Today is the Day of Apologies. President Bush is sorry about the economic crisis, but his biggest regret is the flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq war:
“The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein,” Bush said.
A lot of people had a lot more than their reputations on the line. More than a million casualties later “Sorry” just doesn’t cut it. Too little, too late – he can’t bring those lives back…
Lets’ leave politics, and turn to other mistakes that can still be corrected.
Microsoft apologizes for Cashback glitches – reports CNET News. Their s Live Search Cashback site failed spectacularly on Black Friday. Nowhere felt customers more cheated than at Hewlett-Packard’s hopping site: HP and Microsoft together promised 40% discounts. People spent hours hitting refreshing their browsers – after all, the promised discounts could have easily amounted to $500 and more. Some customers who actually got through only received 3% cash-back, instead of the promised 40%.
Microsoft apologized:
“We deeply regret customer inconvenience with respect to the outage”
Again, too little, too late. But, unlike Bush, Microsoft and HP can actually do something about it. Don’t just apologize – deliver. Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday, there is talk about Mobile Tuesday – for all I care they can call it Regret Wednesday, Sorry Thursday, Live (Sometimes) Friday, but declare a day of online shopping with 40% off when HP and Microsoft jointly deliver on their promise. That’s the only real apology.