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The Biggest Technology Failures Of 2020

This was a year we needed technology to save us. A pandemic raced over the land, there were wildfires, uneasy political divisions, and we gasped in the miasma of social media. In 2020, the ways in which technology can help or hurt never seemed clearer.

In the success column we have covid-19 vaccines. But this article is not about successes. Instead, this is our annual list of the worst technology flops and failures. Our tally for 2020 includes billion-dollar digital business plans that faceplanted, covid tests that bombed, and the unforeseen consequences of wrapping the planet in cheap satellites.

Covid tests

The polymerase chain reaction is not a new technology. In fact, this technique for detecting the presence of specific genes was invented in 1980, and its inventor won a Nobel Prize a decade later. It's employed in a vast array of diagnostic tests and laboratory research.

GETTY

So it counts as a historic screw-up that at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, the specialized laboratories of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states lab kits with wrong ingredients that didn't work. So began the failure to stop the pathogen, the sidelining of nation's top public health agency, and, more broadly, the unexpected inability of the country that invented PCR to get coronavirus tests to everyone who needs one. Widespread and frequent testing is what economists said would be the swiftest, cheapest way to keep the country up and running. Even now, 11 months later, lines and delays are still the testing norm in the US, even as private labs, universities, and health centers run approximately two million tests per day.

Read more:

Stop covid or save the economy? We can do both, MIT Technology Review

The CDC's failed race against covid-19: A threat underestimated and a test overcomplicated, Washington Post

Unregulated facial recognition

Imagine a grainy video from a convenience store robbery. A shoplifter looks at the camera and presto, police use face recognition to identify a suspect. Now imagine a city—like Portland, Oregon—that decides it has to ban police from doing that.

The ability to match faces is one of the signal triumphs of the new generation of artificial intelligence, and the technique is appearing everywhere. That includes settings where its use can seem intrusive or unfair, like schools or public housing. The result this year: a run of bans and restrictions by cities, states, and companies that could stifle one of the first and most significant results of superhuman AI.

The reason the technology is accelerating is that cameras are everywhere—and we all handed over our selfies. "We have allowed the beast out of the bag by feeding it billions of faces, and helping it by tagging ourselves," says Joseph Atick, who built an early face recognition system using special cameras and a custom image database. Now there are hundreds of face recognition programs crunching pictures online. Controlling these systems, says Atick, "is no longer a technological issue."

Over the summer, Microsoft and Amazon both denied police access to their face-matching systems, at least temporarily, and cities like Portland enacted sweeping bans that also stop hotels and shops from identifying people. What's still missing is a national framework to guide right and wrong uses.  Instead of a cycle of abuses and bans, we need policy. And in the US, we don't have it yet.

Listen to more: Attention, Shoppers: You're Being Tracked, In Machines We Trust podcast

Quibi's quick collapse

"Quick bites. Big stories." That was the motto of Quibi, a Hollywood-powered streaming service that set out in April to revolutionize entertainment with 10-minute shows for phone screens.

But the big story ended up being Quibi's fast demise. Six months after its debut, the company was firing talent and giving what remained of its $1.75 billion budget back to investors.

Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg

DANIEL BOCZARSKI/GETTY IMAGES FOR QUIBI

The misfire reminded us of journalism's infamous 2018 "pivot," in which news sites reassigned reporters en masse to manufacture ultra-short text-on-screen videos before brutally firing everyone. Similarly, Quibi was using well-paid pros to make slick $4.99-a-month subscription content that competed with YouTube, TikTok, and hordes of creators who film cat videos and dance moves for free.

In a farewell letter, studio mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman said their pursuit of a "new category of entertainment" might have been misguided, but they also directed blame at the pandemic, which kept people at home in front of the TV. "Unfortunately, we will never know, but we suspect it's been a combination of the two," they wrote. "Our failure was not for lack of trying."

Read more: Quibi Is Shutting Down Barely Six Months After Going Live, Wall Street Journal

Mystery microwave weapon

Since 2016, several dozen US diplomats and spies in Cuba and China have been hit by a spectrum of painful and strange neurological symptoms. They've woken to sharp noises and experienced loss of balance and a feeling of pressure in the face. The most plausible cause of their torment, according to the National Academies of Sciences: a microwave weapon.

US Air Force Research Laboratory's THOR

AFRL DIRECTED ENERGY DIRECTORATE

No one can say for sure if a directed beams of pulsed radio energy aimed into diplomats' homes and hotel rooms are to blame for "Havana syndrome." The US was slow to recognize and investigate the pattern of injuries and still can't name a cause with certainty. What is clear is that anyone using a microwave weapon in deliberate attacks has failed to think things through. Other powers, including the US, can also generate powerful, invisible beams to cause headaches, clicking noises inside the skull, nausea, and hearing loss. The clandestine use of such over-the-air technology, the academies said, "raises grave concerns about a world with disinhibited malevolent actors and new tools for causing harm to others."

Some weapons just shouldn't be used.

Learn more: "An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies," The National Academies Standing Committee to Advise the Department of State on Unexplained Health Effects on U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies

#zoomdick

Have you ever had a dream where you show up at work or school in your underpants? With Zoom, it's entirely possible.

During the pandemic, the video app became our new office, our schoolyard, and our way to socialize. With it came the hazard of broadcasting what should remain private. There was the toilet flush as the Supreme Court held oral arguments, and the Mexican senator who changed her top on video without realizing it.

Jeffrey Toobin

JOE KOHEN/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE NEW YORKER

Gross-out humor turned to tragedy in the case of prominent CNN and New Yorker legal critic Jeffrey Toobin, who allegedly exposed his genitalia to coworkers as he fumbled between a work Zoom and a pornographic interlude. Many said Toobin deserved to be fired by the New Yorker, citing the #metoo movement (#metoobin became the hashtag). Others sympathized with an all-too-human situation. "There but for better camera work go I," they seemed to be saying.

Read more: New Yorker Suspends Jeffrey Toobin for Masturbating on Zoom Call, Vice News

Light pollution from satellite megaconstellations

Since prehistory, humankind has looked upwards for awe and inspiration, to imagine what forces created the world—and which might end it.

But now, that cosmic view is being contaminated with the reflections of thousands of inexpensive commercial satellites put aloft by companies like Amazon, OneWeb, and SpaceX, who want to cover the Earth with internet connections. Sixty satellites can swarm out of a single rocket.

Starlink streaks visibly mar this image of the night sky taken by the DeCam DELVE Survey.

CTIO/NOIRLAB/NSF/AURA/DECAM DELVE SURVEY

The problem for astronomers is that sunlight reflects from the satellites, which race by at low altitudes at dawn or hover overhead, perpetually illuminated. Their sheer numbers pose a problem. SpaceX plans to launch 12,000 of its Starlink satellites, while other operators plan 50,000.

Concern is greatest for wide-field optical telescopes sitting atop mountains, whose job includes detecting exoplanets or near-Earth objects that could collide with our planet. Now there's an after-the-fact attempt to fix the problem. SpaceX tried coloring a satellite black, but it heated up too fast. More recently, the company started equipping satellites with sunshade visors to stop the reflections.

Read more: Satellite mega-constellations risk ruining astronomy forever, MIT Technology Review

Learn More: Impact of Satellite Constellations on Optical Astronomy and Recommendations Toward Mitigations, NSF NOIRLab

The vaccine that make you test positive for HIV

We knew things could go wrong with the rushed vaccine effort against covid-19, but the fate of Australia's homegrown candidate was still a surprise.  

A team at the University of Queensland and the biotech company CSL developed a promising protein vaccine that seemed to be working well in people. But its main innovation was its downfall: it used two bits of HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) as a "molecular clamp" to help it inside cells. As a result, researchers discovered, volunteers who got the shot were turning up positive on common HIV tests. Those false positives created a chance for confusion and controversy, and conspiracy theorists would be certain to sow doubts over the vaccine.

The Australian team made some heroic efforts to correct the problem, but to no avail. In early December, the government admitted defeat and canceled a $750 million order for 51 million shots, making it the first advanced covid vaccine project to get scrapped. Compare that with the situation in the US, which authorized or approved several treatments against the coronavirus that don't work, or where evidence is lacking. Sometimes admitting failure is the better course. "This is the scientific process working," Australia's health minister said.

Read more: Australian vaccine abandoned over false HIV response, BBC

Cyberpunk 2077

The creators of the most anticipated video game of 2020 promised players a sci-fi dystopia. Instead, they delivered a world broken in all the wrong ways. The immersive universe of Cyberpunk 2077 was beset with problems from day one. Players (in particular, those playing on consoles) encountered a ton of glitches ranging from hilarious to game-breaking. Sony pulled the game from PlayStation stores a week after its release, offering full refunds for anyone who wanted one.

CD PROJEKT RED

The reviews of the game aren't bad—some are even positive. And even in a virtual world, everyone makes do. The bugs and glitches that make the game unplayable are now part of the fun: try riding a motorcycle by standing on it pantless, or teleporting at random when you jump in a car.

Read more: Cyberpunk 2077 Was Supposed to Be the Biggest Video Game of the Year. What Happened? New York Times

Hydroxychloroquine, the covid drug that never worked

You knew things were getting strange when Rudolph Giuliani tweeted, late-night infomercial style, that a malaria drug called hydroxychloroquine was "100% effective" against covid-19.

Indeed, a chorus of right-wing figures—cartoonist Scott Adams, Fox News hosts, and flag-bearing avatars on social media—were all convinced the cure had been found.

Early on, in March, the old and plentiful drug did make the list of possible covid-19 treatments. But studies quickly showed it didn't actually help. By then, though, what the studies said didn't matter. That's because the drug was promoted (and even taken) by Donald Trump, who—as Politico wrote—sought a silver bullet for the political problems caused by the pandemic. What he called "the hydroxy" was going to be that bullet. "A lot of good things have come out about the hydroxy, a lot of good things. You'd be surprised how many people are taking it," Trump said.

At first the pressure to declare a cure paid off. The US Food and Drug Administrations authorized the drug's use, and the federal government ordered pallets full. But as the nonexistent evidence was replaced by the results of clinical trials (which found no benefit and even some heart risk), covid's fakest drug faded from view. Giuliani's tweet was removed by Twitter. The FBI arrested a doctor selling $3,995 "survival packs" that included the drug. Trump, when he eventually fell ill with covid-19, received every treatment his doctors thought might help.

That did not include hydroxychloroquine.

Read more: The Strange and Twisted Tale of Hydroxychloroquine, Wired

—Abby Ohlheiser contributed reporting and analysis.

The Technology Sector's 2020 And What It Means For 2021

The technology sector was already big prior to 2020, boasting trillion dollar companies, with Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) joining the club in early 2020, and a healthy outlook going in. Due to the pandemic, however, the importance of the technology sector increased enormously. We'll look at tech's 2020 and what it likely means for the sector's performance in 2021.

Key Takeaways

The tech sector has enjoyed a strong 2020 driven by people turning to more online solutions for their work and home lives.

Many of the habits now being formed will carry into 2021 and beyond, contributing to long-term revenue growth for the companies that excelled during the pandemic.

One important thing for investors to note is the legal action being aimed at the technology sector and the implied loss of social license driving this.

The Adoption Acceleration The pandemic had many impacts, but one of the broadest effects has been an acceleration of technology adoption at work and at home. This adoption acceleration was, of course, driven by the needs of people in lockdown and the pivot by many companies to working virtually. The tech sector received a big boost as a result, and we can reasonably expect those positive effects to linger well into 2021 and beyond. When there is a more concerted effort to get workers back in office, usage of services like Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (ZM) may drop for internal meetings and happy hours, for example, but too many people have realized that a video call can replace a costly business trip for the trend to fully reverse. Similarly, the convenience of click and collect as well as groceries delivered to your door will become a habit for people who have grown used to the convenience – the initial public offering (IPO) surge of DoorDash, Inc. (DASH) likely owed a lot to this realization. This expansion of online shopping habits goes beyond packages from Amazon.Com, Inc. (AMZN), with consumers now able and willing to purchase larger ticket items like furniture and cars without visiting a physical location. This increased willingness to buy larger items online helped Wayfair Inc. (W) enjoy triple-digit growth, with the company's stock sitting up over 180% on the year. While the online retailers are in good shape overall, some of the big winners in the pandemic may not be as strongly positioned for a post-vaccine world. Peloton Interactive, Inc. (PTON) is one of the tech stocks that the market appears to be using as a test case for post-vaccine resilience. The stock cooled after the Pfizer Inc. (PFE) vaccine announcement but is heating up again as the pandemic looks to drag on well into 2021. Whether the company can translate its pandemic success into a permanent alternative to community gyms and studios remains to be seen, but it is a huge edge when the main competition is being financially devastated by lockdowns and public fear around sharing space. Digitizing Traditionally Low-Tech Sectors The push to go digital has been immense in traditionally low-tech sectors. The public sector, for example, has held onto physical paperwork and in-person interactions to a greater degree compared to the private sector. Now, however, we are seeing a global push to digitize government records and take workflows online. Some functions, like food or environmental inspections, will never be fully digital, but many of the more mundane aspects of the public sector like renewals, certifications, and documentation are being moved online. The companies that benefit from this push are larger tech companies that can tender bids for more comprehensive service agreements with the public sector. Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), Oracle Corporation (OCRL), International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Accenture plc (ACN), and Alphabet's Google are all offering large-scale services in this area. As these companies successfully transform some of the more byzantine areas of public administration, this learning is being turned to interconnected sub-sectors of that ecosystem, including health and education. The size of this market and the nature of the longer-term contracts represents a rare area of real growth for these tech giants in the years ahead. The Lawsuits Speaking of tech giants, they may spend 2021 facing an issue oil and gas companies are familiar with – social license. 2020 started off a bit rough for social media firms like Facebook, Inc. (FB) as far as public relations due to a Netflix documentary called "The Social Dilemma." The documentary shined a light on how social media platforms sought to keep users scrolling and clicking to drive their revenue, and it made the message stick by personifying the platforms as experimenting on their audience. This was followed by Congressional hearings on big tech stifling competition in July, featuring Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Tim Cook of Apple Inc. (AAPL). Zuckerberg then appeared in front of the Senate judiciary committee in November with Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Inc. (TWTR) to answer questions around the handling of the 2020 election. The issues being raised by all this attention are many, but a few key ones have spawned litigation that may eventually lead to heavier regulations and perhaps even antitrust action in the tech sector. The questions currently being litigated or considered for litigation include:  Is Google a monopoly in search, and is it actively working with other large players to maintain dominance? Is Amazon using its platform sales data to clone successful third-party sellers' products for its Basics line? Is Facebook using acquisitions and its size to eliminate competition in social media platforms? Are social media platforms like Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter using the guise of platforms to grab ad revenue that should be going to the original content creators and publishers? Are social media platforms responsible for the content being shared using their platforms, similar to how newspapers are liable for content they publish? The answers that come out of the courts on these questions could reshape large parts of the tech sector. Given the complexity and importance of the answers, however, investors shouldn't expect too many of them to be resolved in 2021.  The Bottom Line Although 2020 was unpleasant for most of us, it was generally positive for the tech sector. The acceleration of tech adoption had a corresponding effect on the revenues and the business models of the companies offering that tech. The tech sector has the twin advantages of a revenue windfall and momentum going into 2021, increasing the probability that the broad sector strength will continue. That being said, investors need to be aware that tech has a social license issue that has just started to come to the surface in 2020. In 2021 and beyond, we are going to see whether tech's future is one of unrestrained innovation and competition or whether regulation will come in to curb some of the excess.

Enterprise Technology For 2020 And Beyond

Every company is a technology company. Some don't know it yet. Companies that have truly realized this have been able to evolve much faster than their competition across all industries.

Over the last decade, this shift has been enabled by the rapid evolution of digital technologies. There has been the virtualization of data centers, the emergence of ambient computing, the evolution of elastic computing engines, the pervasiveness of APIs and the rise of the experience economy. Industry leaders have been rolling out these technologies ahead of anyone else.

Through these breakthroughs, numerous transformations have been possible. We've seen more personalized customer experiences and faster, nimbler business processes. Entirely new value propositions have emerged. Full supply chains have changed. And the velocity of transactions has accelerated. Ultimately, these have all led to new innovative ways of working and better business outcomes.

Along these transformation journeys, IT and digital, once run separately, are now coming together to drive the next set of transformations. The role of the chief data officer and that of the chief information officer have never been more aligned.

So where do we go from here? What will define enterprise technology in 2020 and beyond?

The New Fundamentals

To reach the next set of quantum leaps in technology and business outcomes, companies will need to go deeper and incorporate three fundamental capabilities into their enterprise technology architectures.

1. Core technology services utilizing new-age capabilities

Increasingly, IT services are taking advantage of serverless computing architectures on the cloud — a foundation of data that can enable greater insights, connected ecosystems that can drive bigger business synergies, and a scalable footprint optimized for agility and business growth.

It's a journey that many have started and achieved. But for those still using on-premises legacy systems, it's important to have a clear strategy prior to migration. Plan accordingly by taking into account each application's complexity, business value, immediate objectives and desired end state. The migration will likely take sequential waves, as some applications may be easier to migrate, while others need recoding or a complete redesign. The security of these applications when running in the cloud is paramount, too, especially with different compliance, privacy and risk considerations between industries.

2. Experience as the North Star

From robotic process automation (RPA) and smart analytics to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, there are digital technologies available now that can automate not only routine, transactional tasks, but also processes that require deeper thinking and judgement. These technologies have the power to redefine applications for the new age, but the best results come only when they are focused on experience.

This starts with envisioning and defining what an optimal experience looks like — one that benefits customers and employees alike. From there, we can determine where and how to implement digital technologies services to get us there, making experience the North Star along our journeys. Banking is an industry that has seen numerous successful experience-led use cases, including chatbots that can assist customers with basic banking tasks and even use predictive analytics to offer financial guidance. For employees, several banks have added AI-powered anomaly detection technology to help with recognizing changes in customer behavior and finding patterns of money laundering or fraud, as well as predictive analytics to anticipate next best actions.

3. Proactive road maps to manage the change

Transformations from previous ways of working and traditional IT services don't happen overnight. They take methodical approaches. Customer and employee journeys have to be mapped so that they can be reimagined for the better. The desired future state needs to be architected to draw a path to transformation, including the wire frame and business requirements, and those requirements need to be deconstructed into technology. When developing applications, it's also best to use agile methods with iterative innovation sprints to manage the entire solution delivery.

A good example is one of our customers, an investment bank that wanted to break into the consumer banking market. The bank knew that competing on customer experience would be critical, so it set out to build a digital banking platform. Taking a well-thought approach, it mapped out its customer and contact center agent journeys across products such as personal finance and loans. This helped to draw a road map for development and delivery. Such proactive road maps help manage the change and deliver best outcomes, which for the bank meant a rapid increase in consumer loans.

Domain And Direction

In all of these projects, companies need a strong foundational base: domain knowledge. Only with a deep and pervasive understanding of the business, processes and industry can companies effectively incorporate business requirements, understand and thereby reimagine workflows, and adjust analytics, automation, and AI according to the context of their use. Having this deep understanding is critical to getting technology services right.

Above all, companies need a clear vision for how to execute these new capabilities, including overall operating models, desired business outcomes and industry best practices. Essentially, what shall the business look like in the future? That vision and direction are what propel us forward and drive different outcomes.

There are leading companies today utilizing emerging digital technologies to transform the employee experience across several shared service functions. Domain knowledge of existing processes is critical during early workshops to identify journeys prime for change. From these workshops, a narrow set of technologies can be defined to turn visions into reality. Key to this is designing digital capabilities that can not only deliver, but also suggest and anticipate services.

Ultimately, technology services need to be rooted in a deep understanding of domain and industry context. When these services are simultaneously bound by the ability to reimagine processes and drive desired outcomes, we can unleash the power and potential of new enterprise technologies — in 2020 and beyond.

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