101 Dumbest Moments In Business 311
hhutkin writes "It's that time again. Business 2.0 posted their 101 Dumbest Moments in Business. Of course, they lambast Enron, but they also slam Ginger, a laptop computer made for the steering wheel of your car, Steve Ballmer dancing, and some other really dumb stuff from the past year."
THE dumbest moment in business (Score:2, Interesting)
Biggest Mistake=Adobe destroys goodwill using FBI (Score:1, Interesting)
Adobe using DMCA was sucha big mistake they fired the two principal people involved.
One was a long time insider. She was immediately axed.
The genie is out of the bottle.
Everyone I know HATES adobe and their DMCA mind control though police fascism.
Screw Adobe!!
It happens every day (Score:4, Interesting)
As anyone involved in corporate America can attest, incredibly stupid things happen in business every single day.
Considering this, what is remarkable is that businesses are as successful as they are.
Re:Business2 isnt all that. (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree.. After seeing one in person zipping around Manchester, NH (Where Deka is based) I must say, they are very cool.. The guy (a Deka employee) was zipping down the sidewalk on Elm St. not bothering anybody.. the only pedestrian problem be causes was people gawking at him (I happened to be in a pizza place). He was going around 10mph along the sidewalk, came to an intersection and stopped DEAD.. it was amazing to see how fast it stopped. Then he zipped through a park and went around the corner.
Alot of people don't like to ride bikes and get all sweaty, they can't change when they get to work, or whatever.. I'd use one.. hell.. just today I went to the drug store to pick up a few items and it's in one of those weird distances. To far to walk (or would take to long to walk) but seems silly to use the car. Since my bike is still in storage awaiting slightly warmer weather, I took my bike, but if I had a segway, I would have taken that.
The work in the grass, snow, and dirt. They'll go through puddles and work in the rain. They're bairly wider then an average person, so space isn't really an issue.
BTW, they were called "Ginger" because the stair climbing wheelchair that was also invented by Deka was code-named "Fred-a-stair"
Get a load of this... (Score:1, Interesting)
Shades of Donna Dubinsky (Score:3, Interesting)
She did a great job of alienate Handspring's existing customer base and rendering their inventory unsellable before the Treo was available.
And Handspring's damage control was just as bad as the original statement... lots of "We want to reassure our customers and Springboard developers that we're not discontinuing the Visor, uh, right away. We're still behind the Visor line, but we're dropping our only color model and sticking with OS 3.5."
Why Boston Market Failed (Score:5, Interesting)
Something so simple too.
They switched cleaning agents. I was a huge Boston Market fan. One day, I go in, and the place reeks like some kind of urine. I go across town to another store, it too reeks of urine.
Not everyone could smell it; my girlfriend did an investigation and found that most people only noticed it once it was pointed out--chicken smells sort of that way too. However, we routinely saw people leave from the smell, muttering under their breath, but not telling the manager. A handful with 'good smellers' couldn't even enter the door.
My girlfriend tracked down the smell to the cleaning agent they used for the floor..and oddly enough, the trays. She tried to tell employees. They would not listen; they couldn't smell anything..they had acclimated.
She told the managers. They humored her. But nothing changed. She went to several outlets across town; same story.
About a year and a half later, Boston market shut down its restaurants ostensibly because 'americans were changing their eating habits'..sails climbed, then fell off because 'americans had changed their eating patterns'
As I said, not everyone noticed the smell; but the subconcious is designed to avoid certain odors such as death and human waste.
I am certain the smelly cleaning agent was their real downfall.
XBOX marketing campaign backfires (Score:2, Interesting)
SEGWAY is a violation of city sidewalk ordinances (Score:1, Interesting)
That is why the company is trying to give a few free gingers to the POLICE and a few to the fereral government for Postal Workers.
That way they hope that laws might be changed to take away sidewalks from pedestrians for Segway right of way.
SEGWAY is merely a violation of city sidewalk ordinances
It will never take off even at 2 thousand bucks unless San Francisco changes its laws, and every other city.
Re:Why Boston Market Failed - NOT Urine smell (Score:1, Interesting)
I also hated how long their metallY incompetent (they hired borderline retards in los angeles area) took to serve up a simple sandwich.
SLOWWWWWW
But the number one reason I stopped going : THE NAME
When it was called Boston Chicken, sales DOUBLED every 10 months.
After they renamed every store from BOSTON CHICKEN to the asinine "Boston Market" the oppositge happened... sales started dropping every year at a fast rate.
The urine stench cleaner was probably icing on the cake.
Some people like the smell of rotting things or acrid things.
And urine is not that bad a smell to some people.
fecal smell is not that welcome with foods, or regurgitated items smells.
However Capranoic Acid (found in belly buttons and under armpits) is found in Thai soups such as the famous Hot and Sour soup.
Capranoic acis is 5 carbons and Butyric Acid if 4 carbons long.
Butyric acid stench (rotten rancid butter) is so foul it is the only thing that is a FELONY to put in or on someones private posessions such as autos. It has its own law in California Penal code.
Urine is fragrant with nitrogenous smells and ammonia and urea smells but is not exaclty a crowd disperser like sulpherous coumpounds are.
Sulpherous items more resemble rotten cabbage gas (Hydrogen Sulphide Gas) and farts and bloated corpses.
Now I think Boston Market could have done much worse than pick that urine smelling floor wipe.
They should have invested in a real diswasher instead of a bartending Bromine dip wash for their trays though.
why not hike gas prices? (Score:2, Interesting)
I am baffled at how a business magazine could think the gas price hikes of 9/11 was dumb business. People were panicking and filling their tanks at an incredible rate. There is only so much gas at a station, and when it is gone, it takes a while to replace.
I fully support the increase gas prices of that day as a way to moderate demand. After all, there are a lot of people with huge cars that can hold in excess of 30 gallons. Some of those people were getting gas just to get gas. If the higher prices meant that some of those people put 10 gallons of gas in their tanks instead of 20 gallons, I think the price hikes did their jobs. The fact that I did was able to get gas a few days later was, in my opinion, a validation of the higher gas prices.
Ultimately, the problem is caused by the number of people who can only afford to own the cars they do because of cheap gas and other government subsidies. On the other hand, for those of us with cars within our budgets, gas at $1 or $2 or $3 is just not such a big deal.