Until a few years ago, they built their PC to run an OS called PC98, that wasn’t compatible with anything. If you go to any second-hand computer store in Tokyo you can find NEC desktops being left outside so the homeless can use them as building materials.
Remember Iridium, the failed satellite phone network? NEC was a main financial backer of ICO, Iridium’s less successful competitor. The project collapsed before a single rocket had been launched. The cost for the satellite and antenna networks alone was projected at $10 billion. Do you think there are enough people in the world willing to buy $3000 telephones to recoup those costs? NEC thought so.
Their submarine fibre optics division was a complete goatfuck. When we were working on a major multinational cable network, the boss told us “we’re doing this project at a loss. Our goal is mainly to form a good relationship with the clients in order to get more profitable projects in the future.” Fair enough, but then actually satisfying the clients should be a priority, shouldn’t it? At the project conference, in front of reps from all 26 client companies, NEC was exposed for blatant violations of the contract, lying about those violations, submitting false test data and still not being able to stay on schedule. Not only did the assessed penalties from this one incident (I didn’t stick around to see the grand finale) total at least $20 million dollars, every client rep I talked with said they would advise their companies to never use NEC’s services again. So much for building good relations.
Unquestioned fact of life #1: defense contractors overcharge the government. Unquestioned fact of life #2: Japanese lawmakers are so cozy with big business that a company would have to be raping puppies on Mother’s Day to even have to worry about the possibility of censure. NEC, however, was greedy and blatant enough to piss off enough people in government that they were banned (in 1998) from government contracts for four years. That’s at least 20% of their revenues gone.
Absolutely any private company in the UK that is contracted by a public agency. Time and again I see companies win multi-million (occasionally multi-billion) pound contracts, then screw up royally and go massively overbudget.
Example:
[source: http://www.nao.gov.uk/pn/9495245.htm]
In May 1994 the Inland Revenue signed a 10-year contract with Electronic Data Systems Ltd (EDS) to provide computer services previously provided by the Department’s in-house Information Technology Office. Under the contract - which is valued at around £1 billion over 10 years - EDS takes over the work, assets and some 1,900 staff of the Information Technology Office. The Department estimate the arrangements with EDS could result in savings in cash terms of about £225 million over 10 years at 1994-95 prices.
“At 31 March 1999, cumulative revenue expenditure on the provision of information technology services under the contract with EDS stood at £874 million, and payments to EDS for the use of capital equipment amounted to £163 million.”
So they managed to give EDS a little over the entire £1billion budget in half the contract’s lifetime. The same report goes on to explain that “… the contract with EDS is not a fixed-price
contract, reflecting the fact that it was difficult for the Department to predict with any degree of certainty the size or nature of its long-term information technology requirements. The Department™s current forecast of the projected revenue spend
on the ten-year contract is £2 billion.”
Double the initial estimate! But the worst bit is where they admit they’ve given up trying to predict how much the eventual cost will be, effectively giving EDS a blank cheque.
This scenario is repeated again and again and again in the UK, from railways, to defence, hospitals, even the maintenance of criminal records. Absolutely EVERYTHING has been or is in the process of being signed over to private companies or consortiums, with invariably increasing costs to the taxpayer and usually with drastic decreases in value for money.
It seems all a company has to do to be successful in the UK is grease a few political palms to win a megabuck contract then overcharge and underperform with impunity, repeat ad infinitum.
I would tell you the name of a company that I deal with quite a lot at work, but then our customers would probably get pissed at me. I can’t even tell you technical details of what they do wrong because that would tip you off as to who they are. Suffice to say that their product quality has gone to shit over the years, and they don’t seem to care. Their problems started when they bought a company in a related field. That company has been in the red for so long, their accounants don’t even know what a black pen looks like. The losses from that part of the now larger company dragged down the profitability of the company as whole to the point where they started laying off technicians and engineers - most especially the older, better paid guys who actually knew how stuff worked and why. The ones who were left pretty much were over their heads and unmotivated because they couldn’t get budgeting to do the development work that needed done. Then, for the final blow, the company went ISO9000 and quality dropped dramatically.
Say what? ISO 9000 caused quality to drop? Yep. They are so busy doing paperwork that they take forever to get around to actually fixing the reported bugs in the hardware. A couple of weeks ago, I got a reply back to a customer complaint I sent in over six months ago. The reply was not only too late to do any good, it also showed that they were clueless - and they have been producing crap with the same defect for six months. In the old days, I could call one of the engineers, explain the problem to him, and by the end of the week production would be putting out products with the problem fixed.
Oh, yes, the company is successful. Not due to anything that they do, but by virtue of having no competition.
Ah, well. Such is life.
Most successful companies are not “totally incompetant”. All companies have some idiot managers or lazy workers. Companies are run by people and people often make mistakes or bad decisions. All a company has to do is make money. If a company is making money, they are doing something right. If they are losing money, they are doing it wrong.
The General Electric Information Services Company does e-business backroom stuff. They run the network and will sell you a program to use it. The program runs on DOS, it is (as of a few years ago) not Windows compatible.
I was on a one-year contract. It was not working out and I was not going to be offered a new contract. A few days before I would have been let go with no benifits they laid all of us off. I got enough in benifits to finish my book.
Dummies. On Wall Street Week GE was called America’s best run company.
It might possibly be, as I wouldn’t want to be accused of trashing my employer on the boards. Or anywhere. I can confirm, however, that it is not a Noble, nor a Barn.
This giant is run by idiots! The consumer electronics division in particular-anybody remember Digital Compact Cassett? This was an audio cassette, digitally encoded. It came out ca. 1995, just in time to be overwhelmed by reliable CDs-estimated losses-$1.8 billion! Then there was the short-lived “video disc” (a pre-DVD standard). This was actually pretty good, but PHILIPS decided NOT to licence the format to SONY or PANASONIC, or any of those other insignificant companies (in PHILIP’s opinion). The format bombed-total losses exceeded $3 billion! Not bad you say? In N America, Philips decided to enter the PC market-around 1990-when profitabilty was already dropping. They built a huge new factory outside Montreal, and shuttered it 2 years later.
Going back further-they built a huge plant to make DRAM chips-only to close it when the prices dropped through the floor.
So, all in all, I would rate this firm as totally incompetent!
An obvious case can be made for the inclusion of MicroSoft in this category, if we take their core business to be software production.
They have created only two products that I am aware of – Word and Excel – that were pretty good before feature creep took over. Almost everything else that drives their money machine was bought from some other company with the bad luck to be spotted on the MicroSoft radar.
Actually, of course, their real business is marketing, where their rapacious bullying has made them a colossal success.
I don’t think a cite is necessary. Just look around you.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m in the middle of my own AOL nightmare now. To make a long story short, I’ve cancelled the service THREE TIMES, and they’re still trying to bill me for it. It may be easy to use, but it’s damn near impossible to quit.:mad:
Having worked for Hewlett-Packard, Pacific Bell, NASA, Excite@Home and Microsoft in some fashion I would say that without question the WebTV part of Microsoft in Mountain View is the most comprehensively screwed up company I have ever worked in, or even heard of.
The have nothing of anything: no product, no vision, no understanding of competition, little or no contact with customers or potential customers, a parking lot which is practically vacant at 10 AM on a work day, managers who come to work one day a week (at most), and others who spend the whole day surfing the Internet. The mind just boggles. Uncle Bill, why don’t you do something?
[Rant mode off]
To avoid joining the foreign legion, I keep telling myself things like: “Everyone who’s employed by a company has a right to pursue their own vision of work” and “Not everyone is a genius, but everyone has to work at a job to earn a living, if they can” and “The technology is really more complicated than people were expecting and/or were trained for, and they’re just doing their best.”
