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

[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

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I guess we could just expect them to rollover and die because they are outdated. But it's funny how many people don't want to do that, regardless of how outdated they are.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