At some point, you have to chuckle. Here are two examples of business practices, intended or otherwise, that bite back. Both are sad and funny at the same time (if true):

1. XBOX 360 failure rate as high as 33% (Consumerist)
2. Consumerist ensnares Geek Squad (Best Buy) tech stealing porn from a Consumerist computer (Consumerist)

For Microsoft, the trend of using the first generation of a new product to be debugged by the marketplace is following in line with an all-too-unfortunate practice; a lot of people are aware enough to avoid new technologies on the first time out. It surely must be more expensive in the long run, and to have such a high failure rate demonstrates shoddy research and development, as well as lack of foresight into the long-range costs associated with returns, refurbishing and so on. Googling “xbox 360 problems” came up with this as the top post, mentioning that costs could be up to $1 billion for Microsoft.

For Geek Squad, a favorite target of Consumerist, it was apparently easy to allow Consumerist to show proof of principle. Consumerist previously wrote about Geek Squad employees and their shenanigans, so it wasn’t apparently too hard to catch them in the act.

In both cases, crisis management should kick in. The trick is how to handle such situations. Consumerist has played up one example. The rest remains to be seen. I just Googled the term “geek squad apologizes” and found little current—instead, this came up, which is more than a year and half old. A search for “porn” on the Geek Squad Web site yielded zero results. 

With any luck, the public relations folks are sitting at the table of senior leaders in both companies helping decide how to appropriately, and quickly, respond and ensure these situations do not happen again; if not, they should be.