Idiots

Tom Peters has a great post on idiotic market and trade publications.  I'm sure that many of you have seen the Cingular advertisements that state that 4 out of 5 Fortune 500 companies use Cingular for wireless e-mail; my company even uses Cingular for our Blackberry service.  What you may not have instinctively keyed on was the fact that the picture of 4 out of 5 people using Blackberry devices features 5 men.  From the post:

My colleague Dini Coffin . . . faxed me a Cingular ad on September 21st, with a cover note that cryptically said, "What's wrong with this picture?" The ad's tagline was "4 of the top 5 commercial banks use Cingular for wireless email." Below was a pic of 5 folks—4 doing wireless email, 1 obviously not playing. Dini's point: ALL 5 WERE MALES! Her follow-up line, "I guess Cingular doesn't want women buying their services." Go Dini! Hisses & Boos to Cingular! (Idiots!)

As a further point of the business world simply not getting the women thing:

Three hours later I was reading my latest issue of BusinessWeek, and came across an ad for "The BusinessWeek 50 Forum," an October 7 event billed as the "one event that can make a difference in your pursuit of high performance." There are 15 "best of the best" speakers listed (including Jack Welch and Starbucks honcho Howard Schultz), plus two BusinessWeek moderators. One of the BW folks is Senior Editor Mary Kuntz, but among the "content providers" ... 15 out of 15 are ... MALES. My reaction: Sick!

Are you paying attention?  A lot of the people that use Blackberries in my company are women.