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The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business 460

Posted by michael from the bright-ideas dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Business 2.0's fourth annual review of the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid moments of the past year. Yes, SCO is represented..."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business More

The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business

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  • I've got one ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dukael_Mikakis ( 686324 ) <andrewfoersterNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:21PM (#8138213)
    ... my company's hiring me, as evidently I am reading slashdot at this very moment. And we've got a patch going out today.

    Mark one for the "little guy".

  • WTF? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:21PM (#8138214)
    Dairy Queen franchisee W.A. Enterprises is docked $700,000 by a jury in Richmond, Va., after DQ employee Ayman Ahmed Hasaballa allegedly slides into a booth next to a female customer, pulls down her sweater, bites her breast, and says, "I am like Dracula." The jury holds the company responsible because it didn't fire Hasaballa six months earlier after he allegedly attacked a female co-worker.

    Are they hiring?

  • What is this!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by moehoward ( 668736 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:22PM (#8138219)
    Again... No sarcastic, slanted, political message from the editor tagged on to the end of the story.

    How in the world am I supposed to know how to think? You expect me to actually read the article?
    • I'm just trying to figure out why the person who wrote the article felt the need to make a running gag of having the bold titles reference the previous number half the time.

      It's like they got the number off by one or something...

      I laughed the first time, snickered the second and groaned by the third time...

  • From the article... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by meta-monkey ( 321000 ) * on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:22PM (#8138222) Journal
    Dumbest moment in advertising, according to the article:

    11. Mommy, can I have something to drink with my cheesesteak?

    Fast-food sandwich chain Quiznos launches its new Philly cheesesteak with a TV commercial featuring two businessmen eating lunch alfresco. One's a smart Quiznos customer; the other, a non-Q loser. "Were you raised by wolves?" asks appalled Guy No. 1. Yes, indeed--and he still calls the wolf den home. Cut to a shot of Guy No. 2 lying on the ground and suckling a mama wolf's teat.


    That's the dumbest moment in advertising? I thought that commercial was hilarious!!

    • Re:From the article... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'll tell you what's dumb about it. They used the word "Philly". If a cheesesteak vendor uses the word "Philly", that is a red flag that the sandwich tastes like dog poo. It is the culinary equivalent to the "As seen on TV" logo.

    • Re:From the article... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Thud457 ( 234763 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:39PM (#8138375) Homepage Journal
      [QUOTE]
      30 On the plus side, all the applicants were buying Eclipses


      "Anyone, feasibly, given enough time and enough resources, could hack into any system."--Brad Hill, CIO of Dealerskins, a Tennessee firm that hosts websites for car dealerships, confessing in September that the company had exposed 1,000 customers' car-loan applications on an unprotected website. The Dealerskins "hack"--selecting "Source" from Internet Explorer's View menu to examine the webpage's HTML code--takes about a quarter of a second.
      [/QUOTE]

      Nice to know that my internet financial transactions are safe since they're being handled by professionals. (Professional idiots, apparently.)

    • Re:From the article... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Then there was that Jack-in-the-Box commercial from a few years back. The one where Jack is going cross-country like a political campaigner, talking about all the "great" qualities of Jack-food and associating each one to the locale he is in at the time.

      When in the mid-west he is on a big tractor out plowing a field and he says, "Real milkshakes with enough buttermilk to lube a tractor!"

      Two weeks later, the mid-west scene was cut from that commercial, which continued to air for about 4-5 more months.

      I h
    • That's the dumbest moment in advertising? I thought that commercial was hilarious!!

      So did I.. plus the fact that the "raised by wolves" guy looked suspiciously like Mr. Bean, it was just the perfect set-up..
    • That's the dumbest moment in advertising? I thought that commercial was hilarious!!

      How funny, meaningful, informative, or insightful a commercial is, is pretty much meaningless by itself. We can all recall many very funny or interesting commercials, but can't remember the product. Banks are famous for this. I could give other examples, but you wouldn't remember the commercial if I named the product ;) hense the problem.

      The fact that you remember the product, liked the commercial, and would possibly co

    • Points here (Score:3, Interesting)

      by phorm ( 591458 )
      Indeed, of all the commercial in the last while this is probably the one most mentioned by my friends. Maybe I just hang around with a bunch of sickos (well, probably), but still it obviously proves that the commercial is getting high visibility.

      You might want to remember, if 10% of people ignore a commercial, 45% of people remember it because they like it, and 45% of people remember it but it bothered them... 90% still remember the commercial and have a company name quite possibly stuck in their head. Ho
    • What if they showed Raised by Wolves guy remembering his first date?

      * * *

      There's an SUV commercial featuring a suburban dad Raised By Wolves. He's shown chasing deer, fetching sticks, and cavorting with timber wolves.

      My question: Which came first, the car commercial or Quiznos's?

      Stefan

  • The All Time Dumbest Is... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tealover ( 187148 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:23PM (#8138227)
    IBM contracting out DOS to Microsoft...and letting Microsoft keep ownership.

    If IBM had played hardball and demanded ownership, more than likely Gates would have caved. The world would be much different today, that's for sure.

    No butterflys. The Rolling Stones wouldn't have sold out...ok, maybe that would still have happened.

  • Forget (Score:5, Funny)

    by jstrain ( 648252 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:24PM (#8138238)
    the 101 stupidest business moves, lets hear more about this Lingerie Bowl in #10!

  • SCO is in the 81-90 section? (Score:3, Informative)

    by rubypossum ( 693765 ) * on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:25PM (#8138248)
    SCO is in the 81-90 [business2.com] section? Number 83. Seems to be a little low on the list... but then I would've put it at #1.
    • Maybe in the future we can say that. Right now they're doing pretty well...depending on your point of view. As anyone that bought low low and sold high can tell you.

    • Re:SCO is in the 81-90 section? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by adamruck ( 638131 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:42PM (#8138397)
      no way... I would say sco is doing great for having no customers

      now if this was the list of the most unethical companies...... ding ding ding we have a winner
      • no way... I would say sco is doing great for having no customers...now if this was the list of the most unethical companies......

        Agreed. It is not a list of Evil Companies, but companies that make bad business decisions. SCO is shrewed because they went from having a 90% chance of death and 10% chance of mere piddly survivle, to an 80% chance of death and a 20% chance of getting royalties on the second biggest OS in history and being huge. Evilness aside, the second is the smarter choice it appears. At l

      • now if this was the list of the most unethical companies.....

        But people don't know. Just this morning Darl was interviewed on CNN where he painted the picture that those "Linux hackers" are attacking his business. Then he was asked a question about SCO's reward for leads ($250K) - could it be that the "bad guy" could turn someone in just to get the reward?

        Darl's answer was - yeah, potentially... that's what it has come down to, they can't sell Linux, it's free, so they attack us to get the money.

        Not exa

    • SCO? Have they done something wrong?
      *runs*

  • Million Mac Marathon (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CelticWhisper ( 601755 ) <celticwhisperNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:26PM (#8138259)
    How about Apple's release of countless models of Macintosh systems in the mid-90s, all with unique proprietary hardware configurations, causing stores nationwide to drop support and driving Apple to the brink of bankruptcy? I'd bet half of the death predictions for Apple fell within that time period.

  • Here's one... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Yoda2 ( 522522 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:26PM (#8138260)
    As president of my company, I had to send this out earlier this week...

    Today's Physics Lesson:

    Generally speaking, when something is cooled down it contracts and when it is heated it expands. The chemical compound commonly known as "water" follows this rule until 4 degrees Celsius (just under 40 degrees Fahrenheit) when it reaches its maximum density and starts expanding as it is further cooled. One interesting fact is that if you read the ingredients for many common beverages (say Diet Coke for example), you would see that they are comprised mostly of this "water" substance and thus take on many of its interesting physical characteristics. Another interesting fact is that in order to make "ice" which is the common name for "water" in its solid state, you generally have cool it to below 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Surprisingly enough, we actually have a device in our very own office building commonly known as a "freezer" capable of cooling "water" enough to bring about this magical state change.

    So what is the point of my little physics/trivia lesson? When you put an (already pressurized) can of Diet Coke into a freezer for more than a few minutes, it typically explodes!

    In the future, please refrain from placing beverages in the office freezer.

    The Management

    • Re:Here's one... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Eric_Cartman_South_P ( 594330 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:39PM (#8138367)
      What makes the parent post really funny is that he's the only employee.

    • Re:Here's one... (Score:3, Informative)

      by menscher ( 597856 )
      Uhh, I think that's why the bottom of the soda can is concave, rather than convex. If it gets too much pressure, it can pop out. They do similar things with milk jugs, for example.
      • ... the bottom of the soda can is concave, rather than convex ...

        Hmm, I always thought the base wasn't convex because if it was rounded out on the bottom it would fall over whenever you attempted to stand it on a flat surface. Not so useful for a container holding liquid really ...

      • Re:Here's one... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Politburo ( 640618 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:08PM (#8138590)
        Yup. However, as the cans are dented in transport, weak spots can be created in the aluminum. These weak spots require less force than the concave safety portion of the can to expand, and they will break first. Also, the concave portion can bend out so far that it will come lower than the normal bottom of the can. For this to happen while the can is normally upright, the whole container must be able to maintain a pressure sufficient enough to both expand the concave portion of the can and lift the can up.

      • Re:Here's one... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Clover_Kicker ( 20761 )
        Do you have the courage of your convictions? Go put a can of pop in the freezer, and let us know what happens.

        • Re:Here's one... (Score:3, Informative)

          by menscher ( 597856 )
          Do you have the courage of your convictions?

          Nope. I've seen the bottoms get popped out, but I've also seen cold cans explode. We had a very sticky front seat of a car after leaving a can in it for a cold week.

          I was more raising the issue since I think it odd that they built in these protections, but apparently they don't always (or even usually) work.

        • Re:Here's one... (Score:3, Informative)

          by _xeno_ ( 155264 )
          Speaking as someone who has left a 12-pack of Diet Vanilla Coke out in his car for a good 6 hours in 15 degree F weather, I can say the following:

          It depends. :)

          One of the cans had the bottom pop out like several people expect to happen. Most of the cans showed signs of the bottom starting to be pushed out, some were just fine though. Since I could no longer put the can with the bottom inverted down, I had to open and drain it and I can tell you that the pressure is indeed increased - soda spilled ever

    • Re:Here's one... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Politburo ( 640618 )
      When you put an (already pressurized) can of Diet Coke into a freezer for more than a few minutes, it typically explodes!

      That's a hell of a freezer for it to happen in 5 minutes or so.


    • Do you know how many *YEARS* it took for me to get my fucktard room mates to stop putting bottles of Corona beer in the freezer "so it would be ice-cold when I get home"?

      The effect is especially amusing when you have an automatic icemaker with a door dispenser. Shards of clear glass are amazingly transparent when interspersed with ice cubes.

    • Re:Here's one... (Score:3, Informative)

      by AJWM ( 19027 )
      I'll add a data point to that: regular (non-diet) Coke takes a lot lower temperature to freeze and explode than does Diet Coke. The sugar in Coke depresses the freezing point way more than does the tiny amount of artifical sweetener in Diet Coke. That said, the Diet Coke is a heck of a lot easier to clean up.

      (Leaving unopened cans in the car overnight in winter also demonstrates this principle.)

  • Number 16 - Spike Lee (Score:5, Interesting)

    by curtisk ( 191737 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:27PM (#8138266) Homepage Journal
    I'm glad that idiot is listed so high, that lawsuit was just wrong. I guess he owns the market on "Spike" huh? I was hoping the network won, but it turns out there was a settlement, wonder how much it cost to have Mr. Lee grace the network with "his name" - what a tool
    • i thought the whole thing was just some kind of gimmic staged by spice lee and the TV channel.

      Remember any publicity is good publicity

    • I'm glad that idiot is listed so high, that lawsuit was just wrong. I guess he owns the market on "Spike" huh? I was hoping the network won, but it turns out there was a settlement, wonder how much it cost to have Mr. Lee grace the network with "his name" - what a tool

      He could certainly make a case... until reading this article, I thought he had something to do with the network. Not just because they used the name "Spike," but because the style of their logo reminded me vaguely of something Spike-Lee rel

  • OSDN Personals (Score:5, Funny)

    by Muda69 ( 718162 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:28PM (#8138281)
    The OSDN Personals ads get my vote!

  • And you thought you loved your car? (Score:5, Funny)

    by erick99 ( 743982 ) <homerun@gmail.com> on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:29PM (#8138287)
    This one gets my vote: In Canada, General Motors is forced to come up with a new name for its Buick LaCrosse sedan after discovering that crosse is a slang term for masturbation in Quebec. If gives a whole new meaning to "road trip." Happy Trails, Erick
    • That's allright... Sony Japan was going to bring a peta-byte industrial tape storage system to North America... and call it the "Peta-File".

      Uh... no. Don't do that.

      (Seriously, an ex co-worker was part of the Sony Canada business team involved).

      MadCow.

  • Since No One Reads the Article (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dave at hostwerks ( 466530 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:30PM (#8138298) Homepage
    I liked this one. Mental note: avoid McDonald's on Chicago's famed museum campus.

    12 It could be worse. At least they're not selling wolf milk.
    In July, a McDonald's outlet in Chicago's Field Museum is closed by health inspectors who discover that the food preparation area is backed up with raw sewage and that employees have changed the expiration dates on 200 cartons of milk.

  • #102 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:31PM (#8138301)
    Requiring TEN PAGE VIEWS to get through a dumbest moments list.

  • SCO is at No. 83 (Score:2, Informative)

    by cliveholloway ( 132299 )

    for those of you who can't be bothered to RTFA.

    michael, you think we're psychic or what? Try using a link maybe when you talk about SCO's position [business2.com].

    Nobody cares about anything except maybe SCO and the RIAA (at No 82, on the same page).

  • Taking the Fun out of Life (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrBlackBand ( 715820 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:31PM (#8138303)
    Why was putting out "Ghettopoly" a dumb business decision? What ever happened to humor? Or maybe caving in to some idiot protesters was the bad business decision.

    And since when is it sexist to show women playing football? Sure, they were in lingere, but that just shows off the beauty of nature. What do people have against nature? Why are people so damn puritanical in this country?

    Are we even allowed to have fun anymore?

    • Re:Taking the Fun out of Life (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      And since when is it sexist to show women playing football?

      I doubt anyone would consider it sexist to show women PLAYING football. Softcore porn masquerading as football, sponsored by a major automaker, on the other hand, certainly could be offensive. It implies that whereas men can play sports, women are just there for sexual arousal.

  • Here it is. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Camel Pilot ( 78781 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:32PM (#8138316) Homepage Journal
    For those who don't want to hunt and find the SCO reference on the slow server

    83 How to win friends and influence software sales.
    "Terrorists do things designed to intimidate people, and we see a lot of that going on all the time--people trying to attack us or people that we're associated with."--SCO Group CEO Darl McBride, complaining about the backlash from hundreds of thousands of Linux users after the former Linux software vendor sued IBM, a major Linux proponent, for allegedly violating its intellectual-property rights.

    Darl really did [pcworld.com] say that! - i know it is hard to believe.

    Talk about the kettle calling the pot...

  • Follow up to the follow up (Score:3)

    by Ralph Wiggam ( 22354 ) * on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:35PM (#8138335) Homepage
    In early May of 2003, Slashdot and other places reported on the MS iLoo, a web enabled toilet. The jokes came a mile a minute. Then a few days later, MS said that it was an April Fools joke. I've seen that happen before where someone reads something and doesn't realize it was written on April 1 and reports it as fact. Check this out from the article:

    Part 3 Something doesn't smell right. The next day, realizing that nobody's buying the April-Fool's-joke-29-days-after-April-Fool's-Day explanation, Microsoft calls back reporters and admits that it had told an iLulu: The project was indeed real but has subsequently been killed. "We jumped the gun basically yesterday in confirming that it was a hoax," says MSN group product manager Lisa Gurry. "In fact, it was not."

    Wow. What a completely insane project. Many people were certainly fired for spending money on that.

    -B

  • LaCrosse (Score:5, Informative)

    by Scrameustache ( 459504 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:36PM (#8138347) Homepage Journal
    8 Just to be on the safe side, let's also lose the jack, the fuel pump, and the four-stroke engine.
    In Canada, General Motors is forced to come up with a new name for its Buick LaCrosse sedan after discovering that crosse is a slang term for masturbation in Quebec.

    Its also a slang term for "a rip-off".
    I never heard it used to mean masturbation when used as a noun, its masturnbatory meaning is only applied when used as a verb. So To me that GM car sounds more like a rip-off than a jerk-off. Also note that GM laid off a lot of people in Quebec recently by closing down a plant...

    Ah, fond memories of the sign "do not cross the track" at the amusement park with my friends when I was 14... : )

  • Did they mention... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ziggy_zero ( 462010 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:41PM (#8138391)
    Clear Channel's recent decision [suntimes.com] to replace O'Hare airport as a landmark for the traffic updates in Chicago with the Allstate Arena due to a marketing agreement?

    Clear Channel is worse than the devil.

  • Strong Mutual Funds (Score:5, Funny)

    by mhesseltine ( 541806 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:42PM (#8138399) Homepage Journal

    I don't know if I trust my finances to a guy who, when you look him up in the phone book is listed as Strong, Dick.

    The guy's probably pretty good at "screwing" his investors.

    </juvenile_humor>

  • Memory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sean80 ( 567340 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:42PM (#8138402)
    What bothers me is that there's no community memory about these sorts of things. Say I have a guy who walks into my office looking to fill a job position I have. How do I know he isn't some scum who ripped off a bunch of little old ladies last year when he was a stocktrader on the floor on the New York Stock Exchange? How do I know he's not the marketing guy who named his car 'Le Masturbation'?

    Maybe that's a role played by HR consulting firms that I'm simply not aware of, but my understanding is that those guys typically search criminal records and so forth.

    Who's up for a web site that catalogs this sort of behaviour, easy to search, for use during recruitment? Otherwise these guys just prey on our lack of communal memory.

    • Re:Memory (Score:3, Informative)

      by savagedome ( 742194 )
      You might want to look at what the geek chick [slashdot.org] did ;)

    • Re:Memory (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mr. Piddle ( 567882 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:44PM (#8138970)
      Who's up for a web site that catalogs this sort of behaviour, easy to search, for use during recruitment?

      1) It's none of your business.
      2) If the government were doing it, how would you feel?
      3) The "second chance" is the key to our theories that people can be reformed.
      4) Your proposed system would "convict" people outside of a court of law, possibly making their lives miserable with no justification other then hearsay.
      5) Isn't this what references are supposed to be for?
  • Are they nuts? Where on this list is my executive's decision to not give me a rather large payrise?
  • 30 On the plus side, all the applicants were buying Eclipses. "Anyone, feasibly, given enough time and enough resources, could hack into any system."--Brad Hill, CIO of Dealerskins, a Tennessee firm that hosts websites for car dealerships, confessing in September that the company had exposed 1,000 customers' car-loan applications on an unprotected website. The Dealerskins "hack"--selecting "Source" from Internet Explorer's View menu to examine the webpage's HTML code--takes about a quarter of a second.

    Fi
  • Where's New Coke? I've only looked at the top 20, but I think it would have been way up there (near number one).

    And what about Divx? (not the codec)

    • An anonymous reader writes
      "Business 2.0's fourth annual review of the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid moments of the past year...."

      ... Ooops. That's kind of embarrasing :(. RTFA, and all that.

    • New Coke wasn't a mistake.

      The
      [Real] Coke --> New Coke --> Coke classic
      changes allowed them to change the sweetener (sugar -> sugar and/or corn stuff) without people noticing as much.

      • Sorry, nope. [snopes.com] They had made the switch completely BEFORE New Coke.

        Snopes to the rescue, again..

        In 1980, five years before the introduction of New Coke, half the cane sugar in Coca-Cola had been replaced with high fructose corn syrup. By six months prior to New Coke's knocking the original Coca-Cola off the shelves, there was no cane sugar in American Coca-Cola. Whether they knew it or not, what consumers were drinking then was 100% sweetened by high fructose corn syrup.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:47PM (#8138443)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I actually witnessed the QVC incident... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gillbates ( 106458 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:49PM (#8138456) Homepage Journal

    My wife was watching QVC, and I wasn't really paying attention until I saw the guy fall off the ladder. At first, I thought it was a part of the show until I heard someone saying, "It's OK, he's moving..."

    Then it occurred to me that perhaps they would have a hard time selling this ladder when their own demonstrator fell off the thing on national tv!

    And the best part: The host continued to plug the ladder as safe and convenient, in spite of what had just happened!

  • #1 -- two greedy dicks (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:49PM (#8138459)

    from the article:
    #1 (TIE) Two greedy Richards.
    Richard the First ... Dick Grasso ... Richard the Second ... Dick Strong...

    come on!! they had a PERFECT headline for the #1 dumbest moment, they could have had:
    #1 (TIE) Two greedy Dicks.

    damn the political correctness!
  • "At an investment conference in January, Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson explains his company's recent layoffs: "There are 15 to 20 percent of the people that really add 80 percent of the value. Although we have a lot of good people, you can cut a fair amount ... and still be well positioned for the upturn." Paulson later apologizes in a voice-mail message sent to every Goldman employee."

    Y'know, this is no different than just about any CEO speech I've heard in any of a dozen companies in the last five yea

  • dumbest != shameful/dishonest (Score:3, Informative)

    by flint ( 118836 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:52PM (#8138484)
    Interesting to note re: SCO the dumb moment is the quote. I can agree with that. Using terrorism or war related analogies just doesn't fly. Ask Kellen "I'm a soldier" Winslow Jr.

    But, how many replies to this article will rave about SCO being dumb and that they should be rated higher? Probably too many due to a little myopia. What does SCO care if they piss of linux advocates? It's not like they have to worry about the opinions of most techies. They can't lose market share they didn't have. And what do they care if people are driven away from Linux to truly other systems if they succeed in forcing companies to pony up licensing fees? If they win they make money they wouldn't have. If they lose they die but they've survived longer than if they'd never tried.

    Their moves may be detestable to /.'rs but aren't necessarily dumb. They've been on life-support for awhile and if you were a good CEO you'd probably take a stab at IBM's deep pockets too. Their moves appear to have already extended their life.

    A corporation's chief mission is to survive. That comes long before societal and ethical concerns.

  • chevy (Score:2, Funny)

    by gordlea ( 258731 )
    And chevy used to wonder why their Nova car didn't sell very well in mexico...

  • My favorite: (Score:5, Funny)

    by shystershep ( 643874 ) * <bdshepherd@gma i l .com> on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:03PM (#8138557) Homepage Journal
    39 They thought about changing their name, but, sadly, Whizzinator was already taken.
    U.K. energy company Powergen finds itself so often confused with a similarly named Italian battery maker that it issues a statement disavowing any connection between the two enterprises. It's not so much the Italian company that the Brits want to distance themselves from as its Web address: Powergenitalia.com.

    The humor . . . it is too much . . .

  • $21 billion (Score:5, Funny)

    by ad0gg ( 594412 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:11PM (#8138607)
    In October, three and a half years after buying Network Solutions for $21 billion, VeriSign sells its dotcom-registration business for $100 million.

    Coulda bought $21 billion worth of beer and returned the bottles and still would a made $900 million more money.

  • Purain? Eeeeeeewwwwww! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Scrameustache ( 459504 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:13PM (#8138629) Homepage Journal
    31 Yes, it does. But your bottled rainwater idea still bites.
    In February, inventor J. Hutton Pulitzer files a trademark application for Purain, which he proposes as the name for a line of processed rainwater. When the Dallas Observer mocks Pulitzer's audacity--he was the man behind the CueCat scanner flop--he transforms the Purain website into a lecture about media schadenfreude: "Sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, fighting, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip. Sounds like today's media--doesn't it?"

    Purain is a french word for "liquid manure".

    I hope they're planning to compete against Naya and Perrier on their home turf! That'll be an entertaining press release.

  • "Terrorists do things. . . (Score:4, Funny)

    by kfg ( 145172 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:17PM (#8138662)
    . . . designed to intimidate people" -Darl McBride

    You're absolutely right Mr. McBride. Now, about this letter you sent me about a license fee for something you don't have any known rights to, complete with a threat to raise said fee if I don't comply in a timely manner?

    Keep talking, maybe next year you can break into the top 50.

    KFG

  • So where's the true evil? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:24PM (#8138743) Journal
    Articles like this are cute and give us a chance to snicker at idiotic behaviour, but the worst business decisions of (pick a year) should really be looking at and even emphasising the deeply amoral and criminal behaviour of some companies. Consider Coca-Cola, in India: They're draining ground water, bottling and reselling it, and dumping the purification byproducts onto the desert they've created where fertile farmland once stood. A few years ago, Nike (and then everyone else) ran into issues with sweatshop labour, but we don't hear about these things anymore, and they're still going on!

    Bottom line, I'd like to see a magazine doing an article on the REAL abuses of businesses, and not just their silly little dumb decisions.

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