Vista Has Trouble With (Peach) Speech Recognition

Bill Gates once predicted that speech recognition would someday equal the use of keyboards as a leading input technique. It seems, however, that we have a ways to go.

The technology has rarely been put in a worse light than in a nightmarish 2006 presentation of Windows Vista's speech-recognition capabilities, in which nearly every word spoken by a Microsoft executive came out wrong on-screen.

Although Gates and Co. seem to have had more than their share of embarrassing missteps, we'll stop picking on Microsoft now. To be perfectly fair, many other companies have had disastrous demos as well -- including the ultrahip Apple and its leader Steve Jobs. And demos are just the beginning -- there are plenty of other highly awkward moments in technology, as the rest of our list shows.

IBM Exec Inflates Resume

Jeff Papows' tenure as head of IBM's Lotus Development division was successful from a business standpoint, but in 1999 it emerged that he had falsified his resume and made some less-than-truthful claims to co-workers through the years. Instead of being a Marine captain and a heroic jet fighter pilot, he was a lieutenant air-traffic controller. Rather than a Ph.D. from a prestigious university, he had a degree from a correspondence school. And it turns out he wasn't really an orphan after all.

With an upper lip apparently made of steel, Papows refused to be publicly embarrassed, claiming that the errors were the result of water cooler talk that took on a life of its own. Nor was IBM particularly mortified, allowing Papows to stay on the job until he resigned in 2000 to lead an Internet start-up.

iPhone Bills Kill Trees

If the iPhone had been introduced a few thousand years ago, it would have been carried into the capital city on a palanquin and those en route would have prostrated themselves until it passed.

Fortunately for those who rebel against that sort of pomp, there were also a few embarrassing moments for Apple, such as when the company eliminated its 4GB model and cut the price of the 8GB model by US$200 just two months after the devices had launched. Even ardent fanboys and girls used language that was so surprisingly sharp that Apple agreed to give early adopters a US$100 store credit.

But the most embarrassing iPhone moment came at the expense of the device's U. cellular carrier, AT&T. The company's extraordinarily detailed billing process resulted in some users receiving bills this August that ran dozens or even hundreds of pages long, as captured in blogger Justine Ezarik's video of her unwrapping a 300-page phone bill. (It came in a box.)

Without actually admitting embarrassment, AT&T said it would start sending out more svelte bills to iPhone users.