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Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Preacherman on January 23, 2007, 10:10:49 AM

Title: 101 dumbest business moves of 2006
Post by: Preacherman on January 23, 2007, 10:10:49 AM
CNN has a fun gallery about this:  see http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0701/gallery.101dumbest_2007/index.html for all the gory details.

Samples:

"German utility EnBW admits that its employees lost the keys to the most highly secure areas of its nuclear plant in Philippsburg.  After months of fruitless searching, the company announces plans to change the locks."

"TextTrust, a company that uses a combination of software and human editors to scour the Web for spelling errors, issues a press release on the most commonly misspelled words it has found 'on the 16 million we pages it has spell-checked over the past year'. "

"After a run-up in metal prices, the U.S. Mint announces that its cost for producing a penny has risen to 1.73 cents, while that for a nickel has grown to 8.34 cents.  In addition to costing American taxpayers more than $100 million a year, the imbalance also forces the federal government to enact new regulations prohibiting the melting of coins to extract their intrinsic value."

"The city of Hoboken, N.J., signs a deal to have Robotic Parking operate its Garden Street Garage, tripling the number of available spaces by shuffling cars in and out through automated lifts.  When Robotic hikes its monthly fees by 20 percent, however, Hoboken officials give the company the boot.  One small problem: Robotic's employees are the only ones who know how to operate the system, and the company disables its software, trapping dozens of customers' cars in the garage for days. After a court order restores its control of the garage, Hoboken pays $1.9 million to another firm to install a new system."

 cheesy
Title: Re: 101 dumbest business moves of 2006
Post by: Matthew Carberry on January 23, 2007, 11:07:28 AM
The last two are government, not business.  It's Hoboken's fault they messed up, the contractor made out just fine.   grin
Title: Re: 101 dumbest business moves of 2006
Post by: cosine on January 23, 2007, 12:10:19 PM
Quote
3. McDonald's
Guess the translator took the phrase "viral marketing" a bit too literally...
In August, McDonald's runs a promotional contest in Japan in which it gives away 10,000 Mickey D's-branded MP3 players.

The gadgets come preloaded with 10 songs - and, in some cases, a version of the QQPass family of Trojan horse viruses, which, when uploaded to a PC, seeks to capture passwords, user names, and other data and then forward them to hackers.

Geez... dummies. 

They're all really funny. cheesy