A recent thread in GQ about U-Haul was overwhelmed by people relating their bad experiences. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about them myself. But yet they are one of the most successful companies in the area of renting trucks.
Know any other companies in this seemingly contradictory position?
The Linen Chest, in Canada. So severely disorganised I almost shot myself several times while working there, out of sheer frustration.
Most UK high-street electrical goods retailers (not mentioning any names, except Dixon’s). With some exceptions the staff I’ve dealt with have been surly, unhelpful and unable to display even minimal knowledge about the products they’re selling. I don’t expect shop staff paid peanuts to be able to explain every detail on every PC, stereo or TV in stock, but it would be nice if they could do more than just read off the box.
A local fast food joint named taco bell, they never can get an order right.
Xerox has been horribly mismanaged since the late 1960’s. They invented the laser printer (and the forerunner of Postscript), the first real workstation/PC, the point and click interface (WYSIWYG), Ethernet, etc. And let other companies get rich off their ideas. Living purely off the brand name association “Xerox” means a copier ever since and then just barely getting by. (The reason I heard Xerox tanked is that they hired a bunch of Ford execs during the boom times.)
IBM, although quite successful, is widely regarded as a seriously mismanaged company. Standard budgeting and accounting methods used by almost everyone are alien to IBM. If they had been reasonably managed since the 1970’s, a PC would still mean an IBM PC and the CPU and OS that came with it would be made by IBM. They’ve been playing catchup on Internet apps all along. Fortunately, they are big enough to weather the dot-bomb better than most companies. But when the dust settles, it is unlikely they will press this advantage. They recently sold off their disk drive business. Partly hurting due to bad quality control. But it had been a steady money maker for a long time. This will likely go down as a classic example of a bad business move.
The American auto makers are also amazing. Ad agencies that happen to make cars in order to have a product to sell. People have wondered for decades how they can stay in business given the superior competition. Ads and customer inertia have allowed them to ignore many deep rooted problems within.
Kmart. Nothing works, we never have merchandise in, never have enough help, nothing rings up right.
sigh
Yeah, but KMart filed for bankruptcy protection…didn’t it?
Uh, someone else tried that style of hanging onto everything for themselves.
Last time I checked, Macintosh accounted for less than 10% of computers in use…
The United States Federal Government.
AOL
“Sucessful Company” Oy. :smack:
For the OP:
Try Ford as of late.
Focus and Escape recalled, recalled some more, then recalled again. Just park them at the dealers each night please. Crown Vic’s burning. Explorer’s flipping, lawsuits flying. Mustangs sooooo old. Exclusion a flop. Daddies little boy in charge. Run, don’t walk, from Ford stock.
Corel. Nice job with Wordperfect. Could you run it any further into the ground.
Worldcom. :rolleyes:
All of them?
Wow. So many things wrong here. Where to start?
ftg said:
That is most likely true up until Gerstner took over in the early '90s. After that, I don’t believe that anyone, except those who have been out of touch for 10 years, thought it was mismanaged.
Cite, please. I can remember one accounting issue that has come up with them in the last ten years, and it’s always been about they way IBM accounts for one very specific type of transaction.
IBM really mishandled the whole PC era. Can’t disagree with that. But others have pointed out the bad parts of exclusivity. Also, keep in mind that IBM was being “Microsofted” by the DOJ during this period.
Hmm. I guess it depends on how you define “Internet app.” IBM has never been very in to consumer-level stuff. When it comes to business-level Internet apps they haven’t been playing catch-up lately.
They are a highly-diversified company that offers a range of products and services that is completely unique in the computer industry. IBM got through the bubble bursting because they’re not an Internet company, not because they’re big.
Hahahahahahahaha! Sorry, no. The drive bsuiness had been suffering for quite a while.
To sum up: IBM had one, horrible, disasterous, screwed-up decade with morons at the helm (that almost drove it bankrupt). Before and after that, not so much.
I have to chime in with Xerox. (I used to work for them.)
They didn’t “invent” the mouse or the GUI (that was Douglas Engelbart), but they came up with Ethernet (which is still in use), and developed the first GUI-oriented PC in 1973 with the Alto. It was monstrous and expensive, but was later refined into the Xerox Star. Unfortunately, the brass at Xerox on the East Coast didn’t get what was being developed at PARC on the West Coast, so the Star never went anywhere. It predated the Lisa and the Macintosh.
(Oh, and BTW, Apple didn’t really rip off the Xerox GUI concept - Xerox bought shares in Apple in exchange for their concepts.)
Apple made it big with the Mac (after a few years, and the failed Lisa), which lined Xerox’s pockets quite nicely. But had the Xerox brass been more open, you’d be talking about Xerox vs. Microsoft instead of Apple vs. Microsoft. (I don’t doubt that Microsoft would have ended up anywhere else than where they are now.)
No cites here. Do your own Google search.
I’d have to add the British Mobile Phone Service Provider O2. Despite being one of the most rational people in times of trouble, they reduce me to yelling at my phone in a maddened blood-red fury on a weekly basis. No one can tell me how I am meant to set up offline email and O2 WAP on my mobile, because my Billing Company (Carphone Warehouse) has the right to delete all O2’s WAP settings and put MVIVA (their own) on instead. Carphone Warehouse can apparently detail the innermost workings of O2’s systems (or any other, since they cover all phone service providers) but knows nothing about MVIVA. O2 on the other hand, knows nothing about anything. Added to this, both MVIVA and O2 completely refuse to acknowledge that you can either A) Compose emails offline on your phone and then connect to send them, instead preferring to order you to connect FIRST and THEN write your email, and B) can send pictures you’ve taken with your phones built in digicam to anyone without the use of MMS. (IT’s simple - you just email it as in part A). And neither are willing to help with anything even remotely to do with either of these problems since it means less WAP calls whilst your write your mailings and less profits for them as a whole.
But if O2 hadn’t blown so many billions of pounds on acquiring 3G licenses (that are probably not going to be worth their salt in the end), they’d be able to afford a customer support that does more than redirect you to their premium rate phone help desk. An email was not enough to find out if non-geographic lo-call rate numbers are included in free time on my tarriff, must call helpdesk!! An email is not enough to find out any WAP settings, must call helpdesk!! A visit to their website gave me lots on information on how to play their textflirt game, but nothing about anything I wanted to know. And I know that as soon as I call the helpdesk, I will be sent on a merrygoround as they refuse to tell me what I need to know to circumvent their hyperlative MMS and WAP rates.
So all in all they are highly irritating to deal with.
But there is one vague glimmer of hope: Their website glowingly informs people that the company is ‘evolving’. But they wouldn’t need to if they weren’t so completely lodged in the protozoic era equivalent of customer management.
-James
(P.S. I have sorted it all now with the help of some chap in a shop in Sheffield. I can now take and send pictures and write emails without MMS or expensive WAP calls. : D But I bet that both mviva AND O2 will put SMTP restrictions on their services to prevent people sending offline emails through third party websites…)
Where to begin so many errors, backwards assumptions, etc. I can’t spend time citing everybody by username.
Re: IBM. Here’s Robert X. Cringely’s recent take on IBM’s historical management problems. Note that he skewers (rightly) Gerstner. Only a hero to the “this quarter” idiots, but didn’t do anything in the long term interests of the company.
Two people (egad) really screwed up in linking somehow my post to IBM trying to take the PC proprietary (with things like the MCA bus). And fantasized that I thought that this was a good thing. No, this is in fact a major example of IBM screwing up. IBM could still be dominating the PC business like a giant by just massive sales, production and innovation. All of which could (and should) have been done while keeping things open.
So A. Don’t read in something that I didn’t say. B. Don’t assume that I could conceivably agree with the assumption you just made.
The disk drive business would still be quite profitable if it were run right. Again, note. IBM screwed up something. Therefore I am critisizing what it did, not supporting it.
I know people who worked for IBM in the 50’s right up to people working there now. Including management and research people. It has consistently failed to capitalize on innovation that it has developed in house and almost always not noticed trends until it is too late. Remember the “Jurassic Park” joke of a few years back?
Re: Xerox.
Again, people are reading in things that I did not say. Read my post again scott evil. I did not say they invented the mouse. I did not mention Apple and the other matters at all. The Xerox Alto (which I used for several years) was the first real system to integrate the mouse, etc. into a non-lab prototype.
You are also quite mistaken about Xerox Alto’s cost. To make them one at a time cost Xerox $20k. This was in 1977 dollars! There was big production costs just for things like the plastic shell that housed the monitor. The highest estimate I ever heard for producing Altos in reasonable quantities was $5k. Again that was in 1977 dollars. $5000 for a workstation with GUI and ethernet that interoperates with fileservers and laser printers in 1977 is hardly expensive. The Alto’s projected low production cost directly encouraged the founders of Sun Microsystems to go into the worksation market. I don’t know what you mean by “monstrous”. The box was about the space of 2-3 PC tower cases. Large by today’s standards, but in 1977 you have to compare them to the rack sized systems of the day.
ftg, I never said you said Xerox invented the mouse. However, when I used to work for them, they had these self-congratulatory signs saying “ooh, we invented the mouse, ooh, we invented the fax machine, ooh, ooh, ooh, look at us!” I was referring to the first statement on those propaganda signs, saying they had invented the mouse and the GUI. No, they were the first to implement it, at PARC.
Anyway, having done much research on the Xerox Star, it’s really a shame it went over like a lead zeppelin, because from what I’ve seen, it looks like it might have been a real contender.
Apple didn’t steal from Xerox, and Micro$oft didn’t steal from Apple. The GUI is an intuitive concept, and I believe would have happened anyway. There’s still speculation over who got to PARC first - Apple or Microsoft. Different web sites present different accounts of the whole thing. The Lisa wasn’t originally going to have a GUI, but that was changed after Apple’s PARC visit.
There are many differences between the Xerox GUI and the Lisa/Mac GUI. From what I’ve read (correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m sure you will if I am), there was no drag-and-drop in the Xerox GUI. The three-button mouse was deemed too complicated by Apple, and therefore was replaced by a one-button mouse. (I still hold that a two-button mouse is optimal, with a scrolling wheel. Who wants to hold down the control key to get a context-sensitive pop-up menu when you can just use the right mouse button? Interestingly enough, Xerox DocuTech copiers - well they’re more than copiers - still use the old three-button mouse.)
IMO, Xerox should have been more foreward-thinking. When their patent on photocopiers expired (late 70s?) they should have pushed forward moreso than they did. The Star could have saved them, if they could have reduced the price tag. But, as I’ve read, this was a company whose modus operandi was based on paper documents, and their reluctance to move to a paperless office is understandable.
Finally, the laser printer as we now know it wouldn’t have flown unless a (then) small company now known as Adobe hadn’t come up with the PostScript language. Remember the days of sticking font cartidges in an old HP laser printer? PostScript changed all that.
British Telecom.
They run O2 moblie phones.
They tried to buy out other middle rank telecoms providers, and lost lots doing so.
The only thing they have in their favour is a virtual monoploy of lazy British consumers who cannot be arsed to move to a better service.
There have been several threads in the pit about them, all thouroghly justified.
Things like misleading advertising when promoting the use of moblie phones whilst on overseas holidays, whilst not explaining the tariff system that can lead to charges in exces of £10 per minute.
Transferring users of their “anytime” internet services onto a winding country road of telecoms communication, a road which is frequently blocked by electronic cows lying in the way, entirely potholed, extremely obscure and difficult to find your way onto, and a road which if you travel too often, you get barred from, despite paying handsomly to do.
There is that Swedish company Tetrapack that patented those cardboard milk containers. You can never open them properly and, when you at last manage to open them , half the milk goes everywhere except where you want it to. The owners of this company ( two brothers ) are amongst the richest men in the world. 
I work for a major chain bookstore here in the States. The entire management philosophy seems to be based on blind hope and a complete and utter disregard for common sense.
For example:
We have these big cheap books that we used to put out in front of the store, and they sold really well. We have a loot of foot traffic going by the store, so people would walk by, see this huge, attractive book on sale for 3 bucks, and buy it. Management got the bright idea to take these books and put them inside the store…all the way at the back of the store, with no signage or anything indicating where these books were.
Bargain book sales went down. Way, way down. Management is shocked, SHOCKED that people wandering by don’t wander in and magically find their way to the back of the store to buy these books. Yet my particular chain keeps expanding.