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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.
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?