The nominees for "item on which the most time is wasted producing something of zero value for a company" are:
a) Any internal powerpoint presentation
b) Sales pipeline reports that extend beyond two quarters
c) The press release
While there was much discussion among the judges between a and c, i'm afraid that for pure "everybody does it and nobody derives value from it", you gotta go with the press release.
Here are a few things that we know about the press release:
1. nobody will ever read them, ever. ok, maybe people who have bought 50 shares of the stock will read the intro paragraph and post a notice on the yahoo stock boards saying "YEAH! THIS IS GONNA GO TO 100! SHORTS ARE SKRU'D!", right before they go to look at pornography the rest of the day, but nodoby else reads them.
2. all press releases say exactly the same thing, in as many words as possible. Here is a snippet from an actual press release i just looked at on businesswire.com. read the snippet and then let's play a game:
"Our web-based application supports a multi-user administrative system that allows many users [...actually shortening this clip from an even more boring length...]from different levels and within departments to send high volumes of SMS while providing the necessary administrative controls."
Ok, here's the game: first of all, what the fuck did that mean? answer: this company has built a text messaging app. question: aren't there a shitload of those? answer: yes. question: why would you make a press release about it? because companies announce things, no matter how trivial. question: why didn't they say they'd built a text messaging system? answer: because that's not enough words. this was actually clipped from paragraph 9. the first 8 paragraphs used "leading-edge" and "industry leading" and "world class" a lot.
Here's another line from a press release today, this one from the president or something of the CES show that just closed in vegas: "The innovation, phenomenal products, convergence of technologies, people and excitement were unprecedented". WOW! And here i'd heard that the only neat thing announced was that motorola said they were going to enter the flat panel tv market. you gotta hand it to those folks at motorola, always entering a market only 10 years too late. plus, when i think motorola, i think "killer consumer marketing machine!"...oh no, wait, that's the NOT motorola company that exists in our mirror universe.
Anyhoo, the best best best all around thing about these press releases that nobody reads is that they frequently are created by PR consultants that don't work at the company! Riddle me this, batman: couldn't the lowest-iq moron in the entire company write one of these? yes, the lowest iq moron could. that's why you have to outsource it to consultants, because nobody wants to have to tell Pete in Accounting that he's the low iq moron.
Note to self: you can ALWAYS make money starting a business predicated on the notion that business executives and ceo's are self-important and that they will firmly believe that other people will give a shit what they think or say. Always.