top technology flops
CNN today published a list of “Top Tech Flops” for 2007 and I must say there are some weird things there. The list contains around 18 instances which are stupidest in the field of technology but some of them particularly caught my attention and Google it seems is ahead in this regard as well with the CNN list comprising of 3 instances where Google goofed up!
One of the most interesting example was that of Google and Ebay. Ebay had a conference in Boston for Ebay’s Top sellers and Google invited all of them for a party to promote Google Checkout, competitor for Ebay’s Paypal. In response to this, ebay which is the single largest user of Google Adwords discontinued its ads on Google for more than a week and then Google canceled the party.
Another thing that caught my attention was that Google’s Adwords service example. A belgian based IT security consultant Didier Stevens, in order to test Google’s ability to detect harmful ads created a ad on adwords that said “Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!” and the ad was displayed 259,723 times; 409 web surfers actually click on the ad. I think this is really funny….:)
Another example again involves Google. The Google’s famous blogging software Blogger misidentified one of the company generated blog as SPAM and disabled it.
There are several other stories as well, like apple sent a legal letter to a girl for suggesting features for Apple’s flagship Apple iPod. And there was the example of Jon Griffin who used all the money funded by venture capitalists to buy cars and have a ball. Another example was the famous United Nations one laptop per child campaign where in several children Africa were given laptops and they discovered Porn. LOL..i think that was pretty funny and now they are thinking of having filters in these laptops.
There are several other instances in this list which are equally funny and hilarious and I think you guys should definitely have a look at the list here.
Hope you guys also enjoy as much as I did.
Just a sentence of disclaimer that none of the content above with respect to any companies is mine or my findings and this is just a reference to an article published by CNN( link provided above) citing examples from the article.
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