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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."
"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.
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.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
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.
TODO: Insert witty sig
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.