Open Mouth, Insert Foot - the 2005 Awards

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Another list from Wired News, which shows that technology not only makes our lives easier, it makes it easier to insert your foot into your mouth. Many of these were covered here at RealTechNews. A few of the notables:

“Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” – Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG’s global digital business division, speaking to NPR about the Sony DRM issue.

“It was done as a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong.” — Fake Wikipedia poster Brian Chase, apologizing for his post that linked John Seigenthaler, Sr. to the Kennedy assasinations.

“Screw the nano.” — Motorola CEO Ed Zander in an Infoworld interview about his first days as CEO of Motorola.

Source for all the above: Wired News

We Say: Here are some I found amusing:

“The problem with the SonyBMG situation is that the technology they used contained a security vulnerability of which they were unaware. They have apologized for their mistake, ceased manufacture of CDs with that technology, and pulled CDs with that technology from store shelves. Seems very responsible to me. ” — Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America at a CPNewsLink newsmaker conference in November.

“We weren’t paying attention, we got distracted by all these people with pierced body parts and blue hair.” — Larry Singer, VP at Sun Microsystems Inc., explaining how the company lost its edge during the dot-com boom.

“I don’t have a therapist. I have my blog.” — NBC News anchor Brian Williams told his wife while explaining the concept of The Daily Nightly.

As you may know, bloggers are not journalists, nor are they held to the standards that my television station and your newspaper are held to. Bloggers make things up. — WESH General Manager Bill Bauman in a letter to the Orlando Business Journal regarding a story in their online column “The Buzz”.

What about you readers? I’m sure you remember plenty of “quotable quotes” from this year.