Okay Geek Farm
Top 5 Corporate Epic Fails of 2011
Brandon Davenport
2011 has been chalk full of exciting stories; like the iPad 2, Nintendo’s Project Cafe, Firefox 4, Portal 2, Season 8 of The Office, and much more. But with so much good there usually comes an equal amount of not-so-good news. Now, usually the sad news is along the lines of “Company X Suing Company Y” or “This totally awesome game is being delayed 6 months” but this year, the bad news was so rediculous that it got to a point of becoming a laughing stock. Here’s the breakdown of epic corporate fails of from 2011 so far…
5 - Microsoft buys Skype
Advertisers, advertisers, advertisers! — Skype has been on a downward spiral for the past few months (need to pay for video calls, horrible UI, more ads) and what Microsoft is planning for Skype is basically adding gasoline to the fire, or advertisements on Video calls.
When asked about adding more ads to Skype, CEO Tony Bates said “Given the size of our base…it seems like a natural monetization extension,” and we can only imagine Steve Ballmer towering over him, his shadow overtaking the “best boss ever” mug on his desk.
4 - Steve Jobs F***ing flips out
Note: These are Steve Job’s exact quotes taken from this article on MacRumors. It’s crazy to realize that Jobs could be going senile…
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?”
[Team responds with satisfactory answer]
“So why the fuck doesn’t it do that? Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.”
3 - Gawker site redesign
Before the redesign, Gawker was one of the fugliest websites on the internet, and in our minds, there was no way to make it worse. Well there was a way after all and if anything can be an example of how not to redesign a website, it’s the Gawker redesign.
The redesign itself was raunchy, but the icing on the cake was the glorified advertising, to the point of blocking the content entirely — not to mention, Gawker leaked all of it’s user info.
2 - Godaddy CEO Elephant Hunting
This is one of the most outlandish endevours of a company’s CEO in the bast 20 years. Godaddy CEO, Bob Parsons went out to Zimbabwe and took video and photos of hunting elephants.
Once images got out, they spread like wildfire. Bob proceeded to sieze websites hosted on Godaddy hosting images of the elephant hunting, and proceeded to fume smoke as he watched more videos and images flood Twitter, Facebook and blogs world-wide.
This wasn’t Godaddy’s fault. It was all Bob.
1 - PSN out of order for 4 weeks
On April 20th, Sony announced that the Playstation Network had been compromized and they needed to shut it down for some quick matinence. What we didn’t know was that all of our user info had been leaked, including email and credit card info.
Once things got messy, Sony proceeded to point fingers at Anonomys to which Anon denied that they had anything to do with it, even though there was strong evidence they did.
As of May 18th, the PSN is still not 100% active, and to compensate for the users suffering, Sony offered some free games and services. The people who really got hurt? Independent developers and Valve.
In summary
2011 has been a pretty eventfull year so far, and when you wrap everything up, more than anything it’s been a rollercoaster of mistakes and change. There are many more companies to mention in this list, and we’re sure you’re screaming at the computer screen, “why didn’t you include X in your list!!” — so leave a comment, and tell us about a company that has epic failed in 2011.
