The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. One Is the Loneliest Customer

Remember last week when we told you no one actually says the stuff that company press releases quote them as saying?

Well, now we suspect that no one producing press releases reads that stuff, either.

This week's evidence: the statement issued by Ethernet networking company Extreme Networks (EXTR Quote) about its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31.

"While visibility is uncertain," CEO Gordon Stitt "said" in the release, "we are in a solid position to continue to move forward and address our customer's needs while focusing on operational excellence."

Now, go back and take a close look at that last sentence. No, not because it's a stellar example of corporate meaningless-speak, which it is. No, take a close look at that word "customer's."

Hmm. As Mrs. Swanson taught us back in fourth grade, when you take a noun, add an apostrophe and then an "s," you end up with what's known in the grammar racket as a singular possessive. As in one noun, not two or more. As in, the CEO of Extreme Networks just told you the company had a single customer.

Hah! Was this a typo, or has business just gotten extremely bad at the company? We don't rule out that second possibility here at the Five Dumbest Things research lab, given Extreme's weak revenue growth and $140 million loss in the first quarter.

"It's multiple customers," says an Extreme Networks spokeswoman.

Or is she an Extreme Network spokeswoman? Who cares? Like Extreme itself, we can't always trouble ourselves with these little details.

2. New Standards of Excellence

You know, we at the FDT lab thought we were the champions of inertia and torpor on Wall Street. But this week, at least, we'll have to cede our crown to the advertising sales department over at Internet domain name registrar Register.com (RCOM Quote).

We reached this conclusion Wednesday night while we transferred the lab Web site's domain name registration to Register.com. (Relevant to the torpor and inertia issue, we don't actually have a Web site, just a Web address.)

As part of the registration process, Register.com sent us to a Web page combining a customer survey with a dozen free offers from different companies. So we went down the list.

Did we want a monthly report on new trademarks and domain names? Nope. What about hot deals from Staples.com? No again. Free content from iSyndicate.com? Naah.

Well, what about "4 Risk Free Issues of The Industry Standard"?

Now, that was an offer we couldn't pass up.

Gosh, The Industry Standard. A fine magazine covering the Internet and the New Economy. A well-written publication staffed by many of our past and future colleagues.

One little problem: It went out of business last August.

Register.com didn't call back to explain the strategy behind this particular offer. But in the event it knows something we don't, we signed up for our trial issues. We already have too much to read each week, but we suspect this magazine won't be too much of an additional burden.

3. Form Better or Worse

We're in a cranky mood this week. You'd be cranky, too, if you stayed up until 1 a.m. Monday finishing your taxes.

Oh, we forgot. You were up until 1 finishing your taxes.

Anyway. What makes us particularly grumpy about our taxes isn't the usual stuff, like having to pay them. No, it's just that the incredibly clear and helpful instructions we get from the Internal Revenue Service put our own careless, confusing prose to shame.

Yeah, right.

What's bugging us specifically is Form 4562, a.k.a. "Depreciation and Amortization (Including Information on Listed Property)." You have the singular privilege of filling out this form if you, like us at the lab, have a business on the side and want to depreciate property you use primarily for business. In this case it was our Barbie personal computers.

Thankfully, the IRS provides line-by-line instructions for how to fill this form out. Which was great, until we hit Part V, Questions 24a and 24b: "Do you have evidence to support the business/investment use claimed?" and "If 'Yes,' is the evidence written?"

Well, those questions stopped us dead. What qualifies as evidence when you're sitting across the table from an IRS auditor? How do we prove we spent 95% of our computer time working, and only 5% playing Minesweeper. And what's this unwritten evidence anyway? Daily videotapes of us pecking away at our research papers?

Of course, we checked the official IRS instructions for Form 4562. Of course, it had instructions for lines 23 and 25, but not 24.

So we called up the IRS. After checking with the people who actually wrote the darn form, a spokesman let us know that indeed, no further instructions were available. But he did fax us 11 pages out of Section 274(d) the Tax Code -- 11 pages having something to do with evidence and substantiation. We assure you we understood nary a word.

Combing the IRS' Web site for some straws to grasp, all we found was the service's mission statement: "to provide America's taxpayers top-quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and by applying the tax law with integrity and fairness to all."

Integrity and fairness? Possibly so. But understanding their tax responsibilities? Maybe next year.

4. Get an mLife

Forgive us if we don't get all excited about mMode, the service announced with mind-boggling fanfare this week by AT&T Wireless (AWE Quote).

Sorry if we act like we've seen it all before.

Because, of course, we have.

Yeah, in their three-page monster-sized ads in major newspapers on Tuesday, AT&T Wireless made it sound as if it was unveiling the next Cool Thing -- a service enabling people to play networked games, read news, chat and shop all through their cell phones.

This, of course, is pretty much what AT&T (T Quote) promised back in 1994. At that time, the telephone giant unveiled PersonaLink Services, a wired and wireless "sort of town center" with "people meeting, shopping, working and playing." That particular Cool Thing lasted 2 1/2 years before Ma Bell shut it down.

Undeterred, in 1997 AT&T trumpeted PocketNet, a wireless service encompassing email, address books, weather, stock quotes and instant messaging. That one attracted fewer than a million subscribers, according to The Seattle Times, and is considered to be a commercial failure. AT&T Wireless, which says PocketNet was available in areas amounting to only 40% of its subscribers, and on a limited number of phones, says there's no comparison. mMode is "leaps and bounds ahead of PocketNet," says a spokesman.

Yeah, right.

In its new ads, AT&T Wireless makes plenty of claims -- some ironic and some not -- about how mMode will enrich the lives of lovers, grandmothers, debutantes, artists, capitalists, tourists, shopaholics, teachers and others. "Athletes will use it to compete," says AWE. "Poets will use it to spread the word."

Debutantes? Poets? We smell desperation here. No matter how much fun it's supposed to be to play Star Trek: First Duty on a postage stamp-sized screen, no matter how convenient it's supposed to be to order a cookbook from Amazon.com, we're not convinced.

Plus, try as hard as we can, we can't imagine Robert Frost sending instant messages on mMode's Jumbuck Chat. This is where we diverge in the yellow wood, buddy.

5. Brother, Can You Spare $30 Million?

Winning this week's Efficient Use of Capital award is discounter Kmart (KM Quote), which spent at least $30 million on -- well, we're still not sure what.

See, in the months before the ailing retailer filed for bankruptcy, Kmart lent about $30 million to top executives at the firm. Apparently, these loans were part of an "executive retention initiative," a Kmart spokesman told TheStreet.com reporter Tim Arango, who was following up on a story originally reported in The Wall Street Journal.

Unfortunately for Kmart, its creditors and employees, the loans didn't quite do the job, retentionwise. Nine executives who'd been lent a total of $18 million have already left the company. Kmart has forgiven at least $5 million of that amount.

And people are shocked that this retention initiative didn't work? Come on. As everyone in the U.S. knows -- except, apparently, the geniuses on the Kmart board -- lending money to someone is the surest way to guarantee he'll disappear.