Em busca da estupidez

[srgloureiro]

Olá.
Ando a ler o livro "In Search of Stupidity - Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters", que é um livro cheio de retrospectiva sobre grandes falhanços da indútria informática. Tem várias analogias com a indústria automóvel, e algumas fazem-me lembrar o escândalo da VW.

I particularly remember toward the end
of the decade an abomination produced by Chrysler called the Cordoba,
which was, we were assured by pitchman Ricardo Montalban, clad in
“fine Corinthian leather.” It is a virtual certainty that all that survives of
these cars are the leather seats; the bodies long ago turned to rust.
Chryslers of this era were matched in this respect only by the Chevy
Vega, a car that began to disappear in a cloud of iron oxide particles
from the moment it was driven out of the showroom. If that wasn’t
exciting enough, for more thrills one could always buy the “Immolator,”
the Ford Pinto with that amazing, mounted-above-the-rear-axle-so-it-
was-guaranteed-to-explode-when-smacked-hard gas tank.

Nor do brands allow you to simply raise prices at will. Many com-
panies learned this lesson the hard way. Throughout the 1980s, Porsche
and Mercedes raised the prices of their products seemingly in defiance of
the laws of economics as consumers developed a thirst for German engi-
neering. When they were done, by the early 1990s a fun little two-seater,
such as the Porsche 944, that you could have bought for $14,000.00 in
1982 cost almost $50,000.00, and a small family sedan, the Mercedes
Benz 190, that initially went for $15,000.00 cost $45,000.00. Then
Mazda introduced the Miata for about $15,000.00, and Porsche’s sales
disappeared. Toyota and Nissan introduced full-sized luxury sedans for
$30,000.00, and Mercedes gave up U.S. market share and profits by the
bucketful. IBM also learned this lesson when it introduced OS/2 in 1987
with a price tag of $340.00, a sticker-shock contrast to the $60.00 price
tag buyers had become accustomed to seeing for the current version
of DOS.

In February of 2006
yuppie panzerwagon maker BMW found its German website banned
from the search engine’s rankings when the company was caught
“gaming” Google’s ranking system. BMW, smarting in its lederhosen
from its Google-administered spanking, promptly capitulated and
removed the dubious material from its website, after which the chas-
tened automaker was allowed back into the indexed database.