Research and Development, Part 2

The Dumbest Moments in Business History: Useless Products, Ruinous Deals, Clueless Bosses, and Other Signs ofUnintelligent Life in the Workplace
by Adam Horowitz

(Page 3 of 4)

The result was the Polavision, introduced in 1978. The $700 contraption created instant movies, yes - but they only lasted two and a half minutes, ran without sound and required a special viewing device if you actually wanted to watch them. Which precious few people did. Sales were so slow during the Christmas season that Polaroid offered to have a Santa Claus hand-deliver a Polavision to anybody who bought one. Only 3,000 people signed up. And half of those clueless early-adapters probably thought they were buying into a bird's-eye view of Santa's workshop called Polarvision.

...Including the Pompous, Short-Sighted Bureaucrat

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

— Federal Office of Patents commissioner Charles H. Duell, in 1899, declaring his job obsolete

But at Least They Canned the Ad with the Elephant and the Zookeeper.

Here's a fact we'll bet you're glad you didn't know: 63 percent of Americans use moist wipes or wet toilet paper while... well, let's put it this way, not while washing the car. Armed with this information, Kimberly-Clark thought it was sitting on a gold mine, sitting in the catbird seat, sitting pretty - well, we're almost certain that sitting or something that rhymes with it was involved. The company saw an enormous potential market of customers who at that point were improvising because nobody made the product they clearly yearned for. Dry toilet paper on a roll might have ruled the 20th century following its invention in 1890, but premoistened rolls would wipe up in the new century. The company poured $100 million into R&D, booked $35 million in advertising and in early 2001 proudly unfurled Cottonelle Fresh Rollwipes.

Maybe Kimberly-Clark thought the advantages of Rollwipes were self-evident and a grateful populace - nearly two-thirds of the country! - would reach for them instinctively. Otherwise, getting the word out was going to be tricky. One ad simply showed people happily splashing in a pool with the tagline "Sometimes wetter is better." Given that sort of vagueness, Cottonelle Fresh Rollwipes could've been a new kind of toilet paper or the worst-named water park in history.

With sales sluggish, a later print ad tiptoed toward frankness. It featured a sumo wrestler, shown from behind, with the wetter-better tagline. In an act of desperation, the company sent a van on the road with a restroom attached so that folks could privately test-drive Rollwipes. That's when Kimberly-Clark learned that people won't use PortaPotties unless somebody's sticking a gastrointestinal gun in their backs.

Clearly, toilet paper of any variety just isn't meant for blockbuster rollouts. After two years, Rollwipes was still languishing in test marketing and had a negligible impact on the company's (ahem) bottom line.

The Day Steve Jobs Went for a Stroll in the PARC and Ate Xerox's Lunch

Its official name was the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, but it was more familiarly known simply as PARC. Nestled near the Stanford University campus and home to some of the most brilliant minds in technology research, Xerox PARC was the place where great ideas were invented - and then blithely given away.

Created in 1971, Xerox PARC was the copier company's attempt to work on technology transfer - birthing new innovations and bringing them to market. And by 1973 it had come up with some fascinating stuff. There was the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the computer mouse and the Ethernet to connect computers. But by 1979, Xerox still wasn't doing anything with these extremely cool ideas. That same year, a 24-year-old Steve Jobs, fresh from the success of his Apple 2 computer, visited the PARC complex.

Jobs, gawking at the GUI, begged his hosts to let him bring some Apple staffers back to check it out. A PARC administrator warned Xerox higher-ups that showing off the GUI would risk a tremendous asset, but his bosses said, in effect, "Oh, let Jobs ogle your little point-and-click OS toy all he wants...we're busy making copiers here." In the course of an hour-long demonstration to the Apple crew, Xerox successfully transferred their technology into the fertile minds of Jobs and his team. As Jobs later said, Xerox "could have owned the entire computer industry." Or was that what Bill Gates said about Steve Jobs?

Our Sexy New Shampoo, "Corporate Spy" - Now with the Scent of Half-Eaten Tuna Sandwiches!

Competing for market share can be a messy business, but some Procter & Gamble employees didn't get the memo explaining that they shouldn't take this idea too literally. In April 2001, P&G CEO John Pepper discovered that some staffers in his marketing department were too eagerly investigating the hair-care products of rival Unilever, going so far as to rifle through the garbage outside the company's Chicago offices. The Dumpster diving - or, as the corporate espionage folks call it, "waste archeology" - was part of a $3 million spying program that P&G initiated in the fall of 2000.

As R&D goes, the research was an unfortunate development. Though Pepper informed Unilever about his underlings' activities, P&G still had to pay out a reported $10 million to settle the matter. Three overzealous employees were fired, giving the garbage pickers the chance to spend some quality time in the tub testing the difference between P&G's Oil of Olay Moisturizing Body Wash and Nature's Breeze Body Wash, brought to you by Unilever.

Mr. Keely's Dynamic Turnkey Technology Solution

It's tempting to believe that the contemporary plague of mind-numbing corporate jargon is a novel form of mental illness that will fade away when people admit that burbling words such as disintermediation and instantiation just sounds silly. But, if history is any guide, polysyllabic claptrap will be with us as long as suckers are still regularly emerging from the delivery room.

Witness one John E. W. Keely, who in 1872 began exhibiting on the second floor of his Philadelphia home a curious device he'd developed. Having recently discovered a way to tap into the "inter-molecular vibrations of ether," Keely told onlookers, he had invented a "hydro-pneumatic-pulsating vacue" device that converted a quart of water into a fuel that offered a nearly endless supply of energy. In other, shorter words, Keely was saying he'd developed a perpetual-motion machine.

Investors, not looking into the part of Keely's résumé that read "carnival barker," were eager to invest. With the help of four businessmen - and $1 million - Keely organized the Keely Motor Company. His pitch to investors was as clear as an Enron bankruptcy filing: "With these three agents alone - air, water, and machine - unaided by any and every compound, heat, electricity, or galvanic action, I have produced in an unappreciable time by simple manipulation of the machine, a vaporic substance and one explusion..." and so on. Keely Motors never actually produced a Keely Motor, but its founder was able to put off questioners for years with his impenetrable wordsmithing. But finally, in 1899, a group of angry investors and reporters barged into Keely's house, where they discovered an array of hidden tubes, pipes and air compressors that created the illusion of perpetual motion. Before his accusers could apply their pneumatic-pulsating knuckles to his chin, though, Keely came down with pneumonia and lapsed into a state of perpetual inaction.

Sheesh, What're You Doing in There? Downloading War and Peace?

In the ongoing search to find ways to offer Internet access everywhere, all the time, Microsoft proudly announced that it had crossed connectivity's final frontier in the spring of 2003. The finest minds at the company's British branch had created the first Internet outhouse, iLoo, by "converting a portable loo to create a unique experience." Equipped with a Wi-Fi broadband connection, iLoo featured a flat plasma screen, a waterproof keyboard and toilet paper printed with Web site addresses. Six-channel surround-sound speakers were installed, ready to play your favorite, er, streaming audio tracks ("Splish Splash," say, or "I'm Coming Out").

The portable toilet was slated to make the rounds of British music festivals, but the gales of laughter that greeted the news prompted Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters to claim that the iLoo concept "was an April Fools joke" - which would have held more water if the company hadn't waited more than a month to let the world in on the supposed prank, and if the iLoo press release hadn't come out on April 30. With its credibility swirling around the bowl, Microsoft fessed up: iLoo was real, but still in the prototype stage. Acknowledging that iLoo "wasn't the best extension of our brand," Microsoft flushed the project.

And to Think, He Hadn't Even Heard of the Loo Yet

"I can make a market on the Toilet Show. Contractors, interior designers and consumers could all tune in, and you know that you're talking to a group of people interested in toilets. With the efficiencies of distribution made possible by the Internet, you could make a business on that."

— Josh Harris, chairman of Web broadcast site Pseudo.com, speaking to Adweek in March 1999.

Copyright © 2004 Adam Horowitz. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Adam Horowitz is the executive editor of Business 2.0 magazine and a creator of "The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business."