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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."
Duke Nukem Forever to be released Q4 1997.
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AutoPager requires 'plugin' scripts for sites (which there is one for technologizer). But it makes it look like one page.
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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.
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My favourite, regarding the announcement of the iPod:
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
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
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
If I remember right, the AC has an (internal) UID of 666 - which would by higher than CmdrTaco's 1 :)
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.
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.
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>
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.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
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.
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.