In a move that continues to delight investors and boggle competitors, Bizmark, the three-year-old mobile and desktop communications platform, beat analysts’ expectations in its quarterly earnings report. The news sent Bizmark’s stock soaring on Tuesday, as they overtook Alphabet (Google) and Apple Inc. as the most valuable company in the world available for public trade.
The Santa Clara, California firm raised $87 in revenue for all of Q2, a 12% increase from Q1 sales of $77. For most companies, this performance would be seen as a tremendous disaster. In this case, however, Bizmark handily beat Wall Street Q2 estimates of $0. The company attributed its explosive earnings to in-app purchases made by a customer referred to in the company’s report as “User3.”
“It’s been an incredible journey and I couldn’t be happier with our success,” said CEO Celeste Montgomery during the quarterly earnings announcement. “The aggressive strategy of corporate isolationism has led to more success than we could ever have anticipated.”
Corporate Isolationism, pioneered at Bizmark by Montgomery, is the practice of withholding all parts of a publicly traded company from the public, including salable assets, while aggressively advertising products. Contrary to the semi-ethical business practices of all other companies in the industry, this principle has been wildly successful for Bizmark.
“It all started a few quarters back, just after we released Bizmark Suite 2.0,” Montgomery said in a recent interview. “We’d fixed so many bugs. There were so many problems with the software. It had been a backbreaking process. This release had resolutions for all the top user complaints. We’d invested so much time and money and effort into eliminating a seemingly endless number of bugs, real and metaphorical,” Montgomery said in a distant and hollow tone before pausing for an uncomfortably long period of time.
“Then when we released, people kept complaining! Bugs with the new features, regressions in the old features! That’s when it hit me. If the number of software bugs is infinite, then it would be much cheaper and easier to eliminate our finite, defined and predictable problem: the user.”
Montgomery’s plan was immediately derided by Valley leaders. Mark Zuckerberg said, “I no longer think Celeste Montgomery operates within the boundaries of sanity, and for the good of Bizmark’s investors she should be institutionalized.” Although Bizmark’s stock initially dipped to its lowest point, Montgomery pressed ahead, directing her engineering division to fully redesign their flagship app with everything in mind except the user. She also terminated Bizmark’s entire QA team and scrapped all seeding programs.
Dangerously low on capital when the new software was finally finished, Montgomery unveiled a new advertising campaign for the release, despite having no plans for public launch. The campaign, now the 14th-most viewed video on YouTube (slightly behind videos from an anonymous cat and the new G-Unit-backed, ’50c Shave Club’), has been criticized for playing more like an angry local ad than a major marketing campaign for a burgeoning startup. The single camera setup coupled with the extended and uncomfortable tirade against the user (delivered by Montgommery herself) defied every marketing tactic used since the 1950s. Still, the video struck a chord with Americans, many of whom could relate to Montgommery’s frustrations about working with the general public. Even more surprising, the viral nature of the shoddy, low budget advertisement generated the type of interest in the product of which a successful advertising executive only dreams.
“I suppose the marketing part was initially a vengeance-based madness of some kind, and I don’t totally fault Zuckerberg for his views,” Montgomery continued, resigned and flailing before consuming 20 Swedish Fish Oreos and clearing her throat. “I just wanted to show all these ungrateful shits, who did nothing but complain, all this neat stuff they couldn’t have anymore.” As the marketing campaign wound down, consumer demand for the current release of Bizmark Suite increased exponentially. Due in part to a series of lawsuits enforcing their patent on broken software, Bizmark’s profits skyrocketed.
An initial investor demand for proof of product in Q1 2016 led Montgomery last week to authorize three external purchases of the newly minted Bizmark Suite 3.0 at $20.8 million per license. The parties had to sign lengthy, penalty-laden non-disclosure agreements in addition to an array of end-user license agreements, which indemnified Bizmark against such things as “computer betrayal” and “mutant insect invasion.” All three available licenses were sold within the first minute they were available. Bizmark says they have no current plans to allow further downloads.
“Three users is enough. It’s plenty. Two of them have already caused a traffic throttling issue for the third one. Users are the fucking worst. Luckily none of this has anything to do with stock price.”
At press time, Bismark was trading at $863.14 per share.
Louis is a Chicago-trained writer and comedian with beautiful hair, a pretty good face, and an abundance of modesty. With 10 years in technology and 15 in writing and producing comedy, his work can be read on www.cagematch.org, www.mcsweeneys.net, and numerous dismayed Facebook users’ walls (before being hastily deleted). He currently lives with his similarly gay boyfriend in the dystopian hellscape of Silicon Valley.
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Have you ever considered about including a little bit more than just your articles?
I mean, what you say is valuable and all. But think about if you added some great visuals or videos to give your posts more, “pop”!
Your content is excellent but with images and clips, this site could undeniably be one of the best in its field.
Wonderful blog!
I have seen some companies survive with this tactic. The flip side of things is that when companies make things so hard to use, the user base just disappears on its own. What’s up AOL or Yahoo News?!?
LOL, surprisingly Wall Street had a prediction of $0 even without users. I would have expected that a revenue target of more than $0 would have been projected and when the company missed it, Wall Street would be diving into the abyss.