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101 Dumbest Moments In Business
hhutkin writes "It's that time again. Business 2.0 posted their 101 Dumbest Moments in Business. Of course, they lambast Enron, but they also slam Ginger, a laptop computer made for the steering wheel of your car, Steve Ballmer dancing, and some other really dumb stuff from the past year."
33. "We've been doubling sales every 18 months. However, when you start from zero, it takes a long while." -- Stephen Yeo, a marketing director at Windows-terminal manufacturer Wyse, explaining his company's less-than-meteoric rise, to ZDNet UK
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
As far as dumbest moments in business go, can anyone top this?
0. Websites will revolutionize the way people do business
1. Houston, We Have a Problem, Part 1: Enron
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
Anyone else notice the article was co-written by Adam Horowitz? I guess after Hello Nasty there was only one place to go - business journalism!
Biggest famous mistake=Osborne's Interview 60 Minutes.
Mr Osborne is a multimillionaire with his portable computer (pre Compaq competition) and his Osborne 1 is famous, though not too high tech).
60 minutes asks him if he is rich enough and if Osborne 1 is good enough.
Osborne foolishly boasts " THE OSBORNE 1 is NOTHING COMPARED TO HOW GREATE THE OSBORNE TWO WILL BE!!!!!!!"
That boasts puts him out of business the next month practically.
Its is now called the Osborne syndrome.
Apple computer avoids this mistake.
Do you see the mistake?
Not one customer wanted to ever buy an Osborne 1... they all waited for an Osborne 2 that could never ship because the inventory was killing the company in unsold computers with no buyers.
One foolish public boast about new model.
Its one of histories top 100 mistakes, and its a silicon valley top 10 mistake.
If its not in the list then the list is not authoritative complete or correct.
They should consult this slashdot thread and read at "level 0".
people never moderate anymore.
5. Proving the old business school law that says "any idiot can sell a dollar for 80 cents," online-currency company Flooz.com in July launches a special offer whereby American Express platinum cardholders can buy $1,000 of Flooz currency for just $800.
6.A month later, Flooz.com ceases processing transactions. It declares bankruptcy in November, leaving those who bought Flooz currency stuck with worthless e-dollars
Homer: Okay, I'll take $1,000
[Signs inside Itchy & Scratchy land]: "No Itchy & Scratchy bucks accepted here." "We don't take Itchy & Scratchy bucks." "Real cash only."
Homer: D'oh!
c-hack.com |
The best thing about
is that in marketing-speak, this is a totally normal thing to say. Only in plain english do "zero" and "double" have their mathematical meanings.And my reaction to the "Tibet-themed bash" is why couldn't I work for one of those companies, even for a little while? All in all, I'd rather have seriousness and profits, but for a break?
But of course the most relevant to Linux is:
That's exactly why I disabled "Third-party cookies" in my browser.
btw - did it say "Confucius ensues" back there?
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
27. Mobile Office Enterprise unveils the Express Desk, which attaches a notebook computer to the steering wheel of a car. For use only while parked, of course.
Guess they havent worked in their car before, thats a neat idea actually. It seems better than sitting sideways to work, which I have to do.
There are others where are more of thier personal view of things than actual stupidity.
14. Following in the footsteps of M.C. Hammer and a talking Chihuahua, Amazon.com CEO and Time magazine 1999 Person of the Year Jeff Bezos becomes a shill for Taco Bell in an ad that touts its chicken quesadilla as a "hot new handheld."
I keep laughing at the hot new handheld, and the other stupidly funny commericals from taco bell. Like the quesadilla is like a powertool, and geek cant understand how to use it. Kinda funny.
43. CNN 2, Fox News 2: Reporting live from Afghanistan, Geraldo Rivera implies that he's packing heat. "We refuse to be crime victims," Rivera says. "We're not the victim types. If they're going to get us, it's going to be in a gunfight."
Beats running around naked with a 20 dollar bill taped to your ass.
64. Fox News 3, CNN 2: During his sojourn in Afghanistan, Geraldo Rivera decries the deplorable living conditions in the town of Taloqan. Standing in front of a crowd of barefoot children, Rivera looks solemnly into the camera and states, "Look at the children. They haven't seen television or anything their whole lives."
They really dont like him do they...
65. Eleven years after McDonald's announces that it has started cooking its fries in "100 percent vegetable oil" -- and one month after a Seattle lawyer files suit on behalf of Hindus and vegetarians who interpreted that to mean that the fries are meat-free -- the fast-food chain concedes that the "natural flavoring" in its fries is, in fact, beef fat.
This was soo funny, as thier frys do taste damn good. Glad im not a vegan.
75. Unilever subsidiary Lipton approves an ad in which a man standing in line for communion holds a bowl of onion dip, presumably to improve the taste of the body of Christ. Under protest, Lipton withdraws the ad.
hehe
78. After two years of hype, Dean Kamen unveils Ginger, a.k.a. the Segway HT scooter. To understand why this is on our list, kindly refer to the table below.
Anyone who dis's the segway sucks. IMHO
Site gets slashdotted, cant read the rest.
Argh..
Microsoft came in at a disappointing #7 with:
7. Last May, Citizens Against Government Waste, a group that received funding from Microsoft, is caught simulating a "grassroots" campaign to get state attorneys general to drop their antitrust suit against the software giant. One detail that gives the scheme away: Some of the letters supporting Microsoft are from people who have long since died.
Personally, I can think of many other, much more comical MS events...one of my personal favorites being this...
Anyone else with any votes for stupid MS trick of the year?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
The site seems to be Slashdotted. But do they include themselves? Business 2.0 were the absolute leaders in breathless "new economy" stories, although I haven't read them lately to see if they've calmed down at all.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You'd think people would prepare for this.
--Blair
My God, I hope they had plenty of security personnel on hand to prevent him from getting mobbed by the fans!
Erlang.org: wow
It takes a genius to fuck up this bad :)
16. "No one will deny that Sony is a world-class hardware company, and no one would deny that Microsoft is a world-class software company. Nintendo aspires to be neither one of those things." -- Peter Main, a Nintendo marketing executive, to the San Francisco Chronicle
I must away to buy a gamecube right NOW!
:)
Fox News probably bolstered national morale by sending Geraldo to Afghan! ;-0
And I can't believe Balmer didn't get 2nd after Enron. His little monkey dance was much more embarrasing than any foot burning incident BK went through.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
As anyone involved in corporate America can attest, incredibly stupid things happen in business every single day.
Considering this, what is remarkable is that businesses are as successful as they are.
Amazing magic tricks
Why do /. ters hang out at a site where, even with broadband, it's likely the site they want to acess is unavailable?
"One of the injured, a VP for product marketing aptly named Dana Frydman, tries to put a positive spin on having her feet flame-broiled like so much ground chuck. "It made you feel a sense of empowerment and that you can accomplish anything," she tells the Miami Herald.
The above from the fire walking marketing types is my favourite thus far. Doesn't the response say it all. The glass is half-full, I live in the best of all possible worlds and I love Mary Poppins. Marketing... fundamentalist religions got noth'n on it.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
What's CNN?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
...and it was made on a mac.
Amazing magic tricks
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Ive been thinking about using a pre-caching proxy, or maybe just loading all the pages in cache before I read it. Alot of these sites cant handle a /. hit.
Speaking of which, was Donna Dubinsky's vague conference call statement that Handspring is 'exiting the traditional organizer market' on the list? (Site is slashdotted, so I don't know.)
:P
She did a great job of alienate Handspring's existing customer base and rendering their inventory unsellable before the Treo was available.
And Handspring's damage control was just as bad as the original statement... lots of "We want to reassure our customers and Springboard developers that we're not discontinuing the Visor, uh, right away. We're still behind the Visor line, but we're dropping our only color model and sticking with OS 3.5."
then at least post the link to the printer-friendly version
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Some of the letters supporting Microsoft are from people who have long since died.
Come on, give Microsoft a break. When you think about it, dead people know more about grass roots than any of us; so why shouldn't they be part of a grass roots campaign?
Andrea Thompson was the former actress who was hired as a newsreader for CNN Headline News, as part of their makeover into a really bad Web page-inspired design. HN was criticized for eschewing journalism for a pretty face, the first time in history a network newscast has been accused of that. (/irony)
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
Why, she's Commercial Telepath (Psi Rating P5) Talia Winters, of course.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Maybe not, but here is the google cached printable version.
The byline is dated April 2002, so it's the right article.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
...but it appears to be slashdotted...
Once again: google is our friend!
Page:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Well, I know that doesn't look nice, but otherwise it's hard to post due to characters per line restrictions...
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
Weird, I just listened to a Song from MP3.com yesterday.
... functional ... services.
:) A lot. :)
:) )
Oooh yah thats right,
THEY ARE STILL UP AND RUNNING.
Ok so they were bought out by Big Media (RIAA member no less as I recall!) and now pay artists a mere fraction of what they used to and a lot of artists have jumped ship to less
Their REAL mistake was using those 128kbit MP3 encodes to burn CDs with! OUCH!
I never bought another CD from MP3.com after I learned about that little tidbit.
What they SHOULD have done is had the authors upload the WAV files to their servers and then had a script go through and LAME encode the MP3 file using r3mix settings and then kept the original WAV file around to make CDs with.
That would have rocked.
Paying more attention to us Odd Ball fans WOULD *also* have helped.
*COUGH* Medieval genre *COUGH* (and no it isn't goth, or power metal, though a few bands to incorporate items from those styles into their songs. I like it for the Epic Fantasy works that come out of it myself.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Sure, maybe the flaws you list would have taken them down, but they failed before those problems could be revealed.
Iridiums first line of failure was that they had no infrastructure capable of actually selling the phones! I spent months trying to buy a phone. Only place I found that said they would sell a phone to me was a fly-by-night in Taiwan, but they didnt have a calling plan. I was completely unable to get anyone to nail down how much I had to pay to get service. The closest I could get to price quotes were references in the Wall Street Journal. I wanted to give them my money I really did. There was just plain no way to do it, and no one to talk to about it.
Ever see the Iridium web site? It was bizarre. It actually had a page describing what kind of person might want a Iridium phone; rich Arabian Oil sheiks! They published this fantasy scenario, but no contacts on who actually sold the phones.
What the hell were they thinking?
Um, huh? EMusic is still very much alive, though I can't seem to get the Dan the Automator album to download today.
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
google cache
how about adding a feature to slash that will pre-google-slash (cache) any referenced post and then automatically insert the google-cache reference next to the original link? ... anybody ... anybody...
CmdrTaco
As in:
If that dancing dumbfuck can be #2 and worth billions, anyone can succeed here!
That kind of hope is hard to come by in this world.
Yep, the redundant is deserved -- by 20 lousy minutes :-(
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Maybe make a deal with Google. Love to see both /. and Google make money.
Help fight continental drift.
Take a look at all of the business mags, and you'll see that they're desperate to put anything in the pages, anything that will get readers and fill space.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I know why Boston Market the restaurant chain failed. Analysts made up all sorts of reasons. But I a loyal customer know the truth.
Something so simple too.
They switched cleaning agents. I was a huge Boston Market fan. One day, I go in, and the place reeks like some kind of urine. I go across town to another store, it too reeks of urine.
Not everyone could smell it; my girlfriend did an investigation and found that most people only noticed it once it was pointed out--chicken smells sort of that way too. However, we routinely saw people leave from the smell, muttering under their breath, but not telling the manager. A handful with 'good smellers' couldn't even enter the door.
My girlfriend tracked down the smell to the cleaning agent they used for the floor..and oddly enough, the trays. She tried to tell employees. They would not listen; they couldn't smell anything..they had acclimated.
She told the managers. They humored her. But nothing changed. She went to several outlets across town; same story.
About a year and a half later, Boston market shut down its restaurants ostensibly because 'americans were changing their eating habits'..sails climbed, then fell off because 'americans had changed their eating patterns'
As I said, not everyone noticed the smell; but the subconcious is designed to avoid certain odors such as death and human waste.
I am certain the smelly cleaning agent was their real downfall.
Right. It's easy to prepare for a Slashdotting, because the moderators are soooo predictable in which submissions they post.
/. during prime-time.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't call it a wise business decision to prepare for a 12 hour long 100-fold increase in web traffic on the off-chance that one of your pages might get posted to
That said, they really should have been able to react more quickly, so that the downtime was minimized.
(Well - I think I sat nicely on the fence there.)
A couple of years ago I tried to buy CDPD service off ATT. I could not find the product on their Web site. None of their sales reps knew it existed. I tried asking the VP who launched the product, he could not even connect me to a salesperson.
It is pretty amazing that there are so many companies out there who have the mentality of not releasing their price list except under NDA when they are essentially selling to consumers. Problem with that approach it you start the customer relationship by telling them 'I am going to take you for every penny I can'. Not good, and for that matter not really useful because the only rational purpose behind concealing your prices is in practice if you know you will be giving deep discounts and don't want your customers telling each other what they got.
This is the reason that Priceline is a niche player rather than the future of airlines. We had the priceline principle for retail sales for centuries, it was called haggling. Priceline simply substituted a different method of extracting maximum value from the consumer for an otherwised damaged commodity, the dutch auction.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Sometime in late 2001, some bozo's organising an advertising campaign for Microsoft's XBOX console decided it would be a great idea to graffiti the logo in bright green paint all over publicly funded paving, pathways, garden beds etc in Sydney, Australia. Claimed it was environmentally friendly paint, will wash off with rain. Company charged hundreds of dollars in removal costs for each logo, after the local government found that in many cases it was rather more...permanent, including many instances on newly installed granite paving. Story reported in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, so I suppose theres *plenty* of consumers like me who are spending their money on PS2 instead.
If slashdot are having difficulty with their ad revenues why don't they offer to send their readers off to sites in return for a cut of the ad revenue?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
MacOS shipped in 1984. Mac OS X shipped in 2001. Lets see, 40K apps in 17 years vs. 200 in 1. How many commercial apps shipped for the Original Mac in 1984? I'm not bothering with the rest of your comment. I feel dumber for reading it.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
It looked like everything on there was real recent. At most the CNN/SI thing went back a couple more years.
What about the SNL thing from the 80s?
Hell....fuckedcompany.com is much funner reading!
If that movie classic Pirates Of Silicon Valley is based on reality, Gates had even better moves. On skates. ^_~
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
"77.Houston, We Have a Problem, Part 11: In late January 2002 -- well after the government has instructed Enron to stop shredding accounting documents -- Maureen Castaneda, a recently laid-off Enron employee, reveals that the shredding has continued. The tip-off: In boxing up her belongings, Castaneda finds a stash of shredded paper to use as packing material. Because the paper has been shredded horizontally instead of vertically, Castaneda can see that it consists of accounting documents."
:D
What a bunch of incompetent asses! They can't even shred documents right!
BlackGriffen
I am baffled at how a business magazine could think the gas price hikes of 9/11 was dumb business. People were panicking and filling their tanks at an incredible rate. There is only so much gas at a station, and when it is gone, it takes a while to replace.
I fully support the increase gas prices of that day as a way to moderate demand. After all, there are a lot of people with huge cars that can hold in excess of 30 gallons. Some of those people were getting gas just to get gas. If the higher prices meant that some of those people put 10 gallons of gas in their tanks instead of 20 gallons, I think the price hikes did their jobs. The fact that I did was able to get gas a few days later was, in my opinion, a validation of the higher gas prices.
Ultimately, the problem is caused by the number of people who can only afford to own the cars they do because of cheap gas and other government subsidies. On the other hand, for those of us with cars within our budgets, gas at $1 or $2 or $3 is just not such a big deal.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
There are so many Altivec optimizations in OS X that it really needs to run on a G4. Yeah, the iBook II will run OS X OK, but it's got a far faster G3 than my 350MHz one.
Tell me where to get on board the next class-action suit against Apple. I feel gypped. Thanks, Steverino.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Well, I know that this is a karma killer, but what the hell. #1 on that list should've been Open Source Companies. It's an oxymoron. A whole slew of businesses trying to sell a product that people can get for free. Talk about stupid business!
The bankrupcy really helped Iridium - phones are now $1200 and cost $1.50 a minuit, from anywhere to anywhere. They just lauched five replacement satelites, and have a huge DOD contract.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
...to coin a phrase ... it just smells like chicken.
"And like that
It selects for "blood pumping action" by sending adrenaline junkies to dance with publicity junkies.
Both sides of the equation firmly believe in the maxim "_Anything_ for a good story."
Pretty tedious read. Is there a "most padded story" award?? Many of the items just didn't seem all that dumb. The general background stupidity level of the world makes it hard to tell sometimes. The one about K-Mart being declared "retailer of the year" and declaring bankruptcy the next day was a corker though.
Anybody know a a way to use trading cards as voodoo dolls? ". . . and that's for stealing your recommendations from the tech section of the Bumsteer Daily Braindump . . . " :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
One mistake that has been made, which seems to have slipped past most people's notice is this:
I live in Edinburgh, and would make some fine company a wonderful SysAdmin - yet nobody has given me a job.
Not only would I be great as a Linux/Unix/Windows sysadmin, I'm good with people, cats, and small children and on top of that I'm a competent programmer too!
Come on Edinburghers, give me a job .. please!
This one bugged me:
"No one will deny that Sony is a world-class hardware company, and no one would deny that Microsoft is a world-class software company. Nintendo aspires to be neither one of those things." -- Peter Main, a Nintendo marketing executive, to the San Francisco Chronicle
The quote has been taken out of context. Obviously, he means hardware and software companies as opposed to video game companies.
That's right: they (or rather, someone from their advertising agency) chalked "Peace, Love and Linux" all over Chicago and San Francisco. The artist got thirty days' community service, and IBM got fined ten thousand dollars. Here's the story Slashdot ran at the time.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
The list focused on the top 101 business mistakes of last year.
people never moderate anymore.
Yeah, and they never read the articles, either.
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
You knew I was going to say that.
Or maybe nonstop handheld orgnizer pitches aren't.
This is such a troll that I almost ran into the bridge it hid on.
I won't even go into picking apart your rant. Your lack of power of the English language says it all.
Research your facts before you waste space. Whether Apple is wrong or not, no one is ever in the mood to listen to what seems to be a village idiot, talking much but saying little of factual consequence.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
When you go to their site and they can't serve up a page (due to the
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
do *not* attempt to pull it back through. Seek qualified medical assistance in removal.
hawk
What is this strange attraction, exhibited by people with far too much money, to Buddhism? One thinks also of Richard Gere and [shudder] Steven Seagal claiming to adhere to Buddhist principles. I find that laughable, considering what I remember about the tenets of Buddhism, especially the bits about extinction of the self, freeing oneself from worldly attachments and cravings, and so forth.
hyacinthus.
thanks you thank you. ;_
I thought I was the only one who noticed it.
I asked about it, but the employies thought I was some loon.
I engoyed boston market, but I stopped going there after I noticed that smell a couple of times.
I didn't think it was urine, but is was annoying just the same.
whew, one more thing that proves i'm not crazy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
see your confused.
Thats Traditional Buddism.
They practice Hollywood "Look at my I'm trendy" Buddism.
Same thing with yoga.
I'm glad I escaped from L.A.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I find it interesting that Adobe is very close to being as much of a monopoly as Microsoft, but almost nobody hates them.
I think it's the quality of their products that makes the difference. They also still include thick manuals printed on nice, creamy paper, which gives their products that undefinable touch of class that makes buyers happy.
I will have ungrudgingly spent more than $1,000 on Adobe products this year without a second thought, while I've given Microsoft precisely zero.
I almost bought Windows XP because I was curious about it, but thanks to the "1984-style" registration, I was just too nausesated to go through with the $99 purchase.
Adobe is a good monopoly. They create great, classy products at prices not too far out of line. Not bad.
Although I will admit their mishandling of that Russian programmer was not good, it's not going to stop me from upgrading my Photoshop to the MacOS X version.
D
Serge Tchuruk, Alcatel's president has received a 20% raise of his salary, which makes a decent total of 20 millions Euros, the year Alcatel has scored the worst ever LOSS for a French company (4 billions of loss if I recall correctly).
I think that he will be fired or will leave soon, but not without a diamond parachute severance pay.
You're a literalist.
--Blair