The Eighth Annual Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards

Ladies and Gentlemen, Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Señoras y Señores, Κυρίες και Κύριοι (and for you classicists, Nullam et Viri), welcome to the Eighth Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards!

As you, my dedicated readers, know so well, the Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards recognize those individuals, companies or entities that don't, won't, or can't come to grips with reality, maturity, ethical behavior, and or social responsibility because of their blindness, self-imposed ignorance, thinly veiled political agenda, rapaciousness and greed, or their blatant desire to return us to the Dark Ages. Or all of those faults combined.

The Seventh Golden Turkeys

And so, 2011 ... what a year it's been! I polled friends and colleagues, cast the runes, and examined goat entrails to divine the worst of the worst for this year's award of heaped opprobrium. We'll start with the runners-up ...

To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Señoras y Señores, Κυρίες και Κύριοι (and for you classicists, Nullam et Viri), welcome to the Eighth Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards!

As you, my dedicated readers, know so well, the Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards recognize those individuals, companies or entities that don't, won't, or can't come to grips with reality, maturity, ethical behavior, and or social responsibility because of their blindness, self-imposed ignorance, thinly veiled political agenda, rapaciousness and greed, or their blatant desire to return us to the Dark Ages. Or all of those faults combined.

The Seventh Golden Turkeys

And so, 2011 ... what a year it's been! I polled friends and colleagues, cast the runes, and examined goat entrails to divine the worst of the worst for this year's award of heaped opprobrium. We'll start with the runners-up ...

* The Federal Communications Commission: The FCC were nominated for two issues with their Net Neutrality Rules that they published in late 2010: First, for making wireless data comms exempt from the same rules as wired service, and, second, for dragging its feet for almost a year before publishing them in the Federal Register (which is how the rules become "official"). The lack of, well, cojones in delaying publishing as well as the lack of cojones in offering up rules that demonstrably satisfied a political agenda is why a TGT (Tiny Golden Turkey) is communicated to the FCC.

* The supporters of J.Res.6: J.Res.6 otherwise known as "A joint resolution disapproving the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission with respect to regulating the Internet and broadband industry practices," was an attempt by the Republicans to overturn the FCC's Net Neutrality Rules (should you feel like writing to accuse me of partisanship note that I am not, per se, a Democrat and the vote on J.Res.6 was 50 Democrats and two independents voting against and 46 Republicans voting for). The supporters of J.Res.6 are awarded a TGE (that's a "Tiny Golden Elephant").

* Hewlett Packard: HP gets nominated for its hot and cold running CEOs; for losing $12 billion in market cap when Leo Apotheker, the previous CEO, announced plans for buying Autonomy; for killing off it's WebOS-based hardware at a cost of $3.3 billion; and for having no clear strategy for cloud anything. I'd award them a TGT but they'd probably lose it.

* Netflix: For instituting price and service changes in the least sophisticated way possible and thereby alienating a huge proportion of its customer base, after which it doubled down and made itself look pretty naïve by doing an about face on the proposed Qwikster DVD rental service. Another TGT is hereby awarded to Netflix to be delivered in a bright red envelope. Keep it as long as you like Reed, we'll send you another when you're done with it.

* Research in Motion: RIM did not have a good year with its deepest trough being a service outage in October that lasted for several days. This was on top of the company's ongoing failure to release its "next generation" operating system, QNX, and a slowly declining customer base. Then there was the launch of its Playbook tablet which was generally considered to be disappointing (I would use the term "wretched") and a share price that has fallen by just over 70% this year, making RIM worthy of a shrinking TGT.