Top 10 unlucky IT incidents

Honourable mention: ConnectU
Iain Thomson: Facebook has been one of the defining companies in social networking, but if you believe some people the whole thing was a bit of a rip off.

By all accounts a bunch of Harvard students came up with the idea of using computers to constantly keep updated with your friends. Being ambitious young things, a few of them formed a splinter organisation and set up Facebook.

Now this is bad enough. But then, after suing and getting a pretty decent payout, a second piece of bad luck strikes. Part of the deal was for shares in Facebook, which at the time were valued very highly as Microsoft was buying into the firm.

Share valuations for Facebook, which has yet to make a profit, are now much lower and the award may not be all that it was hoped. All in all, not a good piece of work.
Shaun Nichols: To me this one gets an honourable mention because it's really not so clear whether the whole thing was, or really is, a bad deal for the ConnectU guys.

Recently it was reported that the ConnectU matter was settled for the nice sum of $65m (£45m). If you assume that ConnectU would have become Facebook, and that Facebook will eventually justify its multi-billion dollar pricing, then yeah, those kids got hosed.

On the other hand, $65m for a project that really didn't seem to be as good as Facebook doesn't seem so bad. If things keep going the way they are with the economy and the Web 2.0 financial climate, Mark Zuckerberg's three classmates may come out looking like the smartest (or luckiest) guys in the room.

Honorable Mention: Jerry Yang
Shaun Nichols: OK, so it's hard to make a case for someone we also named the worst CEO of all time. Most of Yang's cock-ups were of his own doing, but at some level you also have to feel for the guy because he was practically set up for failure.

Yang co-founded Yahoo as an electrical engineering grad student and, although he had served on a number of boards and is no doubt incredibly intelligent, Yang simply was not prepared to take on an operation as large and as mismanaged as Yahoo was by 2008.

The Microsoft debacle should also not fall entirely on the shoulders of Jerry Yang. The corporate cultures of the two companies, particularly long-serving executives, were night and day. Had Yang given in to Microsoft early on when the offering price was the highest, he may very well have faced an executive rebellion on par with the shareholder rebellion later that year.

Iain Thomson: Yang was dealt a bad hand to be sure, but he threw even bad cards away with his management style.

Yang seems to have hit a perfect storm of bad luck. He inherited a company that had been run into the ground by know-nothing managers, and that had a shrinking sense of purpose, but he loved it so much he thought he could make it all right again. He couldn't.