In some ways, the most interesting stories in tech for 2011 weren’t the products. They were the companies. Or, more specifically, their chief executives.



The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.

Sign up | See Sample The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in his free, weekly e-mail newsletter.

Or, to be more specific still, the C.E.O.’s’ idiotic blunders.

There was Hewlett-Packard’s chief, Léo Apotheker, whose software company background apparently left him baffled by H.P.’s hardware business. He killed off H.P.’s promising, brand-new TouchPad tablet only seven weeks after its release, along with Palm Pre phones and a huge range of products based on the company’s WebOS operating system—and proposed jettisoning the computer business that had made it famous.

After a huge public outcry, he was fired, and the new chief executive (Meg Whitman) reversed the changes or suspended them.

There was Netflix’s C.E.O., Reed Hastings, who decided to raise the price of Netflix’s most popular plan 60 percent — and then split the company in two. One would just mail DVDs, while the other would offer streaming movies from the Internet. Each company would have its own Web site, movie queues, billing and name (Netflix and Quickster, or Qwikster, or Qwiquster, or something). It would require twice as much administrative effort by its customers, and it made no sense whatsoever.

After a huge public outcry (and after losing a million customers), he backed off from the company-split idea and left well enough alone.

There was Cisco’s chief executive, John Chambers, who decided to shut down the Flip camcorder business he had bought only two years earlier for $590 million. Killing off the Flip involved taking the world’s most popular camcorder off the market and laying off 550 people.

After a huge public outcry, well, nothing happened. He’s still the C.E.O., and the Flip is gone.

These C.E.O.’s may have had their own internal business reasons for these unpopular decisions. But they were internal, self-interested reasons. Reasons intended to please stockholders, perhaps.

Even so, all three committed several cardinal sins: Putting customers last. Rewarding loyalty with rudeness. Failing to make their cases to the public.



All of them wound up looking terrible. All of them increased the sense of disconnection between big companies and the millions who buy their products.

I’ve never worked a 9-to-5 job, so I may feel the biggest sense of disconnection of all. Maybe life inside a company is so different from real life that what seem like crazy decisions to me seem perfectly justified to the number crunchers.

But it doesn’t seem like you’d need a business degree to appreciate that these would be bad decisions. Whenever I see a company shooting itself in the foot like that, I always wonder: how could anyone be so stupid? When do people become so stupid?

Last spring, I taught a class at the Columbia Business School called “What Makes a Hit a Hit—and a Flop a Flop.” I focused on consumer-tech success stories and disasters.

I distinctly remember the day I focused on products that were rushed to market when they were full of bugs — and the company knew it (can you say “BlackBerry Storm?”). I sagely told my class full of twentysomethings that I was proud to talk to them now, when they were young and impressionable — that I hoped I could instill some sense of Doing What’s Right before they became corrupted by the corporate world.

But it was too late.

To my astonishment, hands shot up all over the room. These budding chief executives wound up telling me, politely, that I was wrong. That there’s a solid business case for shipping half-finished software. “You get the revenue flowing,” one young lady told me. “You don’t want to let your investors down, right? You can always fix the software later.”

You can always fix the software later. Wow.

That’s right. Use your customers as beta testers. Don’t worry about burning them. Don’t worry about souring them on your company name forever. There will always be more customers where those came from, right?

That “ignore the customer” approach hasn’t worked out so well for Hewlett-Packard, Netflix and Cisco. All three suffered enormous public black eyes. All three looked like they had no idea what they were doing.

Maybe all of those M.B.A.’s pouring into the workplace know something we don’t. Maybe there’s actually a shrewd master plan that the common folk can’t even fathom.

But maybe, too, there’s a solid business case to be made for factoring public reaction and the customer’s interest into big business decisions. And maybe, just maybe, that idea will become other C.E.O.s’ 2012 New Year’s resolution.