The Press Releases of the Damned

Harry writes "Once upon a time, Microsoft said that Windows Vista would transform life as we knew it. Palm said its Foleo was a breakthrough. Circuit City said firing its most experienced salespeople would save the company. And Apple said that Web apps were all that iPhone owners needed. I've collected the original press releases for these and other ill-fated tech announcements, and annotated them with the facts as they played out in the real world."

Comments

Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

The stupid "article" is spread over 8 pages. Slashdot should have some standards for posted articles... and no, I'm not new here.

Re:Not worth reading

[Shakrai]

and no, I'm not new here.

Well obviously. "Anonymous Coward" has been here since the very beginning and has an even lower UID than CmdrTaco ;)

I'll save everybody the trouble and just link to the only one that's remotely interesting. The AOL-Time Warner merger. How'd that work out again? I stopped getting three AOL CDs/disks a week so they must have done something right ;)

Re:Not worth reading

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The AOL/Time Warner thing was a colossal fuckup; but I have to hand it to the guys on the AOL side.

AOL, purveyor of overpriced, under-performing dialup access and horrendous software to complete morons, managed to (just as it was becoming abundantly clear that dialup was doomed and that the internet at large was superior to the walled garden) convince Time Warner, a company with some actual hope, that they were worth an amazing amount of money.

Re:Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

Normally I'd agree with you.

But in this case, each page is for a separate example, and there's not excessive advertising splashed between the pages. For once, this layout seemed appropriate and very well done.

Re:Not worth reading

[Leafheart]

The only one moderately funny of those were the last. http://technologizer.com/2009/08/18/press-releases/8/

Re:Not worth reading

[0100010001010011]

AutoPager for FireFox or
Re-pagination

AutoPager requires 'plugin' scripts for sites (which there is one for technologizer). But it makes it look like one page.

[header]
page 1
page 2
page 3
[footer]

Re-pagination works on most sites I've tried it on (other than those damn Javascript "next" buttons). But it loads a copy of each of the pages.

[header]
page 1
[footer]
[header]
page 2
[footer]
[header]
page 3
[footer]

Re:Not worth reading

[Verdatum]

What the heck is AOL?

Re:Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'd like to see is early Intel press releases on the EPIC architecture, ie. what became known as the Itanic. As far as I recall, they were planning to take over the world with that one, since it would be so much more efficient than x86 could ever be, at least according to the original plans.

Re:Not worth reading

[DrXym]

The AOL/TW merger could and should have been a massive success. AOL was at the time THE premium content delivery network, and Time Warner has scads of content in print, music, video, TV - just the sort of thing people might pay to see. AOL was just starting broadband and Time Warner had the infrastructure. It really could have lead to a service where you got content and broadband all for some fairly reasonable price. But back to reality... AOL were supremely arrogant and didn't know innovation if it bit them on the ass (witness how they handled Netscape & Nullsoft). And Time Warner were an old school media conglomerate terrified of the internet. Neither side had a clue how to work "synergies" and the whole lot just collapsed in a heap. I'm sure Steve Case made a mint, but the whole deal was a disaster from the get go.

Re:Not worth reading

[REggert]

You're kidding, right?

Just in case you live in a cave, AOL = America Online, the #1 ISP of people who don't know better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aol

Re:Not worth reading

[thebheffect]

I'm going out on a limb that he was kidding. He found Slashdot.

Re:Not worth reading

[methano]

This is exactly right. A lot of people hoot on Steve Case over this deal. I think it was a genius move on his part as explained above. I did the math back when it happened and AOL was valued at around $7K per US household. It would take a long time to get that kind of money back. It was a disastrous deal on TW's part. Overall it was a bad deal because TW was twice as stupid as Case and company were smart.

Re:Not worth reading

[teslar]

Well obviously. "Anonymous Coward" has been here since the very beginning and has an even lower UID than CmdrTaco ;)

If I remember right, the AC has an (internal) UID of 666 - which would by higher than CmdrTaco's 1 :)

Re:Not worth reading

[IPFreely]

If you are comparing AOL to the internet and modern ISPs, then you are completely correct.

The thing with AOL is that it was around *before* the internet and those other ISPs. AOL came around in the age of the BBS.
Everything was dial-up. Mail was tossed and copied around node to node. It was almost all local due to phone charges. What AOL did was make a national BBS, and put in local dial-up access points in most local calling areas. It was bigger than any other BBS of the time. It offered mail to any other AOL user, and mail bridges to most other networks (like compuserv). They had a GUI when everyone else was text based. You can't call them stupid for being the biggest provider in their market. Their problem was that the market changed.

When the internet finally did grow up, AOL was already big. The problem is that the internet changed the online equation. Access became commodity. AOL had to rely on content. (That's why the TW deal). But eventually, the internet had more content too. So AOL is a leftover giant.

I guess we could just expect them to rollover and die because they are outdated. But it's funny how many people don't want to do that, regardless of how outdated they are.

Re:Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

You should not be required to use some additonal add on, some code modification to a browser you may not care to have installed, just to be able to read an article in a reasonable format. Especially on a tech savvy site such as Slashdot!

Re:Not worth reading

[Bat Country]

Don't forget Compuserve who was the granddaddy of AOL and modern ISPs and the first to bring nationwide dial-up home computer network access to American families.

I actually pulled the first open source program I ever used from a friend's dad's Compuserve after reading about it in a catalog listing from one of those generic BBS file collection CDs they used to sell.

Re:Not worth reading

[ari_j]

The really cool thing about this one is, at least as far as I can tell since I didn't bother checking any other than the one you linked to, every page is in fact an image. The AOL-Time Warner press release is 578x3201, for instance. That's the kind of thing that I believe Archimedes would have called "really fucking irritating."

Re:Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

If the page in question had been well constructed, that is: had links marked with rel="next", rel="prev" et.c., then Opera has a built-in function to follow those (no buggy, slow and memory hungry extensions). In the mid-90's, Opera used to guess which links to follow for next/prev/home (that would have worked with this page, where the links have logic names containing Previous and Next). Same thing I imagine those Firefox-extension in the parent comment does. But that feature lead to serious security risks on rare occasions, so they removed it.

As a fact, all extensions know existing in Firefox have been implemented in at least one version of Opera in the 90's. But most have been removed because they proved to have some serious implications, proved unnecessery or was just too damn clunky. ;-)

Re:Not worth reading

[Shakrai]

Is it really? I've never bothered to look at slashcode. I just always assumed the UID was 0 for AC's. It's pretty funny if they defined it as 666 though.

Re:Not worth reading

[FreakyGreenLeaky]

You're either new here, otherwise woooooosh!

Re:Not worth reading

[JustinOpinion]

You remember right. If you directly go to UID #1, you get CmdrTaco. If you go directly to UID #666, you get "Anonymous Coward".

And 1 < 666.

Re:Not worth reading

[hairyfeet]

Yeah Intel has had some huge flubs in the past and I for one would love to read the press release for the I740 and the iAPX 32. The first was supposed to revolutionize graphics, the latter to replace x86 as the chip of the 80s. Both bombed hard, but I bet their press releases were all kinds of bragging and pomp.

Re:Not worth reading

[doomy]

Use autopager and adblock together.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925

Re:Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, too. What is AOL?

Re:Not worth reading

[el_gordo101]

Originally, they were a distributor of 3.5" floppies that could be re-formatted and re-used. They changed their business model when floppies fell out of favor and CDs became popular. It was then that they became the #1 polluter in the US by distributing millions of useless shiny plastic coasters to every man, woman, and child in the country, overwhelming landfills across the nation.

Re:Not worth reading

[Just Some Guy]

What the heck is AOL?

The first major brand of malware. I worked tech support at an ISP in the late 90s, and occasionally you'd get a call from someone whose computer would no longer dial in. When pressed, they'd admit that they tried out "that AOL disk I got in the mail / found on the mall floor / found under my windshield wiper", and we'd sigh and tell them to find their Windows installation disk. There was no known way of uninstalling that junk other than by reinstalling Windows.

A few stalwart customers would insist on re-trying the experiment every six months or so to see if the situation had improved, that is, whether the inferior dialup software to a substandard provider had suddenly stopped horking systems. It hadn't. We'd tell them that it was reinstall time again, they'd cuss, then we'd be good for another half year.

Re:Not worth reading

[b4dc0d3r]

I'm more interested in the "fire expensive people -> fail" cycle of Circuit City. My company is doing that right now (I imagine most are) and it's incredibly frustrating to deal with the leftover people.

Everyone with brains is seeing this happen and jumping ship, so the number of smart people is dropping even more than they intended. End result is the company is dumber every day.

I have a problem - who can figure out the answer? The smart guy who is at home looking for a job and couldn't care any less about his ex-employer.

Re:Not worth reading

[sdpuppy]

From what I remember, FWIW, AOL was also the first BBS that was Mac-friendly. Compuserve, Prodigy etal mostly supposed DOS.

Re:Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember right, the AC has an (internal) UID of 666

Don't you mean infernal?

Re:Not worth reading

[sdpuppy]

And 1 Are you saying that evil is greater than the one???

For small values of 1 .... and large values of 666?

Re:Not worth reading

[cstacy]

If you are comparing AOL to the internet and modern ISPs, then you are completely correct. The thing with AOL is that it was around *before* the internet and those other ISPs. AOL came around in the age of the BBS.

AOL was actually a latecomer to the scene. BBSing was popular for about 10 years before AOL. And there were a number of commercial consumer dialup information/chat/email services similar to AOL that started around then. CompuServe and The Source were both about 10 or 11 years older than AOL. Another was Prodigy, about 4 years older than AOL. The Internet predated AOL by about 7 years (or many more years than that, depending on exactly what you want to count). But the Internet was not widely available to the general public until around 1989, which is contemporaneous with AOL. AOL didn't get chat rooms and such until sometime in the 1990s, though.

Re:Not worth reading

[sjames]

AOL came along on the tail end of the BBS era. The internet was already going strong at universities and was getting off the ground for home dial-up accounts. They were the guy that shows up ready to party just as the hosts are getting ready for bed. Their business plan was practically expired before they launched.

For years after, they pressed forward with their walled garden and hourly rates in the face of flat fee dialup internet counting on an overwhelming flood of marketing to overcome fundamental shortcomings in their product. Their customers mostly consisted of people who had never heard of the Internet and those who finally gave up after repeated attempts to cancel their account.

Their marketing became so strident by the end, they were actually offering more free hours than existed in a month to get people to sign up and depending on making cancellation a bureaucratic near-impossibility to stay afloat. They were stupid to believe that a crazy huge marketing campaign could keep a fundamentally flawed service alive forever.

In the process they made themselves synonymous with anything and everything that wasn't good about the Internet (including spam for quite a while). Their one and only real value (as "the free blank floppy of the month club") went away when they switched to sending CDROMS. Let's face it, once you have 4-6 of those, you just don't need any more coasters.

The only reason they were expected to roll over and die is because they had already made it clear they were unable or unwilling to offer what the customer wanted to buy.

Their crowning achievement was convincing TW (somehow) that they were worth $7000/U.S. household.

Re:Not worth reading

[Shakrai]

They were stupid to believe that a crazy huge marketing campaign could keep a fundamentally flawed service alive forever.

Why is that stupid? It works for the two major political parties in the United States. Why wouldn't it work for AOL? ;)

Their crowning achievement was convincing TW (somehow) that they were worth $7000/U.S. household.

You mean a service that charges $239.40 a year ($19.95/mo) for each subscriber isn't worth $7,000 per American household? All they'd have to do to make that much money is have zero expenses and sign up every single household for 30 years.

Re:Not worth reading

[Machtyn]

Add to that, AOL's business model was falling apart. They could no longer charge per hour. Content on the wild Interwebs was catching up to AOL, yet AOL continued to charge premium prices to content providers (using keywords and such). Those content providers figured out it was much cheaper to slap a webpage up using their own servers (which is what they had to do anyway with AOL) without paying the AOL cost.

Yes, it was a sad day when nullsoft sold out to AOL. Winamp was a great program. Shoutcast servers are awesome. They still are compared to Real, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, and Yahoo!'s MusicMatch Jukebox and music streaming service. And I think Winamp has dumped a lot of bloat since their ill-fated version around the turn of the century... that is, if you disable the bloat during install.

Re:Not worth reading

[Attila Dimedici]

AOL released its first DOS version in 1991 and its first Windows version in 1992. So it started to become a major player in 1991, the Internet came into its own in 1994 (one could argue for 1992 or 1993). With the advent of the Internet for the masses, AOL became obsolete. However, it took most people several years to realize that they were paying a premium price to AOL for access to content that was available for much less.

Re:Not worth reading

[Darinbob]

Will the real Anonymous Coward please stand up? I suspect we have a lot of impersonators.

Re:Not worth reading

[Stupendoussteve]

That's AOL keyword: slashdot to you.

Re:Not worth reading

[Stupendoussteve]

You're talking about Quantum Link, AOL itself didn't exist until 1991 by which time internet mail was pretty common. Quantum Link was pretty cool as a whole, AOL somehow ruined that.

And yes, I do have the old Commodore floppy.

Re:Not worth reading

[sjames]

Why is that stupid? It works for the two major political parties in the United States. Why wouldn't it work for AOL? ;)

Their critical mistake was that they failed to team up with another poor value "competitor" so people could have the "satisfaction" of voting the bums out (with their wallet) every few years. That and a continued program of buying up small ISPs (so you'd just get AOL anyway if you sign up with them) and they could have emulated that success ;)

Re:Not worth reading

[harmonise]

What the heck is AOL?

They're a manufacturer of chair building materials. I hear that Steve Ballmer is a customer.

Re:Not worth reading

[chadplusplus]

My wife had an AOL account when we met and her parents somehow still have one? (Is that even possible?) I would always mock her for her AOL email address. She could never understand why. I just forwarded her a copy of the parent post. I hope that clears things up.

Re:Not worth reading

[ajs]

My favorite press release was the one from Paramount that introduced Seven of Nine. The release itself is mildly amusing in retrospect, but the best part was the MST3K filk of it that was posted use Usenet.

Re:Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

Originally, they were a distributor of 3.5" floppies that could be re-formatted and re-used. They changed their business model when floppies fell out of favor and CDs became popular. It was then that they became the #1 polluter in the US by distributing millions of useless shiny plastic coasters to every man, woman, and child in the country, overwhelming landfills across the nation.

Oh but the disc were very useful. We faceters loved AOL CD's I collected over 1000 of them and am slowly whittling my pile of them down.
They are perfect for the final polish on a facet. A spritz of olive or silicone oil and a small charge of diamond powder and away you go.
Nice and cheap and work so well.

Re:Not worth reading

[DrXym]

AOL had in Nullsoft the ability to build iTunes years before iTunes existed. Virtually everyone used WinAmp at the time and it would have been a natural progression to throw in ripping and a store front. In Time Warner they had a ready supply of music and video content to sell content. There was potential there but AOL was just completely clueless as history has proven.

Re:Not worth reading

[jaminJay]

I sure hope a hoot isn't an ALL-CAPS tweet...

Re:Not worth reading

[Eil]

I'm sure Steve Case made a mint,

From my reading of the press release and associated comments, it sounds like it was a merger engineered from the start to be a way for some of the largest shareholders to pump up and cash out. The really surprising part was that they were able to take such high-profile businessmen (such as Ted Turner) for a ride in the process.

Re:Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to that, AOL's business model was falling apart. They could no longer charge per hour. Content on the wild Interwebs was catching up to AOL, yet AOL continued to charge premium prices to content providers (using keywords and such). Those content providers figured out it was much cheaper to slap a webpage up using their own servers (which is what they had to do anyway with AOL) without paying the AOL cost.

In my estimation, it was the shift from per-hour charges to the flat $19.95 a month that really killed AOL. I had AOL at the time, and the terms of service were five hours free, followed by $2.95 an hour. All the walled garden content AOL had was designed to get you to stay online for as long as possible. In particular, the time-soaking games they had available---like Gemstone III, Modus Operandi, Air Warrior II.

As soon as they shifted to unlimited access, the equation flipped. All that value-added content AOL provided went from being a goldmine to a massive liability. The longer people stayed online, the more it cost AOL. Their entire raison d'etre went from goldmine to massive liability.

The real death knell, the single thing that made everyone I knew with an alternative flee AOL, was the timeout dialogues. Every half hour, AOL would pop up a little window saying, "Gee, you've sure been online for a while. Are you sure you wouldn't rather go play outside or something?" If you didn't click, "Keep me online" within two minutes or so, AOL would disconnect you. The dialogue, of course, only appeared within the AOL window. So if you were using AOL's connection to do anything else---a game, a browser other than their integrated one, telnet---you'd never see it, and every half hour you'd get torqued.

So there AOL was: shedding the suddenly deleterious content which was the chief reason for using them, while simultaneously and deliberately making it painful to use their service for anything else.

The migration of corporate content away from AOL to the free Internet was, in my estimation, merely contributory.

Re:Not worth reading

[REggert]

Now THAT's funny. :-D

Re:Not worth reading

[wallsg]

I used Compuserve from a 4.77 MHz PC clone via a Volksmodem 1200 with a glorious 13" amber monochrome in 1985. That setup cost me about $1,000 (in real 1985 money and not the inflated-away crap we have now) for the PC & monitor (it did have, after all, the full 640 KB of RAM in multiple rows of 9 DIPs using the multifunction expansion card and a nice flip-top case), and I think about $100 for the modem. The 20 MB two-bay Seagate HD and custom controller card was an addition $500.

I also have a "WOW!" shirt I picked up at this little meeting called "COMDEX".

I vaguely remember looking at some service called People that a friend had an account with. Much later, in 1994 or 1995, I had a free web site account with a brand new service called Turnpike.net, back when you created pages by careful hand editing. Then when they started charging I moved to another relatively new web host called GeoCities (but I don't recall what city/neighborhood I was in).

Now get off my lawn.

Re:Not worth reading

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember right, the AC has an (infernal) UID of 666 - which would by higher than CmdrTaco's 1 :)

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Not worth reading

[PyroMosh]

I vaguely remember looking at some service called People that a friend had an account with. Much later, in 1994 or 1995, I had a free web site account with a brand new service called Turnpike.net, back when you created pages by careful hand editing. Then when they started charging I moved to another relatively new web host called GeoCities (but I don't recall what city/neighborhood I was in).

What do you mean, "back when"?

Re:Not worth reading

[Bat Country]

Your lawn had posh grass.

I couldn't afford a decent connection in 1985. I had to learn everything I knew about computers from the 1970s books I found in the local libraries and messing with debug.com.

My first experience with BBS was on a 300 baud parallel port modem I bought for $40 from Boeing surplus.

Ah I miss the good old days when computer hardware cost a fortune, the only good deals you could get were at trade shows, everything was slow as treacle and the average human still believed that computers were sentient.

Wait, no I don't.

Re:Not worth reading

[Bat Country]

That really should have been "serial port." I have no idea how you'd communicate with a parallel port modem using any sane software.

Re:Not worth reading

[torgis]

Also, Prodigy was a popular, GUI-based dial-up content provider that got pretty popular in the early 90's. I can't call it an ISP because (at the time I was using it anyway) they did not really offer internet access. It was a big online community with chat rooms, forums, news, weather, and email...with a catch. You could send messages to other Prodigy members free of charge, but you were limited to 25 "internet" emails per month. And 5 hours of dial-up access. Thinking about it now makes me chuckle, but that's the way it was. No web or telnet or ftp or gopher. Just the content they provide, like the BBS's of old.

Obligitory

[vil3nr0b]

Duke Nukem Forever to be released Q4 2009.

Re:Obligitory

[space_jake]

Duke Nukem Forever to be released Q4 1997.

They were right....

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft said that Windows Vista would transform life as we knew it.

to a living hell!

Re:They were right....

[Anonymous Coward]

So true.

Re:They were right....

[ByOhTek]

Only after Satan takes notes and makes his upgrades. Prior to that, a living hell will be an improvment.

Re:They were right....

[tomhudson]

That's because you don't have enough ram ... what Bill Gates REALLY said was "640 gigabytes should be enough for anyone!"

Remember Weird Al's song about Windows 95 - "

There's so much stuff to buy
I need a new harddrive
It's gonna suck me dry.
My CPU says,
'don't have the speed',
it takes an hour just to bring up the screen

Life imitates art. Microsoft is taking its' HID cues from Weird Al (which explains a lot :-)

Re:They were right....

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember Weird Al's song about Windows 95

<pedantic>That wasn't Weird Al. He never made a parody of "Start Me Up" about Windows 95. Al's not the only guy who can write parodies, you know.</pedantic>

<character type="Comic Book Store Guy">So please review your facts next time before you talk, ignoramus. Hmph.</character>

Re:They were right....

[Svippy]

Weird Al never wrote or song that song ("Windows 95 Sucks"), that was Bob Rivers.

Please, do us (especially Weird Al himself) all a favour and stop downloading your music from Limewire.

Re:They were right....

[Sun.Jedi]

Microsoft said that Windows Vista would transform life as we knew it.

to a living hell!

Quit your complaining. Microsoft transformed many (including many of YOU /.ers) to OSX and Linux.

Re:They were right....

[jedidiah]

Weird Al has addressed this himself.

You're not exactly doing him any favors with a "legitimate" download either.

The common swapper is an amateur compared to the RIAA.

Re:They were right....

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, good point.

Re:They were right....

[tomhudson]

Please, do us (especially Weird Al himself) all a favour and stop downloading your music from Limewire

Limewire? Does it run under linux now?

Sorry, I haven't downloaded music in years and years ... back when it was legal to download (but not upload) in my country.

.. and I heard the Windows parody on the radio, not the InnerTubes, so I guess I can lay some of the blame on them for the wrongful attribution.

PS: Thanks for the correction. Bob Rivers deserves the credit - he's funny :-)

Re:They were right....

[DEmmons]

for a lot of people, probably. for me, Linux was always intriguing because it was different and because i liked the idea of being able to customize it so much, plus the fact that getting it to run made me feel like a hacker. it was mostly a failure for me though until i tried Fedora 6. that's when i found a distro that i could make work as my primary OS (if i'd stumbled upon Ubuntu first things would probably have been easier though). rather than MS being the reason i found Linux, Linux was the reason i dodged the Vista bullet. I do like my MS optical mouse though :)

Re:They were right....

[Sun.Jedi]

MS optical mouse

I prefer the Razer Lachesis or Diamondback for gaming and work. The Lachesis is is 3G 4000dpi and high precision, minimal movement type and the Diamondback is a 2000dpi which basically translates to a really fast mouse with more traditional travel ranges. They both work with Linux, although the actual drivers/profiles needed to be setup on a windows system first. In the case of the Lach, it stores 5 profiles on the mouse itself.

Re:They were right....

[DEmmons]

lol, so would i. neither was $15 at wal*mart though. and i don't need more that 2 buttons and a clickable scroll wheel for SpringRTS and Heroes of Newerth. the high dpi would be great for the next time i get into an FPS though...

It goes without saying...

[DavidR1991]

...that irrespective of the situation, press releases are never going to say "this sucks" or "this is completely unoriginal". A few of these are genuine oversights/lack of forward thinking (e.g. the iPhone app one) but the majority of them are standard marketing hyperbole that appears everywhere ("This cleaning product will TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE!").

Re:It goes without saying...

[value_added]

press releases are never going to say "this sucks" or "this is completely unoriginal"

No, but news stories arise out of press releases, and the news writer will often use as source for information the ... wait for it ... press release. The story, in turn, inspires more news stories, most of which are just like it. By the time the cycle ends, everyone is repeating the same truthiness. And in a busy overstressed world, who has time to be a critical consumer of news and distinguish between press release content from real journalism (original reporting, editorial oversight, etc.)?

Kudos to Harry. I think his efforts thus far are interesting enough, but I'd like to see more as I think he's onto something. That is, if a blog that's a cross between the Daily Show and Mystery Science Theater can be considered "something". ;-)

Re:It goes without saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

"This cleaning product will TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE!"

Just look what it did for Billy Mays. It totally transformed his life in the biggest way possible.

Re:It goes without saying...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

At least according to Wolfram Alpha's 2007 numbers, there are now more PR managers than journalists in the US, and the number of PR managers is rising faster(wages are also higher, and rising faster, for the latter category).

I strongly suspect that, in the fairly near future(to the degree it hasn't happened already, googling "video news release" can be eye opening) news stories will stop arising from press releases, and simply be replaced by them.

Re:It goes without saying...

[jollyreaper]

...that irrespective of the situation, press releases are never going to say "this sucks" or "this is completely unoriginal". A few of these are genuine oversights/lack of forward thinking (e.g. the iPhone app one) but the majority of them are standard marketing hyperbole that appears everywhere ("This cleaning product will TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE!").

Life boils down to a question of whether people are talkin' the straight shit or just a line of bullshit. Bullshit pays more but the straight shit lets you look yourself in the mirror.

The funny thing, people love the bullshit. They bullshit others, they bullshit themselves. It amazes me when someone does due diligence, get told something that's true but they don't like it. This big deal I'm salivating over, it's smarter to pass it up than get all my money tied up in it? Fuck you. What, you're saying my income can only support getting the fancy house and the car, not the house, the car, and the yacht? Fuck you twice-over, cocksucker.

You get some exec with a grandiose plan, something that's really going to make his name, cement his reputation, there's no way of telling him it's just not that good of an idea. So any analyst who wants to remain employed will provide the analysis the boss wants to see, not what he needs to see. And this kind of warped, demented thinking will persist until objective reality makes itself known with all the subtlety of a ship foundering upon the rocky shore.

Re:It goes without saying...

[Anonymusing]

But this t-shirt will transform your life!

Re:It goes without saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

just for curiosity, could you spare the query you used to obtain that data?

Re:It goes without saying...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=journalists

and

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Public+relations

I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything actually fancy(getting both occupations graphed, over time, would have been nice).

Re:It goes without saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cocaine is not a cleaning product...

Re:It goes without saying...

[tygerstripes]

Maybe not where you come from. Here in the UK, sniffer-dogs are trained to recognise detergent powder cut with talc...

Re:It goes without saying...

[datapharmer]

Cocaine is not a cleaning product...

Sure it is... it works great at getting that pesky cartilage stuff out of your nose.

Re:It goes without saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I had mod points
Instead, here is a haiku;
Refrigerator.

Re:It goes without saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, where did you steal that from?

Re:It goes without saying...

[forkazoo]

...that irrespective of the situation, press releases are never going to say "this sucks" or "this is completely unoriginal". A few of these are genuine oversights/lack of forward thinking (e.g. the iPhone app one) but the majority of them are standard marketing hyperbole that appears everywhere ("This cleaning product will TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE!").

Even the iPhone press release is always something I've thought of as "Shit, the SDK is nowhere near ready. People love to install 3rd party apps on their Palms and whatnot. We need to convince people this is a non-issue until we are ready to deal with it, otherwise people won't buy the iPhone and we'll never be able to roll at the app store that we've been talking about."

Ugh

[sheepweevil]

8 pages and no printer friendly version (that I can find)? This is why /.ers don't RTFA!

Re:Ugh

[drinkypoo]

On top of that, if you look at your noscript menu you can see that the multiple page layout is just an attempt to create more ad impressions. Eight pages of free ad credit for a one-page article? DO NOT WANT

If only I didn't have to watch a fucking video tutorial to use autopager, I might have read his stupid article. But I still wouldn't click next seven times.

Re:Ugh

[TheGratefulNet]

needs jscript to view.

forget it, then! anyone want to paste in the actual content? or, maybe even that isn't worth the time.

slashvertisements just help authors get page hits. and that is NOT what slash is supposed to be about, guys..

Re:Ugh

[Jaysyn]

There are ads on that page?

I wonder.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Are the flacks who write these sorts of releases embittered mercenaries who know they are puking shit into the public consciousness but just don't give a fuck, or are they bright eyed eternal optimists who actually think in PR language and sincerely believe each release as they write it(before, of course, believing something entirely different to write the next one)?

Re:I wonder.

[timeOday]

Are the flacks who write these sorts of releases embittered mercenaries who know they are puking shit into the public consciousness... (etc)

That's all awfully dramatic. I think they're just some people doing a job to make a living. Just like the company higher-ups for that matter. The truth is, predicting the future - let alone controlling it - is hard to do. Unintended consequences are the norm, not the exception. Still, people who try to take matters into their own hands and bend the future to their will do achieve the desired effect on occasion, and tend to wind up better off than people who refuse to make any move for fear of doing the wrong thing or being shown up later.

Re:I wonder.

[Rude Turnip]

I think they start out as the latter and turn into the former.

Re:I wonder.

[gnalre]

Hands up all who thought at the time hmm, AOL and Time Warner, now that's a good idea. Equally ebay, skype, yes I can see the synergy there.

OK sometimes someone sees something the rest of us can't and makes a billion, but its amazing how many times ideas that look really stupid to most of us are actually really stupid. Of course the people who pay for it are the common employee's who don't get asked their opinion.

Re:I wonder.

[OctaviusIII]

As someone that used to write form letters, a similar genre of writing, it sort of becomes an art in itself: how much sugar can stick to what's true without it becoming so saccharine nobody wants it? I don't know about others, but I did: a) give a fuck, and b) believe in the kernal of truth around which the letter was written. People that wrote these press releases seem to have lost touch with reality, but I have a feeling they probably took about 10 minutes to write and 2 days to proof, giving others the chance to insert their own BS.

Re:I wonder.

[Attila Dimedici]

I thought the AOL purchase of Time-Warner was a brilliant move on the part of AOL. It was their only chance of survival. I think it could have worked if Time-Warner's phobia about Internet distribution and piracy hadn't proceeded to infect AOL.

Re:I wonder.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a PR/marketing flack myself, I'll freely admit that I'm an embittered mercenary, as I think most in the profession are. But the problem is not us marketing people; it's just the nature of the industry. 1) No one will read a press release unless it claims a huge benefit. No one reads press releases to begin with, but a press release that makes only modest claims will just get drowned out in the overwhelming 24/7 noise of the modern marketosphere. 2) No client will approve a release that makes him sound anything less than the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and his product anything less than the Holy Grail 2.0. 3) Selling is hard, stressful work. You can't afford to have a rational conversation with the public about the merits and demerits of your product, because your job is on the line if the sales curve slacks, so you've got to do your damnedest to sell the thing, no matter how awful it is.

Re:I wonder.

[greenguy]

I've written a few press releases in my day (for politics, not technology). The answer is, people who write these sorts of releases know that journalists are lazy, and routinely cut and paste sentences from them into their articles. The really lazy ones paste in the entire press release.

Re:I wonder.

[lazyforker]

Are the flacks who write these sorts of releases embittered mercenaries who know they are puking shit into the public consciousness but just don't give a fuck, or are they bright eyed eternal optimists who actually think in PR language and sincerely believe each release as they write it(before, of course, believing something entirely different to write the next one)?

Yes.

Re:I wonder.

[mabhatter654]

AOL-TW was much like the more recent Daimler-Chrysler deal. Within 18-24 months the C Level execs that founded/grew AOL/Chrysler were on their ear run off the board. In AOL's case the idea of purchasing TW was to get exclusive content... to be someplace people PAID to go for exclusive media.. (sound familiar!!) but TW ran it's own sites and refused to play along, that demoted AOL to "advertising" only exclusives... which gutted it's base. Because they were "afraid" of publishing media they botched netscape/mozilla terribly, just like yahoo, running back to Microsoft IE when MSN was a toy. They could have had Nullsoft/winamp as THE media center but again TW didn't want to put any ACTUAL MEDIA on AOL!!! Of course TW was the same company that close the WB stores not because they were losing money.. .but because they weren't making ENOUGH profit and took real marketing and planning to keep the stores full off goodies versus movie or record production. Of course then the released Lotr and Harry Potter... Imagine the merchandising they missed out on!

Re:I wonder.

[timeOday]

OK sometimes someone sees something the rest of us can't and makes a billion, but its amazing how many times ideas that look really stupid to most of us are actually really stupid.

Forgive me for over-generalizing a bit, but this is slashdot, most of us think everything is stupid. So we sit at our terminals and do our little IT jobs, draw a salary, and chuck rotten tomatoes at leaders of industry, science, and politics. And usually we're right. But occasionally we're wrong, and those are the occasions when history is made and fortunes are made.

Re:I wonder.

[epine]

You can't afford to have a rational conversation with the public about the merits and demerits of your product, because your job is on the line if the sales curve slacks, so you've got to do your damnedest to sell the thing, no matter how awful it is.

Yes, but you sacrifice the goose (credibility with the public) as a byproduct of living to cuss another day. For me this is the central subject matter of this thread: that the race to the bottom has exceeded itself to such a degree that the press release has become just a fancy spam packet in the mind of the thinking public.

My definition of hell is entering a profession where my victories and my defeats verge on indistinguishable. Monetize any lingering shred of credibility, and once the credibility is gone, move on, like a prostitute whose desirability is inversely proportional to her career earnings.

From a game theory perspective, in a game of competent rivals this outcome should not exist: the cost of manufacturing the PR exceeds the value imparted to those who read it (at arms length with nose between fingers).

In the real world, there are sheep to be fleeced. A relatively small proportion of the public is essentially suckered by PR verbiage into providing just enough marginal profit to employ the hopeless schmuck who churned the thing out, so despite having reached bottom, it doesn't mercifully fade away.

I say this knowing that the conversion rate on penis enlargement is shockingly large. I'm just not capable of wrapping my mind around the vast septic system of human gullibility. We're a depressingly dumb animal once the primal pathways light up and the PR now functions as an unpleasant nasty-gram of human nature.

Generated with Print Screen for your pleasure!

[jimicus]

You'd think when people used screenshots of something they threw together in a word processor they'd at least turn off auto-spell check underlining so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.

Re:Generated with Print Screen for your pleasure!

[Minimalist360]

You mean the links and styled glossary entries in the second slide?

Vista did "transform life"...

[John Hasler]

...For Microsoft.

Re:Vista did "transform life"...

[westlake]

...For Microsoft.

Perhaps not:

The newly weighted Net Applications stats are telling:

Top Operating System Share Trend, Top Operating System Share Trend

Roughly speaking, the global desktop is 70% XP, 20% Vista, 5% OSX, 1% Win 7, 1% Linux and 3% Everything Else.

Loser business ideas.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah see, it's because there are still folks out there, grasping at straws, thinking they can make money somehow with the advertisement and getting eyeballs revenue model on the web. They're stuck in 1998.

Re:Loser business ideas.

[omgarthas]

Like Google?

Damn!!

[Big Hairy Ian]

That's why I'm running low on coasters AOL stopped sending them out in 2006 :)

Sony

[SpectreBlofeld]

Sony ditching their AI and other cutting-edge 'out there' research (like the Qrio and Aibo) to focus on media/entertainment. Sony Labs used to feel like one of those wicked Zaibatsus as described in Neuromancer.

It happened shortly after they took on an American board member, incidentally.

HP did much the same under Carly.

ATT's Bell Labs, too.

I hope Research in Motion's Perimeter Institute takes off. These corporate research labs are where we get all the best stuff!

Re:Sony

[Anonymous Coward]

WRONG! We get the best stuff from FREE software.

Re:Sony

[vbraga]

Interesting, I don't really understand Sony corporate structure, but as far as I know, Sony Music Entertainment was a separate company Sony bought in late 80s (Wikipedia seems to back this up).

Do really they ditched their core business (high tech) for their media business? Wikipedia says the same as you:

The AIBO and the rest of Sony's artificial intelligence program was discontinued after 2005 in Sony's effort to make the company more profitable.

But offers no source. Sony AIBO Europe announcement doesn't says it was ditching the whole AI and robot program. This seems very strange.

There's seems to be at least one (really liked that page design) Sony Lab out there.

Disappointing.

In defense of the Circuit City press release

[elrous0]

I used to write press releases myself in my younger days and often times you're stuck in a very difficult position of having to spin something that's very negative into something that at least doesn't make a bad situation even worse. Let's face it, there are only two reasons that companies ever lay off employees en mass: a budget cut that makes it unavoidable, or an attempt to streamline by removing an entire redundant or poorly-performing area or division. Private sector companies are loathe to admit the former, and so they almost always couch a large layoff as the latter.

They do this because they know that, if they show weakness, their stock will tank and they'll have even MORE layoffs than they've already had. And laying off people is never easy to do. Despite the reputation that corporations have for being heartless, they are nonetheless made up of real human beings--very few of whom take any pleasure in having to throw their employees' lives into chaos (not to mention the real damage it does to the company itself and its projects).

Of course, sometimes the stock still tanks anyway (savvy investors are rarely fulled by mere spin), but to publicly announce "Hey, we're going into the shitter" is still irresponsible. And the only alternative to "We're streamlining" or "We're facing cuts" is "We axed these people capriciously, just because we felt like it." So the choice is pretty clear.

Re:In defense of the Circuit City press release

[OzPeter]

Why is it that in this day and age the movement of the market (and the whole underpinnings of the global economy) is based on things like the perception of how someone wrote a press release? It seems crazy to me that we put up with things like this. However IANAE (economist) so I have no idea how structure our economy differently

Re:In defense of the Circuit City press release

[name_already_taken]

Why is it that in this day and age the movement of the market (and the whole underpinnings of the global economy) is based on things like the perception of how someone wrote a press release?

It's because investors and speculators are indeed crazy. People are sheep.

My parents told me a story of how my grandmother flagged them down as they were driving down the street one day. They pulled over and my grandmother came over to the car, looked around to make sure nobody would overhear the sage investment advice she was about to reveal, and said "pepper's going scarce".

There was a rumor amongst all the old ladies in town that there was a shortage of pepper, and so they were rushing out to the stores to buy all the pepper they could before it ran out. For a week or so, there was a real shortage of pepper in that city, because of all the old people rushing to buy it.

Compare that to what happens to the retail price of fossil fuels when something just as ridiculous happens, and you can see that the people who have influence over the price of things are just a collection of irrational sheep. Once you realize that, it becomes clear as to how you can influence markets and prices if you have some money to invest in the right place or if you can say the right words in front of enough people.

Re:In defense of the Circuit City press release

[barzok]

For the same reasons that the market only reacts to short-term performance instead of looking at the big picture. Your company can be on track for a record-breaking year for revenue & sales, but if you have a single quarter that misses expectations by one cent per share, it'll kill your stock price.

Re:In defense of the Circuit City press release

[Attila Dimedici]

Why is it that in this day and age the movement of the market (and the whole underpinnings of the global economy) is based on things like the perception of how someone wrote a press release? It seems crazy to me that we put up with things like this. However IANAE (economist) so I have no idea how structure our economy differently

The problem is that as an investor, if you are invested in a company that is basically sound, but is currently in a weak market position, if a lot of people perceive that this current weak position is a fundamental flaw in the company, their reaction to that perception can make it a reality.

Re:In defense of the Circuit City press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, layoffs are virtually *never* the right response. You don't regain profitability in the long term by cutting costs. You do it by increasing revenue, and you can't increase revenue in a slow economy with fewer people on board to do the necessary work.

Re:In defense of the Circuit City press release

[evilviper]

And the only alternative to "We're streamlining" or "We're facing cuts" is "We axed these people capriciously, just because we felt like it." So the choice is pretty clear.

This is nonsense. You certainly can tell the truth, and avoid flowery BS spin, without becoming BRUTALLY honest and unnecessarily HARSH about it.

In the case of Circuit City:

"In order to reduce costs, we are giving notice of termination to a small number of employees, totaling X-thousand throughout X-hundred stores. We are contractually restricted from reducing their pay, so termination is the only option open to us. We expect that a majority of these employees will then request to be re-hired to their old jobs at a lower salary, saving the company XYZ million over X years while retaining much of our skilled salespeople."

BS in the corporate world has gotten so thick that it has become self-perpetuating, and we're all forced to swim upstream because of it. That doesn't mean it's necessary, or even beneficial... In fact I KNOW just how often it's quite counterproductive.

Where are the slashdot articles?

[Tomsk70]

....or have slashdot never been wrong?

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Farmer Tim]

Who could forget Cmdr Taco's little gem?

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Anonymusing]

On the contrary, Slashdot is always wrong, so there's no point in remarking on the fact. You might as well say, "We're going to have some weather today."

Example: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't mean he was wrong or incorrect just because the thing is popular..

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Arkham]

I love going through all those posts and seeing how many dozens of people prognosticated how much of a flop the iPod would be. It wasn't just CmdrTaco, it was dozens of geeks. I wonder if I was amongst them. Certainly, I was around back then.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

....or have slashdot never been wrong?

We have never been wrong. It's just that some of our post refer to conditions in alternate universes. It's a geek thing.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Tomsk70]

It *was* a flop.

Apple managed to keep millions brain-dead about mp3's, VBR, lossless...all in the name of style.

Like they did with their computers, in fact.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Tomsk70]

I know when Slashdot is wrong - they mark me down as a troll for pointing it out :-)

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[sharkey]

Well, the Lone Gunmen ARE dead, aren't they?

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Anonymous Coward]

For what it's worth, the 1st Gen iPod had a weird physical wheel controller and was firewire-only (not that many PCs had firewire back then). Wireless FM transmission really was a nice feature to have. And of course, the battery on the iPod was very hard to replace (and people actually cared back then). In other words, that particular early model really was somewhat lame, though obviously the size and software interface were not.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Who could forget Cmdr Taco's little gem?

Actually, reading through that thread - I found a post that seems rather funny, eight years in retrospect:

"Apple is being distroyed by the rumors that are being created. When they announce that they are going to have a new product, everyone thinks it's going to blow their worlds. Rumors start flooding in about even the most outragous products ( I even heard a few "sources" mention teleportion) This is getting plain stupid.

Apple is a normal company. Why does the public constantly expect them do the impossible?"

We see similar posts even now; but the rumors of Apple's death seem to have been greatly exaggerated...

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Dragonslicer]

The posts near the beginning about "5 GB is bigger than my entire mp3 collection anyway" are particularly amusing.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[c6gunner]

He was right, though - the iPod IS lame. It didn't really bring any exciting new features to the market - it just threw together existing technology in a cutesy package and marketed it as a fashion accessory. I've owned several different MP3 players (currently a Sansa e280 with Rockbox) but I've never had any reason to purchase an iPod.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[UnknowingFool]

It *was* a flop.

By what definition? The first model sold a few hundred thousand. That's not bad considering that other models were selling in the tens of thousands at the time. In 2001, the MP3 player was relatively new to consumers; there were probably more portable CD players sold than MP3 players at the time.

Apple managed to keep millions brain-dead about mp3's, VBR, lossless...all in the name of style.

See that's why Apple succeeded. For millions and millions of consumers, they don't care about any of that. Geeks might care but your average consumer doesn't. Apple was the first to understand that the MP3 player could be a consumer gadget if they polished the rough edges of the early MP3 players. And it wasn't about just style. It was about making the thing consumer usable not geeek usable. Yes, the iPod isn't the most technical superior device, but again, consumers don't really care. So what if it can't play ogg? Most consumer don't even care if they have MP3s or WMAs or AACs. They just want the device to to easily manage and play their music regardless of the file format. Consumers want to buy music online so Apple went to the trouble of creating a music store.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[quacking duck]

He was right, though - the iPod IS lame. It didn't really bring any exciting new features to the market - it just threw together existing technology in a cutesy package and marketed it as a fashion accessory. I've owned several different MP3 players (currently a Sansa e280 with Rockbox) but I've never had any reason to purchase an iPod.

Typical consumers with disposable cash (or at least high credit card limits) like cutesy and flashy. News at 11.

For what it's worth I *did* get a first-generation iPod, for reasons which included these "existing technologies" that, curiously, no other mp3 player was using:

- Firewire transfer. Few seem to remember that mp3 players at the time were limited to USB1.1 "Full" speed of 12 Mbps. Filling a 5 GB drive with that would take an hour, Firewire 400 could do it in less than 2 minutes.

- Scroll wheel. May have existed before in other electronics, but not in an mp3 player. Made navigating lengthy songlists easy.

- doubled as a portable FW hard drive. Perfect to keep encrypted backups with me at all times

The iPod was also the first portable player to use 1.8" hard drives, rather than the 2.5" in other HDD players, making it "half the size and weight of all other jukebox players on the market then" and "solved the weight/dimension/capacity problem that faced all previous players" according to this retrospective on digital audio players.

The tradeoff of having an integrated battery was that it got up to 10 hours playback on a single charge, too (which weren't exaggerated; when mine was new I timed it at about 9 hours and 40 minutes).

So was the first iPod lame in "exciting new features" as you say? Maybe. OTOH, geeks are supposed to be less shallow than surface features, and look at the engineering side of things, too.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[Farmer Tim]

He was right, though - the iPod IS lame.

The technical specifications of the original iPod were lame, if you were after an all-singing, all-dancing device with masses of storage space. However, that's an opinion from one particular perspective, not a statement of absolute fact.

it just threw together existing technology in a cutesy package and marketed it as a fashion accessory.

Its extremely improbable that fashion alone could propel sales of a truly bad product for the best part of a decade, and the "cutesy package" argument hasn't made sense since most other MP3 players (including the Sansa e280) started copying the iPod style some years ago. Unless you're referring to iTunes/iTMS integration, but if that's a feature people use and like that lacks viable competition it's hardly a mark against the iPod.

Sorry, but there has to be a more tangible reason why the iPod dominates.

I've owned several different MP3 players (currently a Sansa e280 with Rockbox) but I've never had any reason to purchase an iPod.

Nor have I, and I don't see why you should if it doesn't meet your needs. So including Taco, that's three sales Apple won't make.

But apparently a majority of MP3 player purchasers don't seem to want more than a simple tapeless Walkman equivalent. What they consider lame is features they'll never use: SD cards are just more crap to carry around and lose, WiFi doesn't recharge as it syncs, and OGG/FLAC is perhaps a caveman with an anti-aircraft gun...they don't know, they don't care, as long as their MP3 player plays MP3s exciting new features can go to early-adopter hell. I have no doubt Apple conducted extensive market research on this before spending $millions on product development, and the fact that 8 years later they're successfully selling a model with even fewer features and less storage space than the original indicates the validity of the simple appliance approach for their target market segment.

That doesn't make it lame; quite the opposite, that makes it a well thought out product. Just not the product you want, that's all.

Re:Where are the slashdot articles?

[c6gunner]

The technical specifications of the original iPod were lame, if you were after an all-singing, all-dancing device with masses of storage space.

No, it was lame because it's cost was too high to justify what few advantages it had over what I was using at the time. Now it's lame because it still costs too damn much and the Sansa does the exact same thing for a much lower price.

and the "cutesy package" argument hasn't made sense since most other MP3 players (including the Sansa e280) started copying the iPod style some years ago.

That's true enough, but at this point it's popularity and sheer momentum. People keep buying brand name clothes even though knockoffs sell the same thing for a fraction of the price.

Sorry, but there has to be a more tangible reason why the iPod dominates.

I'd love to hear it.

and OGG/FLAC is perhaps a caveman with an anti-aircraft gun

Very nice. By the way, what's the best way to pull wine off of my monitor and keyboard? :)

That doesn't make it lame; quite the opposite, that makes it a well thought out product.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Tickle-me-Elmo was a well thought out product, but I still think it's pretty lame.

lets classify Vista

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets classify Vista.

Is it a Trojan, or is it a worm?

Re:lets classify Vista

[tomhudson]

Lets classify Vista.

Is it a Trojan, or is it a worm?

Kid #1: "You got a trojan in my worm!"
Kid #2: "You got a worm in my trojan!"
Voiceover: "Two bad ideas that are even worse together. Be BAAAAD! Get Vista! Grind your dual quad-core into the dust!"
(rapidly): "May cause dizziness, vomiting, diarrhea, nausea, feelings of desperation, boredom, suicide, homicide, chair-throwing, offensive body odor, birther syndrome, loss of control-alt-delete, and excessive weight gain or bloat. If symptoms persist, see your Apple retailer."

Re:lets classify Vista

[fracai]

Do not taunt Windows Vista.

Great idea done by a hack

[dmomo]

I didn't bother reading the whole thing. As many people did, I glanced first at the annotations. They are composed primarily of editorial "neener neener" than anything insightful.

At least Cracked Magazine would have made an attempt at humor to make up for the lack of substance.

Not just tech press releases

[drseuk]

"Peace for our time" - Neville Chamberlain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time == "Peace after 1946"

"Mission accomplished!" George W. Bush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished == "Mission not accomplished"

"Titanic goes down: everyone safe" Daily Express, April 1912 http://www.newstatesman.com/200606190037 == well, even the Cameron film didn't distort reality quite that much.

Re:Not just tech press releases

[andyh3930]

And the Daily Express hasn't got much better since.
Just google Daily Express False Stories !!

And some comments on press releases...

[PhunkySchtuff]

My favourite, regarding the announcement of the iPod:

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame
  -- CmdrTaco

Re:And some comments on press releases...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Taco gets a lot of flack for that, but honestly I did agree with him. And I still do. The first Ipod sucked. Mac only, expensive as heck, not much storage space. But, it didn't stay sucky. It improved over the years, gradually adding features to make it appeal to more consumers. I'd say the release of the ipod with a usb interface for pc's was the ground breaking announcement. If you still thought they wouldn't make an impact then you should be made fun of.

I mean, did anyone really think windows was going to be a hit after microsoft released windows 1.0?

Re:And some comments on press releases...

[Anonymous Coward]

double plus good!

Re:And some comments on press releases...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, horror! txtspk! It is here already!

Re:And some comments on press releases...

[UnknowingFool]

Also from a geek's perspective the iPod still sucks technically. Apple however had the foresight to know that they didn't want to make and sell geek gadgets. They sacrificed technical features for better usability and integration to make them consumer gadgets. There was actually a lot of forethought. Even though it had 1GB less than the Nomad, it could double as an HD and a 5GB HD was a large one back then. Also not many consumers would have 5GB worth of music so 1GB less space wasn't as big an issue.

Re:And some comments on press releases...

[ukyoCE]

I think this especially has to do with the fact that things like bullet points next to "wireless", "FM", and "X GB" are easy to communicate in a press release.

Size on the other hand, is very hard to communicate well in a press release or website or newspaper article. But when you hold a phone or ipod in your hand and compare it to other bulkier ones, you tend to have a feel for what size is right. What will fit in your pocket? How will you carry this thing?

That's a advantage Apple has pressed with the ipod, and other device makers are still struggling to understand it.

Re:And some comments on press releases...

[MojoStan]

That reminds me of another Apple-related comment in the form of Apple's full-page Wall Street Journal ad in response to the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981:

• "Welcome, IBM.
  Seriously."

Was Apple being smug? Classy? Cocky? Naive?

Rotten Apples

[NonUniqueNickname]

These are isolated incidents. With the exception of the few rotten apples shown in the article, every press release is 100% accurate in both its claims and its predictions.

Vista transformed my life as I knew it...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'm a sysadmin. FML.

Apple's press releases aren't mistakes...

[argent]

I used to take Apple's announcements at face value (or at least at the same level of face value as anyone else in the industry) but I learned better.

When Steve Jobs says "flash MP3 players are junk" or "no ugly monitors on nice macs" or any of those other announcements that they're going to turn around a year or three later when they release the iPod Shuffle or "bring your own display keyboard and mouse" Mac mini it's all part of their "never say anything meaningful about future product releases" policy. You can't tell ANYTHING about what Apple's going to release based on what they say. Jobs doesn't just play his cards close to his chest, they're surgically implanted.

Re:Apple's press releases aren't mistakes...

[jimicus]

On the contrary, I think you've just proven that if Apple will at some point in the next 1-3 years release something that's the exact opposite of what they're announcing.

In fact, now I think of it I'm sure Jobs announced that the iPod would never have video because there was no point in such a small device.

Re:Apple's press releases aren't mistakes...

[argent]

No, the scurvy beggars sometimes tell the truth just to throw us off.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Web applications that require the web?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it supposed to be biting criticism of Apple's press release that they failed to make web apps that work without an internet connection? I know Steve Jobs is a magician, but it seems a bit like saying "Yeah, but those applications only worked if you had a *computer*. FAIL!"

NOSTRADAMUS quatrain

[Anonymous Coward]

When non NOSTRADAMUS make prediction
epicfail
hister
twin towers
Bush Obama

add me too Re:Not worth reading

[weeeeed]

me too!!1

circuit city crossed wires

[Anonymous Coward]

their firing of experienced employees six or so months prior to 'bankruptcy' was a convenient way to maximize profit taking via wage cutting to bleed out just a bit more.

sheer elegance in it's simplicity. or something like that.

My favorite stupid software ad

[Anonymous Coward]

My "favorite" stupid computer advertisment is a Swedish one from Micro Soft, that claimed MS-DOS/PC computers are the only really serious business computers because you can't play games on them, they don't have screens with more then four colours and no graphic capabilities. I think this was around MS-DOS 2.x.

Ad to injury. At that time the "gaming machine" Amiga had more and better business applications suited for the Swedish market. But everyone who could still get one used Commodore PET (not a gaming machine), because it had really, really good Swedish office software (written in very non-portable assembler). For CAM another "gaming computer" was used, the ABC 80. ABC 80s are still a lot more suitable for running most machinery in industry than any PCs, if you can get a hold on one, they where manufactured 1978-83. But there where a lot of other computer/OS combos that were more suitable than PC/MS-DOS for Swedish business use at that time. The first real killer application on the MS-DOS platform in Sweden was Turbo Pascal 3. With T-P 3 and cheap PC clones people started to develop actually useful (Swedish friendly) business software to run under MS-DOS (and ported quite a few from CP/M). But at the time they ran the ad, it was pure bullshit supported by ridiculous "facts" (no colours, no graphics, no games, no distractions, but they "forgot" to mention: no useful software).

Re:My favorite stupid software ad

[Tablizer]

[ad] from Micro Soft, that claimed MS-DOS/PC computers are the only really serious business computers because you can't play games on them, they don't have screens with more then four colours and no graphic capabilities. I think this was around MS-DOS 2.x.

Leave it to MS to grow large by pointing out they are missing cool features. It's reverse Apple-ing.
     

Vista *did* change the world!

[Hurricane78]

No longer is a Microsoft OS an unquestionable "success". No longer will people buy every OS coming from them without thinking about it.
I call that a pretty big change. :)

Commodore CDTV Press release

[yossarianuk]

I was one of the few people in the galaxy to own a CDTV - possibly the most unpopular system ever (CD32 is so much better), this machine can semi be blamed for Commodore's demise.

"CDTV will truly change the way people learn and are entertained. It's the real new media of the nineties." Nolan Bushnell, CDTV Project Manager

Short Circuit

[rumblin'rabbit]

I liked this part from the Circuit City story...

The company has completed a wage management initiative that will result in the separation of approximately 3,400 store Associates. The separations, which are occurring today, focused on Associates who were paid well above the market-based salary range for their role. New Associates will be hired for these positions and compensated at the current market range for the job.

How far up your butt does your head have to be to refer to a layoff as a "separation"? Such gutless prose deserves our complete contempt.

It has been my experience that managers who lay off their best people to save money don't understand their business. This is what happens when you hire MBA's.

Re:Short Circuit

[jhhl]

You breezed right by the "Associates" euphemism as well!
A more subtle one was "well above the market based salary range,"
  neglecting to say in which country that range was based on or what "well above" really entails.
 

Re:Short Circuit

[ukyoCE]

Sadly, "associate" has become so commonplace I don't even blink when I hear the term. >.

Microsoft were right

[JustNiz]

>> Microsoft said that Windows Vista would transform life as we knew it. ...and it did. It defined a new low-point in software on a planet-wide scale.

The uncomfortable truth about AOL

[westlake]

AOL, purveyor of overpriced, under-performing dialup access and horrendous software to complete morons

The geek is elitist.

If you don't share his knowledge and values you are by definition sub-human - a moron.

AOL introduced flat-rate monthly subscriptions at a mass market price - which defines Internet service to this day.

AOL's software hid its complexities from the user.

It stripped away the last vestiges of the BBS.

It had a graphical UI, automatic updates. You didn't have to configure an e-mail account. You didn't have to understand file transfer protocols.

The user experience wasn't so very different from the modern stand-alone web browser. That made the transition easy.

It also meant that Internet would never again be the geek's private playground.

Re:The uncomfortable truth about AOL

[jedidiah]

AOL was overpriced crap for those too stupid to get themselves a bargain ISP.

It wasn't terribly innovative either. It was an incremental improvement over
what came before it and was similar to other BBS era uber-BBS services.

What ensured that the web would not be a "geek only playground" are the "elitist
geeks" that created the web browser in the first place. As soon as that happened,
AOL was pretty much pointless.

It's not "elitist" to be able to comparison shop or to criticize those that are
too lazy to bother. This isn't about ability, this is about laziness.

Laziness kept AOL alive even after it rightfully come to a quick end.

Re:The uncomfortable truth about AOL

[ooomphlaa]

AOL introduced flat-rate monthly subscriptions at a mass market price - which defines Internet service to this day.

Right, because no one else would have ever come up with this idea, right?

AOL's software hid its complexities from the user.

It also hid that it installed so deeply in your system you needed a virtual colonoscopy to find all its parts and remove them when you finally realized that the software and service was crap.

It stripped away the last vestiges of the BBS.

And this is a good thing, why?

It had a graphical UI, automatic updates. You didn't have to configure an e-mail account. You didn't have to understand file transfer protocols.

This I can't argue too much one b/c it did make web browsing accessable to the common person. Which I believe is in part the basis for good software and hardware. If something isn't usable it isn't going to go far. And then (when AOL was big) and now the majority of computer/internet users are not Power Users, they are not Programmers, they are not that computer savvy. And making tech that is easy for people to use is going to be a main driver in development and marketing. So yes, they did make a "smart' decisions in this respect. Except that I don't believe that AOL's implementation of their GUI was good, I mean come on after all it was AOL.

The user experience wasn't so very different from the modern stand-alone web browser. That made the transition easy.

It also meant that Internet would never again be the geek's private playground.

And I think the internet no matter how fancy your GUI is will always be the geek's private playground.

AOL has roots at Apple Link

[Ilgaz]

Dig deeper, you will find Apple Link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applelink

Apple history after Steve Jobs left is more like the history of wasted opportunities. Combine Applelink with Hypercard which its pointer is still used as link mouse pointer today, you will get grandfather www.

Of course, if you look at that service, it needed actual mainframes to run.

Re:Not worth readingPOWERPOINT

[Nom du Keyboard]

The stupid "article" is spread over 8 pages. Slashdot should have some standards for posted articles... and no, I'm not new here.

You're obviously new to the Power Point mentality and Twitter attention span.

Re:Not worth readingAOL NOT TOTALLY WORTHLESS

[Nom du Keyboard]

Originally, they were a distributor of 3.5" floppies that could be re-formatted and re-used. They changed their business model when floppies fell out of favor and CDs became popular...became the #1 polluter in the US by distributing millions of useless shiny plastic coasters...

Hey, they didn't become totally worthless then. Those tin containers containing those coasters are the best thing yet to reuse when putting your own precious CD/DVDs into the trunks of the elephants employed by the U.S. Snail Service.

Re: Perimeter Institute

[jsellens]

I hope Research in Motion's Perimeter Institute takes off.

Perimeter Institute is unrelated and not part of Research in Motion. A substantial chunk of original funding and enthusiasm was provided by Mike Lazaridis.

Foleo could have been part of the netbook craze

[LordFolken]

It meets the specs of the netbooks (although on the low side.) The price was a little heavy, but then again it might have worked.

... not slashdot worthy

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped reading after the first annotation read "Web apps only work when the Iphone has a working internet connection".

Please let me know when I can push packets through without a connection.

"Anonymous Coward" wasn't there at the beginning

[Anonymous Coward]

"Anonymous Coward" has been here since the very beginning and has an even lower UID than CmdrTaco ;)

"Anonymous Coward" was introduced with the accounts system, which from my vague memory was sometime around mid-1999. Before that, there were no user accounts; you could just sign your posts with any nick you wanted.

Press Releases of The Damned

[GrahamCox]

Today The Damned announced that their forthcoming single "New Rose" will be available in the shops on Tuesday, to be followed by "Eloise" next month. Spokesman Captain Sensible, when asked to clarify, was quoted as saying "Wot?".