Strange Business Models: A Thought Exercise

Can you think of an example where word of mouth hurts?

(the following example is from 2004, so things might have obviously changed)

Sometime back, I was thinking about these 'override proxy' sites - assume that your corporate proxy has a rule that blocks some sites like mail.yahoo.com. Now there are some sites like noproxy, anonymizer etc that will help you enter the url into their own website, and render the page for you. if you pay some money, they render active pages (dynamic content) too. Now, these sites have a peculiar problem.

If they become popular, the corporate proxy guys would know it, and block their site too. So for eg., noproxy would be blocked. But if they do not become popular, nobody would know about the service and hence nobody would use it.

I dont know if there is some term in marketing for this. Also would be interested in more examples.

Can you think of other strange models like this, where the most widely accepted rules of business do not hold, but backfire?