Nominations for the SGI Advertising Hall of Shame:
While there are a fair number of ads that are serious contenders,
I hereby nominate an ad appearing in the Sept. 23, 1996, issue of
Business Week, titled "Silicon Graphics Intranet," featuring a
photograph and statment from SGI's CIO. SGI's CIO initially
informs the reader that he had previously been informed by a Business
Week 1000 company IT officer that the officer considered an
intranet a luxury and had recently read that this officer had been
fired; according to the CIO, "that particular firing was a no-brainer.
The IT executive had no excuse for his lack of foresight."
For the SGI CIO to at least implicitly, if not almost expressly,
tell IT professionals they will lose their positions unless they
set up an intranet seems a rather strange marketing ploy. One
possible explanation: there is some sort of weird competition among SGI executives as to who can sound the most, dare I say it, arrogant--
perhaps following the footsteps of the big man himself?
Postscript: ironically, the insert attached to the SGI ad, which
compares corporations today without intranets to corporations
tomorrow with them turned out to be somewhat nonsensical itself;
textual material belonging in one category was placed in another
instead(that is, material discussing changes in hiring practices was
placed in the category for changes in software distribution and
vice-versa). |
