Eight things that should not have happened last year, but did

January 1, 2025 TH Author

Opinion Happy new year! Tradition says that this is when we boldly look forward to what may happen in the 12 months to come. Do you really want to know that? Didn’t think so.

Instead, here are eight of the tech things that didn’t go as planned in 2024, in no particular order and of no particular significance except to paint a picture of the year in tech guaranteed hype free. Why eight. Not five or ten? We just like powers of two. Now, on with the show.

Oracle does Oracle

This could easily be a mini list all of its own, given the scandalous Java licensing heist. There was a rollout of patient record software in Sweden so shabby people rolled back to manual systems – the tech giant was also treated to nine-digit data privacy fines. The winner has to be HR system so over-budget and under-performing it materially contributed to the bankrupptcy of Europe’s biggest local authority. You can’t get that level of service just anywhere.

The Internet Archive’s very bad year

Like the British Library, the Internet Archive was attacked this year by cyber criminals causing months of disruption to services many rely on. This is only not repugnant if you don’t like the idea of access to knowledge as the basis of a just and free culture.

Unhappily for the Archive, this now includes record labels Sony and Universal, who are suing for $600 million in punitive damages over copyright. IA’s Wayback Machine, you see, takes historical snapshots of web pages which sometimes include licensed music. Thus, Wayback Machine is starving musicians, which is the record labels’ job, and it must be destroyed. That music lawyers find it very useful to counteract claims by music publishers over who did what when is a pure coincidence.

And the winner of the Biggest Outage Award 2024 is…

If misery loves company, then network outages spread more love around the globe than a Beatles mawkish singalong. One misconfiguration, one botched update. One power supply popping – the butterfly wing flaps that unleash chaos across the planet. One thinks of Instagram’s 3.3 million lost connections, or Cloudflare’s 5m. Mere runners-up to KING of unreachable – Facebook. With its epic 11.1m user outage. That was all wrapped up in Meta’s second big outage of the year, proving Zuck’s dedication to providing tech news outlets with enough news to keep going single handedly. (If you’re an outage addict, here’s the global report for the year.)

Apple vision

Like AI and quantum computing, virtual and augmented reality are ideas that seem like good ideas until you try to make them do something useful. It doesn’t matter how many billions of dollars are spent trying to prove otherwise. The Apple Vision Pro goggles got a lot of attention at launch. Apple entering a new sector with very expensive tech will never not be news, but since then, LESS BUZZ THAN A FOSSIL BEE IN AMBER. Not only are there no killer apps, there are no apps in development at all.

The Apple Lisa did things that nothing else released could do while being too expensive to sell, but the Mac, which was quarter the price, got there eventually. The $3,500 Apple Vision Pro face-hugger at $800 would still be useless.

Ex-Twitter and the Musk of decay

It turns out that despite talk of turning X into a world banking platform, and forcing fleeing advertisers back onto the platform through court action, Elon Musk just wants it as the biggest trolling platform on this or any other planet. He used it to troll England about being close to civil war – a country far too polite to make a fuss – and thumbed his nose at Brazil’s attempts to apply its online regulations. Brazil won. Users who like that sort of thing have stayed, but the diaspora of those who don’t has left competitor Bluesky with scaling problems. Way to go, Elon.

Microsoft desktop AI

People don’t want Copilot PCs and they really didn’t want Recall. With a lot of AI, it’s hard to pick out any one reason it can fall flat – its intrusiveness, its inability to tell truth from fiction, its insatiable appetite for other people–s data? – but Recall’s modus operandi of scraping everything you did on your desktop and sending it to Microsoft is a genuine chart-topper on Planet Creepy. That the company didn’t seem to understand this at first, and remains really keen to remain that weird kid with the unsettling stare and no boundaries who wants to be your very best friend no matter how hard you try to avoid them… well, that’s not a good sign for sanity in 2025.

Self driving cars

DARPA kicked off its Grand Challenge long distance autonomous vehicle competition in 2004. As successive years saw huge advances, the ultimate goal of the driverless car felt inevitable. Now, with General Motors unplugging its Cruise driverless taxi project as permanently unviable, leaving just Tesla and Waymo seriously in the game, it looks like just another wrong turn. Twenty years of research and massive advances in sensors, compute, and AI haven’t done it.

And there’s nothing on the roadmap to suggest more time will help. Delivery drivers rejoice: your core skills of dropping parcels in puddles and running away without pressing the doorbell will remain unchallenged by technology for some time to come.

The Murder Of Moxie

“Think of the children” is a real eye-roller of a phrase when used to promote state overreach that can’t survive logic. Sometimes it’s spot on. Moxie is – was – a super-cute robot for children between five and 10, designed to learn their interests and emotions, and bond with them to teach social interactions. Lots of kids, especially non-neurotypical, will form very strong bonds with a favorite toy. When that toy is an infinitely patient, kindly playmate – that’s powerful. But Moxie’s core AI was cloud-based, parent company Embodied ran out of cash and turned the servers just like that. And just like that every Moxie in the world was dead forever. Ethical AI is not an empty phrase.

So there you are, what wonder we can expect for 2025? Answers on a postcard to Vulture Towers. Or maybe just take the easier option and post your comments in the comments section below.

Here’s to a wondrous 2025. ®