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The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business
An anonymous reader writes "Business 2.0's fourth annual review of the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid moments of the past year. Yes, SCO is represented..."
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... my company's hiring me, as evidently I am reading slashdot at this very moment. And we've got a patch going out today.
Mark one for the "little guy".
Dairy Queen franchisee W.A. Enterprises is docked $700,000 by a jury in Richmond, Va., after DQ employee Ayman Ahmed Hasaballa allegedly slides into a booth next to a female customer, pulls down her sweater, bites her breast, and says, "I am like Dracula." The jury holds the company responsible because it didn't fire Hasaballa six months earlier after he allegedly attacked a female co-worker.
Are they hiring?
Again... No sarcastic, slanted, political message from the editor tagged on to the end of the story.
How in the world am I supposed to know how to think? You expect me to actually read the article?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
That's the dumbest moment in advertising? I thought that commercial was hilarious!!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
IBM contracting out DOS to Microsoft...and letting Microsoft keep ownership.
If IBM had played hardball and demanded ownership, more than likely Gates would have caved. The world would be much different today, that's for sure.
No butterflys. The Rolling Stones wouldn't have sold out...ok, maybe that would still have happened.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
the 101 stupidest business moves, lets hear more about this Lingerie Bowl in #10!
SCO is in the 81-90 section? Number 83. Seems to be a little low on the list... but then I would've put it at #1.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
How about Apple's release of countless models of Macintosh systems in the mid-90s, all with unique proprietary hardware configurations, causing stores nationwide to drop support and driving Apple to the brink of bankruptcy? I'd bet half of the death predictions for Apple fell within that time period.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
Today's Physics Lesson:
Generally speaking, when something is cooled down it contracts and when it is heated it expands. The chemical compound commonly known as "water" follows this rule until 4 degrees Celsius (just under 40 degrees Fahrenheit) when it reaches its maximum density and starts expanding as it is further cooled. One interesting fact is that if you read the ingredients for many common beverages (say Diet Coke for example), you would see that they are comprised mostly of this "water" substance and thus take on many of its interesting physical characteristics. Another interesting fact is that in order to make "ice" which is the common name for "water" in its solid state, you generally have cool it to below 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Surprisingly enough, we actually have a device in our very own office building commonly known as a "freezer" capable of cooling "water" enough to bring about this magical state change.
So what is the point of my little physics/trivia lesson? When you put an (already pressurized) can of Diet Coke into a freezer for more than a few minutes, it typically explodes!
In the future, please refrain from placing beverages in the office freezer.
The Management
I'm glad that idiot is listed so high, that lawsuit was just wrong. I guess he owns the market on "Spike" huh? I was hoping the network won, but it turns out there was a settlement, wonder how much it cost to have Mr. Lee grace the network with "his name" - what a tool
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
The OSDN Personals ads get my vote!
This one gets my vote: In Canada, General Motors is forced to come up with a new name for its Buick LaCrosse sedan after discovering that crosse is a slang term for masturbation in Quebec. If gives a whole new meaning to "road trip." Happy Trails, Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I liked this one. Mental note: avoid McDonald's on Chicago's famed museum campus.
12 It could be worse. At least they're not selling wolf milk.
In July, a McDonald's outlet in Chicago's Field Museum is closed by health inspectors who discover that the food preparation area is backed up with raw sewage and that employees have changed the expiration dates on 200 cartons of milk.
d a v e
"Hmmm...upgrades."
Requiring TEN PAGE VIEWS to get through a dumbest moments list.
for those of you who can't be bothered to RTFA.
michael, you think we're psychic or what? Try using a link maybe when you talk about SCO's position.
Nobody cares about anything except maybe SCO and the RIAA (at No 82, on the same page).
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
And since when is it sexist to show women playing football? Sure, they were in lingere, but that just shows off the beauty of nature. What do people have against nature? Why are people so damn puritanical in this country?
Are we even allowed to have fun anymore?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
For those who don't want to hunt and find the SCO reference on the slow server
83 How to win friends and influence software sales.
"Terrorists do things designed to intimidate people, and we see a lot of that going on all the time--people trying to attack us or people that we're associated with."--SCO Group CEO Darl McBride, complaining about the backlash from hundreds of thousands of Linux users after the former Linux software vendor sued IBM, a major Linux proponent, for allegedly violating its intellectual-property rights.
Darl really did say that! - i know it is hard to believe.
Talk about the kettle calling the pot...
In early May of 2003, Slashdot and other places reported on the MS iLoo, a web enabled toilet. The jokes came a mile a minute. Then a few days later, MS said that it was an April Fools joke. I've seen that happen before where someone reads something and doesn't realize it was written on April 1 and reports it as fact. Check this out from the article:
Part 3 Something doesn't smell right. The next day, realizing that nobody's buying the April-Fool's-joke-29-days-after-April-Fool's-Day explanation, Microsoft calls back reporters and admits that it had told an iLulu: The project was indeed real but has subsequently been killed. "We jumped the gun basically yesterday in confirming that it was a hoax," says MSN group product manager Lisa Gurry. "In fact, it was not."
Wow. What a completely insane project. Many people were certainly fired for spending money on that.
-B
8 Just to be on the safe side, let's also lose the jack, the fuel pump, and the four-stroke engine.
In Canada, General Motors is forced to come up with a new name for its Buick LaCrosse sedan after discovering that crosse is a slang term for masturbation in Quebec.
Its also a slang term for "a rip-off".
I never heard it used to mean masturbation when used as a noun, its masturnbatory meaning is only applied when used as a verb. So To me that GM car sounds more like a rip-off than a jerk-off. Also note that GM laid off a lot of people in Quebec recently by closing down a plant...
Ah, fond memories of the sign "do not cross the track" at the amusement park with my friends when I was 14... : )
You can't take the sky from me...
Clear Channel's recent decision to replace O'Hare airport as a landmark for the traffic updates in Chicago with the Allstate Arena due to a marketing agreement?
Clear Channel is worse than the devil.
I belong to the ______ generation.
I don't know if I trust my finances to a guy who, when you look him up in the phone book is listed as Strong, Dick.
The guy's probably pretty good at "screwing" his investors.
</juvenile_humor>
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Maybe that's a role played by HR consulting firms that I'm simply not aware of, but my understanding is that those guys typically search criminal records and so forth.
Who's up for a web site that catalogs this sort of behaviour, easy to search, for use during recruitment? Otherwise these guys just prey on our lack of communal memory.
30 On the plus side, all the applicants were buying Eclipses. "Anyone, feasibly, given enough time and enough resources, could hack into any system."--Brad Hill, CIO of Dealerskins, a Tennessee firm that hosts websites for car dealerships, confessing in September that the company had exposed 1,000 customers' car-loan applications on an unprotected website. The Dealerskins "hack"--selecting "Source" from Internet Explorer's View menu to examine the webpage's HTML code--takes about a quarter of a second.
Finally! A security hole that is exposed by IE.
See, it goes the other way sometimes, too!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What's a popup?
Wait... [thinks long and hard] ... that's one of those Internet Explorer afflictions, isn't it?
Take one of these, six times a day:
Mozilla, Opera, etc etc etc
Sheesh! Anonymous cowards these days! When I was a lad, etc etc etc
This is where the serious fun begins.
Allow that may be an excuse for the Venusians, it's less convincing an argument for those who have lived many years with water in all three states.
I've had this sig for three days.
My wife was watching QVC, and I wasn't really paying attention until I saw the guy fall off the ladder. At first, I thought it was a part of the show until I heard someone saying, "It's OK, he's moving..."
Then it occurred to me that perhaps they would have a hard time selling this ladder when their own demonstrator fell off the thing on national tv!
And the best part: The host continued to plug the ladder as safe and convenient, in spite of what had just happened!
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
from the article:
come on!! they had a PERFECT headline for the #1 dumbest moment, they could have had:
damn the political correctness!
"At an investment conference in January, Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson explains his company's recent layoffs: "There are 15 to 20 percent of the people that really add 80 percent of the value. Although we have a lot of good people, you can cut a fair amount ... and still be well positioned for the upturn." Paulson later apologizes in a voice-mail message sent to every Goldman employee."
Y'know, this is no different than just about any CEO speech I've heard in any of a dozen companies in the last five years. How STUPID do you need to get a job that pays millions like this?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Interesting to note re: SCO the dumb moment is the quote. I can agree with that. Using terrorism or war related analogies just doesn't fly. Ask Kellen "I'm a soldier" Winslow Jr.
/.'rs but aren't necessarily dumb. They've been on life-support for awhile and if you were a good CEO you'd probably take a stab at IBM's deep pockets too. Their moves appear to have already extended their life.
But, how many replies to this article will rave about SCO being dumb and that they should be rated higher? Probably too many due to a little myopia. What does SCO care if they piss of linux advocates? It's not like they have to worry about the opinions of most techies. They can't lose market share they didn't have. And what do they care if people are driven away from Linux to truly other systems if they succeed in forcing companies to pony up licensing fees? If they win they make money they wouldn't have. If they lose they die but they've survived longer than if they'd never tried.
Their moves may be detestable to
A corporation's chief mission is to survive. That comes long before societal and ethical concerns.
And chevy used to wonder why their Nova car didn't sell very well in mexico...
Choose yer poison: Prophets or Profits
39 They thought about changing their name, but, sadly, Whizzinator was already taken.
U.K. energy company Powergen finds itself so often confused with a similarly named Italian battery maker that it issues a statement disavowing any connection between the two enterprises. It's not so much the Italian company that the Brits want to distance themselves from as its Web address: Powergenitalia.com.
The humor . . . it is too much . . .
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Coulda bought $21 billion worth of beer and returned the bottles and still would a made $900 million more money.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
31 Yes, it does. But your bottled rainwater idea still bites.
In February, inventor J. Hutton Pulitzer files a trademark application for Purain, which he proposes as the name for a line of processed rainwater. When the Dallas Observer mocks Pulitzer's audacity--he was the man behind the CueCat scanner flop--he transforms the Purain website into a lecture about media schadenfreude: "Sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, fighting, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip. Sounds like today's media--doesn't it?"
Purain is a french word for "liquid manure".
I hope they're planning to compete against Naya and Perrier on their home turf! That'll be an entertaining press release.
You can't take the sky from me...
. . . designed to intimidate people" -Darl McBride
You're absolutely right Mr. McBride. Now, about this letter you sent me about a license fee for something you don't have any known rights to, complete with a threat to raise said fee if I don't comply in a timely manner?
Keep talking, maybe next year you can break into the top 50.
KFG
Now, imagine breaking up this structure. Take the top molecule and rotate it by approximately 120 degrees, so that the H atom in the upper left of the image is now positioned between the H atoms bonded to the O second from the top. This is what happens when the ice melts... the molecules get closer together, causing the density to increase slightly upon melting.
If you have access to the Feynman lectures on physics, there is much better explanation with more pictures explaining this phenomenon.
Articles like this are cute and give us a chance to snicker at idiotic behaviour, but the worst business decisions of (pick a year) should really be looking at and even emphasising the deeply amoral and criminal behaviour of some companies. Consider Coca-Cola, in India: They're draining ground water, bottling and reselling it, and dumping the purification byproducts onto the desert they've created where fertile farmland once stood. A few years ago, Nike (and then everyone else) ran into issues with sweatshop labour, but we don't hear about these things anymore, and they're still going on!
Bottom line, I'd like to see a magazine doing an article on the REAL abuses of businesses, and not just their silly little dumb decisions.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The problem I have with this - as I expect most people do - is that it's a double standard. If my wife wants to contact me at work, that's verbotten. If there's an emergency at work after hours, the company expects to be able to count on my personal resources (phone, computer, time, etc.) because, well, because...
If the company has no loyalty to me, if they refuse to take my side, then I'll refuse to take theirs. On the other hand, if they have the common decency to allow reasonable use of company resources for personal reasons, then I'll be more than happy to allow them to make reasonable use of my personal resources for company reasons.
I'd say the key word here is reasonable. If the company is willing to be reasonable with me, I'm willing to be reasonable with them - and vice versa. The company often gets to define what's reasonable; in the above case, based on the company's attitude towards employee use of company resources, I think that a reasonable response to your boss calling you at home would be to slap them with a cease-and-desist order for harassment.
In any case, while I think the above was a good example of a pretty unreasonable policy (at least for a salaried employee), you're right - at least it was it writing.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Where does it say that? You apparently can read things I that I can't. If you can read into this that employees are not allowed to have emergencies, then I can read into it that emergencies are a different situation, and leeway is usually given. Then again, our definition of emergency may differ.
Or perhaps you're an idiot who has no idea that, generally speaking, fear is the worst way to motivate employees to do a good job.
Letting the personal bit go, have you ever had employees?. I have. I agree that fear, while it can be an excellent motivator, is not the way to motivate your employees.
This is not about fear. In fact, I would say that this is just the opposite. The greatest human fear is the unknown. This policy eliminates that fear. Here are the rules. Follow them, or be terminated. There is no inferred fear there. If this was the *only* policy that the company had, then yeah, it's a pretty piss poor motivator, and no one in their right mind would work there.
This is not about motivation. It's about expecting employees to follow the rules. Have you read what the latest virus/worms costs companies in lost time and other costs. Get your damned email at home. It's not your computer or network to play with. It's mine. It is there so you can do your job.
If I let you surf the net between calls, be happy I do. Maybe I will even let you check your hotmail account.
But don't think for a MINUTE I am going to let you use your work email account (which is what this memo is about) for personal reasons. I don't need the company mailboxes/servers full of spam and viruses and Nieman Marcus cookie recipies. It cost me money to run these servers and administer them. The more money it costs me, the less profitable our business is, and the less you are gonna wanna work here. Deal with it.
In regards to the phones, how is it irrelevant? If I am running a call center, I get and keep clients based upon my service levels. One of the first things a client looks at when choosing a customer for tech support is average speed of answer. (Been there, done that, trust me... its a big issue) If you are on the phone, not doing something work related, what am I paying you for? Use the phone in the break room when you are on your break. Asking employees not to use the phones for personal calls (when on the clock) is not the practice of some totalitarian regime. It's a good business descision.
Look at it this way. You work for XYZ technical services. You have computers in the break rooms, you have a great benefits package, you have phones in the break rooms. You get a full hour for lunch. We have a great cafeteria and good restaraunts nearby. You are allowed to surf the web between calls. You get excellent training, tuition reimbursement, and *real* certifications by company trainers that you can take with you when you leave. There are emergency contact numbers that your loved ones, or your childrens school administration can call to get ahold of you. You can even have your cell phone with you at your desk, you can get your text messages, but I ask that you not make or recieve calls while you are "logged in" to the phones to take calls from clients.
Suddenly, you get the above memo. Do you have a problem with it now?
We don't know what the conditions are like at the company that this memo was issued at. They could be like I just decribed.
I described it that way because that is very much like a company I used to work for. If I had any brains back in the mid 90's I would still be working for them. But I was stupid and followed a promise of better money, and faster certifications. I didn't realize how good I had it. That company had a policy very much like what this memo states. Not quite so harshly stated certainly, but it reads very much like the memo people recieved after being caught violating the personal use policy the *first* time
Oh, BTW, ask anyone who knows me. I have more personality than I know what to do with.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
Disney losing Pixar, anyone? Thanks for fucking them over on Toy Story 2, Disney.
Indeed, of all the commercial in the last while this is probably the one most mentioned by my friends. Maybe I just hang around with a bunch of sickos (well, probably), but still it obviously proves that the commercial is getting high visibility.
You might want to remember, if 10% of people ignore a commercial, 45% of people remember it because they like it, and 45% of people remember it but it bothered them... 90% still remember the commercial and have a company name quite possibly stuck in their head. How many of those will say "I'd never eat there after that aweful commercial?"
Mindshare works, just look at the SCO fud... even negetive publicity is publicity, though personally I found it somewhat amusing as well.
What if they showed Raised by Wolves guy remembering his first date?
* * *
There's an SUV commercial featuring a suburban dad Raised By Wolves. He's shown chasing deer, fetching sticks, and cavorting with timber wolves.
My question: Which came first, the car commercial or Quiznos's?
Stefan
As others pointed out, you are free to work for this jerkwad if you enjoy having these kinds of policies in place. But if you did, you sure as hell wouldn't be posting to /. during working hours, or you'd be out on your ass come 8:00 Christmas eve. Enjoy the unemployment queue.
There is a benefit to having clear, concise computer, telephone and security policies in place, but there are diplomatic ways to phrase such policies in an employee manual, not by way of a blunt (if not outright rude) email from a boss who sounds like Josef Stalin. If the boss addresses his clients/customers the same way he communicates with his employees, he won't be in business for very long.