Top 10 disappointing technologies by Iain Thomson and Shaun Nichols at PC Authority includes two honorable mentions, so the story actually details a dozen onetime game-changers.

If you ever wondered what happened to FireWire, Bluetooth, virtual reality and voice recognition, here are the answers. This piece rises above the usual numbered list favored by the Slashdot crowd, as the authors actually explain why each failed.

For instance, Biometrics, an honorable mention:

Iain Thomson: ...Fingerprint readers are in wide circulation but they are easily fooled these days with cheap materials, or by more direct means. Taiwanese robbers reportedly cut the finger of a man whose car had a fingerprint ignition, something that led scanner manufacturers to install a temperature sensor in future models to prevent a repeat...

Shaun Nichols: One of the problems with biometrics is that people don't really want it.

As much as we love movies about cyborgs and futuristic bio-scanning systems, few people are comfortable with actually allowing machines to analyse and classify us on that sort of level. While locks that require a palm or thumb print are emerging for high-security applications, the 'big brother' implications of taking the technology to the masses are too much for most of us....

Biggest failure: Windows Vista, of course.

Shaun: ...Unfortunately, Vista hit with a laundry list of shortcomings. Security developers complained about the restrictive kernel protections. Customers griped about the extensive number of versions of Vista and the high price for the premium packages.

Vista's biggest problem, however, was its big appetite for hardware. Users who had grown accustomed to the low demands of XP were often shocked to realize how much hardware they would need to upgrade just to run Vista. Many of the high-end features out of the realm of even some brand new systems.

The matter was further complicated when a lawsuit unearthed evidence that the company purposely lowered some of the suggested requirements at the behest of hardware vendors....

The biggest slap in the face is how many new computers still come with Vista, and you pay a premium to "upgrade" to XP.