you didn't really own was non-trivial, so most WAIS servers were over small private data collections, and there wasn't a good universal federation mechanism in place. So WAIS essentially starved out when systems like the World Wide Web Worm (an early search indexer) and AltaVista began to appear.

It seems that the recipe for a successful protocol or technology is to remove the bottlenecks, and make it possible to distribute it widely. If you can easily federate it (without adding to the implementation complexity), then that's a bonus.

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

Garry — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:35:51 GMT

IMAP EMail - No Idea why it never really took off, seemed like a great idea, downloading EMail and leaving a copy on the server for you to read from another client.

But have to agree about FTP, I use Biztalk to transform 1000's messages per day, can easily offer up file delivery over HTTP or webservice, just cannot get any of our clients to buy in to the idea when FTP is so realiable.

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

J.Marsch — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:45:41 GMT

Anyone remember GOPHER? I remember piddling around with it back in school, but soon after that web sites started budding and everyone was using Netscape and Trumpet Winsock...

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

Kalpesh — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:04:58 GMT

Its more of acceptance by users (not only people in IT) that matters.

People who are into development might know RSS. What about others?

Also, some tools really simplify the job to consume some technology by end users. e.g. one doesnt need to get the feed from some page & add it to their aggregator. Browsers like IE & FF do it easily for them to discover & add :)

FTP hasnt died out but it isnt visible to other users, even when they are using it. HTTP does the job of FTP for users easily, but cant replace it as such.

re: Failed Internet Technologies Examples

John Coleman — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:06:12 GMT

FTP died? I don't think so... it's very mainstream. It's not not something home users user every day. Nothing has ever come close to replacing it at all. It's the backbone of our bulk data transfer.