PC World’s Top 50
I get a kick out of these “Top x of y” lists that magazines love to compile, since they’re almost always completely subjective, and usually have at least a few head-scratchers mixed in with the obvious wins. The latest case in point is PC World’s modestly titled “The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time.” Leading the list is Netscape Navigator, with the magazine calling it “the reason people started spending hours a day on the Internet.” Well, yes. I was certainly blown away the first time I used a beta version of Netscape in late 1994 (especially that way cool “venetian blind effect” it used to download interlaced GIFs. Oooh). It was light years ahead of its predecessor, NCSA Mosaic. But is it the best tech product of all time? What about some truly lifesaving technologies like pacemakers, dialysis machines or defibrillators? What about products that kicked off the computer era, like the Univac (or even the Antikythera Mechanism)? Instead, we have WordPerfect 5.1 (No. 9) and TurboTax (No. 38). What the list really should have been called—despite the inclusion of a few outliers like the iPod and a couple of digital cameras and cell phones—is “The 50 Best PC-related Products of the Past 25 Years,” which would have been more in keeping with its stated parameters of only including “technology that has arisen since the dawn of the personal computer.” But that wouldn’t sell nearly as many magazines as the “Best of All Time,” now would it?
