Give Us Your Tired PowerPoint, Your Failed Plans ...

SEWilco writes: "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer points out that failed business plans are wanted for history. Professor Kirsch is creating a digital archive documents or personal experiences from the Internet bust at businessplanarchive.org so they can be preserved for historians. He mentions they have difficulties such as only finding two days of records about NY electric taxicabs which ran for 15 years around 1900. /. did review Business @ The Speed of Stupid, which is a contemporary examination of recent failures. And don't bombard them which suggestions that their PowerPoint collection should also be archived in a less proprietary form, as they already know that."

Annoying width-adjusting posts solution

[Mizery De Aria]

Have insert_ampersand_here#x003 removed from all posts so as to not have the width manipulated in this manner. It's very annoying!

Powerpoint is evil.

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I was in a dot-bomb; we bombed out I think not so much because of a really stupid plan, just bad execution. There's an old saying, a class A person will do better with a class B plan than a class B person will do with a class A plan. I'll leave the company info in that we were an advertising dotcom, and we managed to swim around blindly with no direction until the Internet stock bubble burst and we were S.O.L.

Besides that, I hate Powerpoint, on principle alone. Explain stuff to me, or let me see it. We were trying to hire a developer, and while I was talking to the guy, explaining that no, 2600 mag wasn't named for an Atari and cool stuff like Linux on handhelds that he was having the geek hot sweats over, my CnEO (Chief non-executing officer) decides "enough of that, let me show him the Powerpoint slides". You can see the change where this guy realizes he's gonna have a tech-person clueless boss spinning directionless firing off orders from a random buzzword generator. He declined our offer.

I had to have talks with my CEO, try to get him on track sometimes. They had the idea "we're a startup, we don't have to be perfect" and I'm thinking, we have to strive for perfection more cause we have no cushion to fall back on. MS has billions to ride out a storm, we don't. When I asked him how many people he thought wanted to quit, he said he didn't care, I'm thinkin, this should make him anxious to find out and not lose half his staff, but he just wanted to end the convo with me. He missed a meeting with some investor bank because he forgot where it was supposed to be. We took 14 months to get a project manager, the CEO lying about it was one of the reasons I got so mad that I just didn't care anymore, and the whole place had that opinion of spinning our wheels and nobody cared. At least he was fully buzzword compliant, with team-building this and that (I tried to get a doctor's note - I can't teambuild today, I have a bad back. I can't do any team-building where I have to lift more than 20 pounds). And he often said "We have to build it perfect" and "we build it fast cause we just have to get it out there for people to see it" in the same paragraph without getting, or completely ignoring the contradiction.

Business plans often aren't the problem as much as those (mis)executing them.

Sorry, but ESR *was* gloating

[Sanity]

ESR annoys me. His constant need to remind people how influential/rich/skilled he is with a sickening false modesty. His self-publicising.

This article is a perfect example, what is the point of it? What is he saying? Basically, he is saying - "Look at me - I am rich!", it has no informative value beyond that. Of course, he should have listened to those who told him to keep quiet, not so much because he might get people begging him for money, but because it makes him look like a total fool when his riches turn into dust.