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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."
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
You'd think people would prepare for this.
--Blair
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
...and it was made on a mac.
Amazing magic tricks
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
When taken ass end out of context that is indeed stupid.
When followed up by the appropriate "we want to be the middle man that provides good hardware AND good software" part of the speech is sounds damn convincing.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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."
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?
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."
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.
It takes a genius to fuck up this bad :)
Probably shouldn't have made the top 100 list, though, considering it had no negative impact on nintendo's sales.
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.
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.
Hey, that sounds like that campaign where people spraypainted TUX on everything... and got in trouble for it. Wasn't that IBM who did that?
I guess stupidity is universal.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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."
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/
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.