Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Office space
By Miss Alli | Season 3 | Episode 13 | Aired on 04.20.2005
George says that as a lawyer, he's embarrassed, actually. Heh. He asks them what their design has over a drawer that you don't have to lift the top of the desk to access. It's a good point. The baskets are, after all, like drawers, only much, much harder to open. Alex again argues that you can see down into the baskets, but he is still missing the point that you can't see into them if you have stuff on the desk, and what's more, you're only going to see the top papers anyway. George points this out. Trump asks Carolyn what she thinks of it, and Carolyn says, "I still don't get it." She also asks if they really think this is better than what Magna came up with. And again, the guys stick with "absolutely" as their answer. "Are you saying that the Staples executives are wrong?" she asks. George starts to jump in, and she says, "George, George, hold on, are you saying that the Staples executives are wrong?" She reminds them of the negative comments they got about how big and useless this product really was. Moreover, the focus group didn't like it either. Alex asks whether the Staples people saw any use for it at all, and Carolyn said maybe it could be used for a child. Or a home office. Carolyn goes back to the idea of having had some kind of a focus group to at least ask people what they wanted. Bren asks her how that could possibly have been done. "They did it," she says simply. "The other team did it." Bren goes right past declining to bootlick and lands on obnoxious sarcasm when he says, "And obviously, if I had done more on a focus group, I would have realized that that was just a horrible, a monstrosity..." Trump now asks why they didn't meet with the executives, and Alex takes the blame for that one, saying that he basically didn't think it was necessary, as compared to the conference call. Trump tells him that the phone is never as good, even if your only objective were to forge a bit of a relationship. Four bazillion online dating veterans agree. Alex then "subtly" redirects the blame back to Bren, saying that he made that call because he believed Bren would put together a "focus group" for them.
George makes the call that they went about the task "backwards," in the sense that they designed the thing first, and then considered asking people whether it was what they wanted. Trump also chastises Alex for starting out strong and finishing up...you know, lame. "I thought you were a star, and you're not really a star. You're not a star. And I'm disappointed." Alex says that he put Bren on marketing, and Bren "dropped the ball." Trump tells him that you can't put that much reliance on someone else. Alex says that with two guys, you have to just take the risk that the other person will carry his half. It's not a horrible argument, this part of it. Trump tells them that he thinks they both sucked, but he has to do something.