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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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...

[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.

Ugh

[sheepweevil]

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

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..

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!

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

[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

[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: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.

[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.

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: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: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?

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: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!