Lenovo shipping laptops loaded with the Superfish malware.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/19/superfish-need-to-know/?sh=25a8a4133877](https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/19/superfish-need-to-know/?sh=25a8a4133877)
Sears was practically built on catalog sales and shipping items to customers. They had the infrastructure in place yet somehow missed out on internet shopping.
Sears had everything. They were the original everything store... You could even buy a house.
- Retail catalog of just about everything that could have moved to electronic form
- Experience with mail order logistics
- They owned Discover card
- They had a large stake in Prodigy, one of the first ISPs
They could have had an online store that consumers felt safe using their Discover card at. They could have offered in store returns on goods bought online.
They fucking blew it
I don’t fault them for not understanding Internet shopping at first. Plenty of people thought the idea was ridiculous.
That being said, one year after Amazon Had started doing it is a different matter. By about 97-98 Sears should have been in the deep end selling online.
Agreed.
I remember a time that you would not admit you met your partner through online dating. It was shameful for whatever reason.
Now it's pretty standard.
I was convinced that online dating would never work. The whole idea was simply too embarrassing and weird. And yes, I definitely remember when people would refuse to admit that they met online.
It’s really funny how attitudes change.
I’ve seen long Reddit write ups on how they couldn’t just Switch to online. All the work involved in digitizing pictures of each product and its own product page etc
And every time they fail to mention that any other company would have had to do that too. Sears had every part of what they needed but the webstore.
It would have been difficult but it would have been more difficult for anyone else.
They understood the internet unbelievably badly. Their website was so weird and insecure that people were very easily able to create fake listings on it which were then somehow purchasable and then when this got out their immediate reaction was to try to censor information about their security problems resulting in an out of control Streisand effect so big that "fuck Sears" gave reddit pretty much its first ever viral moment.
Not sure on security, but definitely remember how badly their site was designed. I remember they put the item name in the URL, and had the page display that. So people started writing super racist item names into the URL and sharing it, which the site happily displayed as the item name. So, so bad.
Eddie Lampert.
https://www.businessinsider.com/rise-and-fall-of-sears-bankruptcy-store-closings#in-2015-sears-revenue-fell-from-362-billion-two-years-prior-to-251-billion-20
He didn't come in until like 2012. He ran it to the ground but it was already a sinking ship .
Sears should have started investing big in e-commerce in the late 90s early 2000 like everyone else.
Probably Blackberry, they're an interesting case study in a company being sniped off of what ten years ago had been an undisputed market-leading position by failing to account for changing technology.
Years ago, I listened to a podcast where they talked about the first time BlackBerry engineers got hold of an iPhone and opened it. They deemed they were several years behind replicating the iPhone and didn't think it was possible.
Same with Nokia. An exec took the first iPhone home and his daughter asked if she could take "the magic phone" to bed with her. He knew then they were screwed.
Nokia yes, but Microsoft was worse. They were the smartphone market leader. They had just recruited the development team behind the hottest phone -- the Danger phone -- who planned a touchscreen phone for their follow-on product.
And they blew it. Mostly because of their strategy of Windows Everywhere, and allowing that to override the experience of the Danger team. Who seeing as they were getting nowhere, dispersed.
Later, when Apple had released the iPhone, Microsoft looked at the API and saw that Apple wasn't presenting a traditional UNIX API, but instead an API which placed huge responsibilities of applications to take action to save power. Exactly the reverse of the Windows Everywhere strategy.
Nokia's problem was simply that they had a feature phone for every variation of every telco's marketing plan. They forgot that their customer was the phone user, not the telco. So when they needed a phone to appeal to directly to customers, they didn't know that Nokia had a smartphone. Worse still, Nokia's next-generation smartphone was full of "second system syndrome" issues -- too many features, lack of focus, late.
I am one of the few who actually bought a Nokia Windows phone.
I really loved the little thing. It was a great little phone. It truly was.
But, I ditched it after a while and went back to Android. No apps.
It's a shame, really. It was a lovely little phone.
I worked there. There was a lot wrong with the company.
They focused more on pushing their existing products into new markets when they should have been replacing their operating system.
The old Java OS was very old and crusty. Apps didn't have separate memory. You could literally reach into another app and insert UI elements, so you'd see things like ads being inserted into BBM. The OS needed to be replaced.
The purchase of QNX as a replacement was the right move but was a little too late.
It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Target's expansion to Canada was a disaster.
They spent billions purchasing existing Zellers (Canadian department store) locations from Hudsons Bay Company (HBC). Then they spent 100s of millions more renovating them. They leased more locations to open stores. 133 in total. Due to a variety of issues, mainly distribution problems -they tanked, Target Canada declared bankruptcy and had to pay more millions to get out of leases and sell their owned real estate. This all happened in about 5 years.
My favourite part of the story is the HBC took some of the proceeds from the sale of Zellers and bought Saks Fifth Avenue with it. They're recently begun re-opening Zellers
I remember walking into a target and alot of empty shelves. Their logistics must have been a mess. And yeah it was everywhere at once. They should have gradually entered the Canadian market like Walmart did. I think they were trying to hit Walmart head on but they really needed to work the bugs out.
I’m not really sure what the difference is between target and Walmart in the US is but in Canada it just seemed the same to me. Except Walmart actually had full stock on their shelves.
Depending on the time period, there wasn’t much. Today Target tries to market itself as a higher end store with higher quality products. But when I was a kid, they were both selling more or less the same shit. Walmart really embraced the race to the bottom and started selling the cheapest junk that they could convince companies to put their brand on.
Target stopped this after a few years of losing the race to the bottom.
Yeah, my experience shopping at both stores in the US (as a Canadian) is that Target stores are very clean and inviting, and well-organized. It shows, right down to the condition of the public restrooms - those are some of the cleanest, well-kept public restrooms in America. Even one I’d gone to in San Francisco was an 8/10.
Their Canadian stores were basically Zellers with a new logo slapped on top. It was not the same store experience as in the US. I remember actually going out of my way to go to a US Target once in late 2013, when I had a Canadian Target nearby.
The issues can almost 100% be blamed on an extremely poor SAP installation. The US wasnt using it but was planning on moving to it so they decided to do Canada with it.
It was very bad.
Omg is this true? I'm a software developer and am constantly frustrated when I see implementations done poorly. Leadership is often nowhere to be found when solutions are being architected to meet the needs of the business... but then they are flabbergasted when those same solutions don't do what they want it to.
If Target Canada failed due to software, this needs to be written up as a warning to other businesses on what not to do.
They had hilarious issues in the back end too. Your store needed 10x cases of tooth brushes because you’re out of stock? Congrats you order 10 cases on your end but, the distribution Center sees 10 individual brushes ordered instead of 10 cases.
Walmart didn't fail on logistics and distribution, they failed by not giving a fuck about local culture and laws and then having to learn the hard way the error of their ways.
One court pointed out that they couldn't violate the German constitution's first and second articles by telling their workers who they could and couldn't date.
Having the manager of their German division live in London was so incredibly emblematic for that entire boondoggle. In their minds, they were convinced they were going to show up and show those bumbling locals how it was done. Arrogance was their downfall.
Not researching the culture and labor laws of the host country was their first failure. The second was trying to enforce American work standards that were in direct conflict with theirs.
Target in Canada was a ghost town. Prices weren't great, and they didn't even have seasonal stuff out in the one near me. Really disappointing after hearing about the brand in the states.
I'm actually still salty about that. They bought up zellers, then imploded, leaving a giant hole in the retail market that has yet to be filled in again.
HBC is starting to open zellers again, but in name only and only a few pilot sections inside hbc stores. I'd love to see a whole new rollout.
EDIT - I also heard part of the failure of Target up here was a lacklustre (by their metric) holiday shopping season. They didn't quite clue in that Canadians aren't rabid shoppers like Americans.
Let me tell you this made my job in the states a fucking nightmare. I actually can speak pretty intelligently about the impact this had because I was an Executive Team Leader right out of college during this time, and helped to open one of the stores in a more remote region in Canada.
There were a few issues at hand that caused the downfall. As you mentioned, logistics is the main one. They just really underestimated how much it would take to keep stores stocked when you're dealing with a new country, new weather, and the expanse of the region. Second which was interesting to me, they didn't realize that Canadians at the time were much more likely to make multiple trips to different stores to get the lowest prices possible. That is, they didn't realize Canadians were so price sensitive and unlike American convenience shoppers who would pay a premium for a one stop shop.
How did this make my job a nightmare? Well, since Canadian stores were suffering and money has to come from somewhere, US stores hours would get shipped up to Canadia to help put out the fires. I ran a logistics process unloading trucks in a high volume store, and corporate would continually cut hours for stores to make up for the shortcomings. So while my predecessors would have, say, 30 people to unload trucks, I would get 18-20.
It fucking blew and I'm so thankful I got out of retail. It feels like the Hunger Games thinking back on it. Here I am working 14 hour nights while fucking corporate has Beyonce perform for all the Store Team Leaders in Minneapolis.
Whew. Okay I think I haven't worked through this trauma like I thought I had. 😂
Circuit City’s salespeople weren’t very knowledgeable by the standards of the day. People shopped elsewhere and then went to CC for the low price. It did their competitors in. Then the internet did Circuit City in.
It wasn't just the internet, it was their fading relevance. As Best Buy eclipsed them in the early 00s, their playbook became "copy Best Buy, but not as good." Their last CEO was Philip Schoonover, someone I was told was a "big picture" guy at Best Buy before being lured over to CC.
Their POS and inventory systems were ancient, their services lagged, their inventory not as good, their stores were progressively quieter and more. They failed to change in the big way that BBY had through their big customer centricity push 20 years ago. The ground beneath them had been eroding forever and by 2008, they only needed the incoming financial crisis to kick the can for them.
One of their last moves was to get a spot in the movie "Eagle Eye" with Shia Labeouf, a film that wasn't good cradling a retailer that wasn't good enough.
I worked for Kodak (Qualex) and I will never forget the meeting we had talking about 35mm film. A person said he’s noticing an influx of people looking to print digital photos.
This was a senior Vice President of Kodak saying, and I quote “this whole digital think is just a fad, it will blow over soon”
I think it's a toss-up between Xerox and Kodak for the worst corporate failure. Both companies were on the leading edge of the revolution (Xerox even more so with there work at PARC) and somehow managed to fuck it up by being stupid.
Worked for Xerox for a while. The problem with these companies is they see how much money they are making from their proven processes and are unable or unwilling to believe someone can do it better. Then technology improves and they are bypassed by someone better and hungrier for their piece of the pie. Hell Xerox even invented the mouse at PARC and I believe a very fine graphic interface but never monetized it. The could not create the market for the products they invented.
I think back to Blackberry. They OWNED the cell phone market in the 2000s and almost every big business had contracts with them. Instead of improving, they sat on their laurels and kept raking in those sweet business dollars. When Apple started to eat their lunch with the Iphone, they weren't concerned because they had all these business contracts, they let Apple have the personal phone market. Until people wanted to use their Iphones for business too. And all their revenue started drying up. Now they are just a footnote in the cell phone world and the last time they released a phone was in 2018.
PARC created "WIMP": Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pointer. The team was so demoralized they showed it to Apple without a NDA. Later Apple sued Microsoft for stealing windows and Microsoft reminded them they stole it too.
I believe several of the people on the Macintosh design team actually had worked at PARC. Like Xerox wasn't doing anything with all their tech, so they just went over to Apple who was.
RIM’s Jim Balsille was also more focused on buying an NHL team and moving it to Hamilton during the early years of the iPhone than on his own company. At one point any news about Balsille was about the Phoenix Coyotes and Gary Bettman and not BlackBerry.
The BlackBerry movie is quite fictionalized, but Glenn Howerton nails the way I remember the local vision of Balsillie: the most business-ass businessman in Canada, inexplicably obsessed with buying an NHL team instead of making RIM truly competitive during the smartphone explosion.
It's definitely Xerox.
"The closest thing in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth is the late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC."
Source: [Steve Jobs Visits Xerox](https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html#:~:text=The%20closest%20thing%20in%20the,had%20been%20developed%20at%20PARC).
And Sears…they were literally Amazon before it was cool, but didn’t embrace online. Bonus points for having started Discover Card and selling it off a couple of years before online blossomed. They had the customer base, the inventory, the distribution, and banking…would’ve been the reinvigoration of a major American retail giant if anyone had connected the dots.
And, on top of that, Sears’ largest competitor in the catalog business was Montgomery Ward. By the 1980’s both companies were struggling to stay alive. In a bizarre corporate version of brotherly competition, the CEO of Sears was Edward Brennan, and Wards was being run into the ground by his younger brother, Bernard Brennan.
Not really. The internet in the 90s is not at all like it is today. If you opened a web page with a picture of someone modeling a sweater, it took a while for it to show up. It was a frustrating pain in the ass to shop online. Amazon worked because they started with selling books. You only needed to see the title and the author. The actual aesthetic of the product wasn't important. Also, people weren't quite ready then to put their credit card number "into the internet." It was a bit of a scary prospect. Finally, fast, free shipping was completely unheard of and Sears did not have the logistics to pull this off. You got things from them in about 6 weeks and that was common.
Sears last catalog was in early 1993. Most people did not have the internet back then. That was my brother's first year of college and he was telling the family about the internet because no one knew what it was. It was still something new that mostly nerdy college guys were into. Nerdy 18 year old boys didn't shop from the Sears' catalog.
Yeah really, how many countless websites were bought up by giants, only for them to fail? In an alternate history they could have been the next Google too.
It's like saying "lol the Chicago Bears are so stupid for drafting Mitch Trubisky instead of Patrick Mahomes". Who's to say Mahomes would have succeeded in Chicago over Kansas City? We'll never know. And in all likelihood he would have failed in Chicago.
Things are the way they are because of the way things played out. Every situation will create a different outcome. It's like saying every cookie recipe will make the same exact product. It didn't work that way.
What's wild is Rochester did *way* better than Buffalo which mostly suffered the same fate as the rest of the rust belt, despite the cities being quite close to each other. Where I grew up it took a little less than an hour to drive to either one.
What is ironic is that Kodak invented digital photography and let the patents expire without cornering the market, and by the time they decided to get into the game it was too late, because everyone else already had.
Ah the ever optimist executive! Gotta love em. I worked at Ritz camera in 2000, so no corporate execs present. But us on the floor had just set up a display case with brand new 1.3 megapixel cameras. At that time, I’d say we still sold marginally more SLRs than digital. But the writing was on the wall. Come to think of it, it was really cool to be a part of that transition, seeing both types of customers at once.
It was a really cool time and this was in 2002 maybe 2003 he said that!
Also I asked how we are monitoring digital customers vs 35mm when we had no digital capabilities so we were just turning them away.
I knew a guy who used to work at Kodak in Rochester. He told me that around the early 2000s, he was in a meeting and Kodak execs said something like "digital is coming, but we're figuring we have 20 years to sort things out/adjust to the new market". And ten years later they were done.
George Lucas offered to sell his computer animation company to Disney for $8 Million in the 1980s. Disney balked so he sold it to Steve Jobs instead and it became Pixar.
Tumblr!!!
- 2013 “sold” for $ 1.1b in CASH to Yahoo.
- 2017 - Verizon acquires Yahoo
- 2018 bans porn
- 2019 sold to Wordpress for $3m
That’s a spicy meatball.
Source - see updates below.
Edit to correct facts.
- better source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr
- added in sales figures.
The entire Penn Central disaster. The railroad was massive but terribly managed and lasted less than 3 years before becoming the biggest bankruptcy in US history at the time
I'm not sure how Penn Central could've made it.
My grandfather worked for the New Haven railroad, which I believe became part of PC. He liked to point out that the federal government gave automakers the Interstate highway system, but gave railroads nothing. That came home to roost.
This one is so odd to me, for a such long time everyone used skype. I dunno how they dropped the ball so hard. Suddenly the panini comes around and boom, people are using everything BUT Skype.
People used skype when it was good, then MS degraded it an people grumbled because for some reason there were no good alternatives. Lockdowns happened and everyone needed video chat and they were STOKED to jump on a skype alternative because the software had been hot garbage for years already and everyone was sick of it.
Skype lives on under the name Microsoft Teams. Still uses the same sounds and broadly the same user interface. I'm not sure which one's better (I only used Zoom once, quite a while ago and it felt a bit rudimental), but Teams is pretty much the corporate/enterprise standard for video communication.
World War II was over. Germany was a bombed-out smoking ruin. The victors saw that communism was taking hold in countries with collapsed economies, so they wanted to resurrect the economies of Europe. They were desperate to just get people working again. They'd try anything that had a ghost of a chance at working.
The U.S. essentially told Ford that they'd give them the Volkswagenwerk, the factory that made VWs. If Ford were to take over, just run this factory and make some cars, get people back to work, they could have it for free.
Henry Ford II told his board of directors: "Gentlemen, what we're being offered here isn't worth a damn." And declined the offer.
Oh, not just some recognition. He was awarded the grand cross of the eagle, the highest award that could be given to a foreigner by nazis, and he received it happily. He was also the only foreigner regarded favorably in freaking Mein Kampf. Hitler saw Ford as a personal hero and aspired to be like him. Hitler kept a portrait, life size if I remember, behind his desk of Ford. Ford was a nazi.
Stalin considered Ford a hero too, and even wrote letters praising him for setting up factories in the USSR in the 20s when many countries refused to trade with the USSR.
Stalin wrote a glowing letter about Ford to the Chamber of Commerce after the deal.
Ford would business with anyone. As long as they had money. And were antisemtic.
> Ford was just pissed off they killed the Nazi’s
That Nazi was grand*daddy Ford, the Ford Model T Henry, the decliner-of-VW bloke, Henry II Ford, was a son of Edsel Ford who was a son of Henry-Model-T-Ford.
Henry II Ford was also the Ford vs Ferrari guy that gave Carroll Shelby a chance to show em MURICA in France.
It was actually the British that offered Ford the Volkswagenwerk - Wolfsburg was in the British zone. It was a British army major that got the plant going again, after Ford and Austin turned them down.
Adidas and Puma focusing on a sibling rivalry so much that they failed to notice when a relatively small newcomer called Nike overtook them to become #1 in the world
At the time IBM wasn't worried about other computers using DOS because DOS was only one half of compatibility with IBM PCs. The other half was the IBM BIOS, which is the firmware in ROM on IBM PCs that actually handled many low-level functions. A lot of early PC clones ran DOS but weren't BIOS-compatible, so they couldn't actually run software that ran on IBM PCs.
IBM didn't believe anyone could clone the BIOS, and they thought they could sue anyone who tried for copyright infringement. They even published the assembly code for the BIOS in the PC manual to make it more difficult to avoid copyright infringement. What they didn't count on was companies like Compaq setting up a clean-room reverse engineering process so that they could win the legal battle with IBM to fully clone the PC.
Not signing an exclusive contract with MS for MS-DOS was certainly a fuck-up, but keep in mind there were also alternative clones of MS-DOS available within a few years too. DR-DOS, for example. Clone PCs were probably inevitable even if MS-DOS had been unavailable. IBM had no patents on the PC architecture, so ultimately they couldn't stop anyone from copying it.
if they had bought it though, they only would have the search engine. All the other Google innovations would never have happened. We’d currently be living in an iPhone vs Blackberry world.
That’s the thing there is an opportunity cost to investing in unproven technology. For every google and Netflix, there is an Ask Jeeves and Napster. Entrenched companies need to focus on protecting their market share and innovation companies strive to steal it.
A few with different outcomes.
Kendall Jenner stopping riots with a can of Pepsi.
Tumblr banning Porn
Only fans [banning porn](https://time.com/6092947/onlyfans-sexual-content-ban/)
Blockbuster not buying Netflix
I believe it was banking companies and porn/sex child protection regulation related.
The company had kinda been set up to be for artists, musicians and some nsfw stuff. Which isn't really a problem for credit cards and banking. However, they really pushed the NSFW stuff and new banking laws showed up. So they had to tighten some stuff down to be able to continue as a company. Credit card companies were rejecting payments probably because of the new laws.
Toys R Us expansion into Sweden in the mid 90s. They refused to follow Swedish labour market practice by not signing a [collectiva bargainaing agreement (cba)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_agreement) with the storeworkers union (Handels).
The union took its memebers out on strike while non-union members continued to work. Eventually more unions joined in sympathy strikes which stopped deliveries, cleaning, mail and finally even financial transactions for Toys R Us in Sweden. It is briefly described in this article: https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/what-canada-can-learn-from-swedens-unionized-retail-workers\_n\_6888328
It's one of the most famous labour market actions in Sweden in modern time, where there are extremely few strikes otherwise. However the exact same scenario is happening right now with Tesla this time.
I should also note that unions work very differently in Sweden compared to the U.S. In Sweden workplaces do not vote on "unionization", the union membership is personal and no one is forced to join a union. If a workplace is big enough and have enough union members the union, which is industry wide, will negotiate a standard industry wide cba with the company. The cba covers all workers even those not in a union. The cba only sets a floor with regards to wages, wage increases, insurances, pension pay etc. There are no fees to the union from non members or the company.
The same is happening to Tesla at the moment. They refuse to have a collective agreement and thus more and more unions (in Sweden as well as the rest of Scandinavia) align against them.
Tesla will go the same direction as toysrus. Latest I heard, Telsa is recruiting lobbyists for the scandinavian market, thinking they can buy new laws to abolish tradition that has been going strong since medieval times..
Universal’s Dark Universe.
In the rush to create a cinematic universe to rival Marvel, Universal was going to do a reboot of their classic monsters (Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, etc).
Alex Kurtzman was going to be their Kevin Feige, overseeing the entire franchise. The first film was going to be The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise. They made the big announcement that Johnny Depp was going to be the Invisible Man, Javier Bardem was going to be Frankenstein’s Monster, and Russel Crowe was going to be Dr. Jeckyl.
But what happened? Cruise took over control of the Mummy, turning it into just another vehicle for himself. With fond memories of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films, audiences stayed away, and the Mummy flopped, taking the entire Dark Universe with it.
M and M’s declining to be the candy of choice for E.T. I remember watching the movie in the theaters thinking, “Oh, Reece’s Pieces, that’s cute.” Huge mistake.
American car manufacturers in the 80s. I was buying my first family car and it was between a Ford Taurus wagon and a Toyota camry wagon. The Ford sales guy said "Yeah, the Japs have to learn they can't make cars that last 15 years!" and then laughed. We got the Camry. No wonder the American car manufacturers all had to be bailed out.
I was selling cats in the early 90s. Customers who wanted Toyotas (the first lot I worked at) came in with consumer reports, invoice prices, and knew what the hell they were buying. I couldn’t sell anything.
Chevy customers (my second lot) came in with “I ain’t gone buy none of that Jap shit.” They were so much easier to sell to, even though the Chevy products were clearly inferior. I had no problem selling cars then.
(And don't even get me started on how shit the Corvette was compared to the Supra. Plastic dashboard versus leather? Really?)
**Edit**: I was selling cars, not cats. Replying on a phone is "fun".
To this day, people haven't changed. Some people would rather by an "American" vehicle made in some other country that will have numerous issues than ever spend money on a Japanese vehicle that might even be made in the USA. All this to say, they buy American. For example full size GM trucks are made in Mexico
I remember getting shit from a coworker for driving a Japanese truck. He finally shut up when I mentioned how that Tacoma was built down the road in Fremont and two of our other coworkers had built it.
My in-laws refuse to buy anything other than Ford and give my wife and I crap all the time for driving Subarus. Their Ford is made in Mexico, my Subaru is made in Indiana.
A second life for Second Life...and Facebook.
Zuckerburg's fan boy tribute to the movie "Surrogates"
Facebook's attempt to encapsulate every aspect of your life in a branded & tightly controlled walled garden that they 100% own, including owning all the advertising & data exploitation opportunities therein.
A way to sell more Oculus hardware, hardware where no one --NO ONE--who wears it can possibly look cool, fulfilling a longtime revenge fantasy of geeky awkward high school-aged Zuck
I sort of know what second life is. Sort of. It had a brief surge of popularity like 10 years ago? Is that right?
BTW, even after your explanation, I still don't know what this is. Was like your bank in your facebook account? I don't get it.
Basically it is an attempt to give you a life that exists entirely within the computer. Everything that doesn't involve moving actual physical objects would take place there--socializing, business (knowledge work/paperwork/money transactions), education, etc
Eventually haptic suits would allow simulation touch, and all-directional treadmills would allow physical exertion (these treadmills exist as a niche item already).
The books "Ready Player One" and "Snowcrash" give a more robust description ("Snowcrash" is a hoot, particularly with its prediction about the pizza delivery business).
When Zuck & Elon talk about making their software world's into banks, that's strictly to attract deep pocket investors. Sure, Zuck et al would love to corner the financial markets, but it would be much easier for them to set up this alternate world first& demand a slice of everyone else's transactions within it (ala Apple/Google App Stores).
Second Life was very popular in 2007. It also offered a space in which people could interact on the web.
Think of it like a MMORPG, but without the organizing principles of an actual "game" with goals and loot boxes and stuff.
People would create their avatar, decide what geographic location within the space they wanted to go to, then walk/fly around talking to other people/avatars
Businesses started buying space in it because "that was the future of where business would happen".
Soon the world realized there were more other spaces to hang and more fun ways to share, and poof! Second life disappeared for all intents and purposes.
Nobody knows what it is. Zuckerberg doesn't know what it is. He was convinced it was the next big platform though, similar to how mobile emerged 15 years ago or however long ago it was.
Pepsi ran a lottery in the Philippines but when there were more winners than expected they refused to pay out the cash prizes. There were actual riots, a few people died.
No it's not that there were "more winners", it's that they had the lottery everynight, announcing the numbers on tv. Prices changed everyday. 500 pesos being the least and 1 million being the max. On the day of the 1 million pesos prize, they announced the wrong code on tv and made 600 000 people winner of 1 000 000 pesos. Paying this would have crippled pepsi. So they settled to get every winner 500 pesos, the minimum prizes. Riot ensued.
My favorite Pepsi blunder is that ad with ~~Kylie~~ Kendall Jenner from 2017 where she joins a protest and de-escalates the situation by [handing a riot cop a Pepsi.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NApOXaynEJM)
They took it down in like 48 hours. I almost couldn't believe it was real. It could have been a parody.
The Ford Pinto. Ford knew they had a problem, but they moved forward on the results of a cost-benefit analysis that showed it would cost more to fix the problem than to pay out lawsuits. The judgment in the first lawsuit blew their cost-benefit analysis out of the water because of the lowball number they used as the value of a human life.
And the Ford Bronco II. It was estimated that one in every 500 Bronco IIs ever produced was involved in a fatal rollover crash. By 2001 Ford had paid out over $2.1 billion in damages verdicts and settlements. But a Ford engineer had reported in the early 1990s that the Bronco II had a dangerously low stability index. In fact, Ford even canceled the J-turn test during the Bronco II testing procedures for fear of killing one of their own employees.
I had no idea about this. My freshman and sophomore years of high school I rode to school with an upperclassman friend that had a Bronco II. I can remember multiple instances of him having it up on two wheels.
Guess we got lucky.
A British corporate failure. Back in the 1980s the dominant manufacturer of vacuum cleaners was a company called Hoover. They were so dominant that the word hoover had become a verb, people spoke about "doing the hoovering". They even had a Royal Warrant which is a stamp of approval from the Royal Family and can be very valuable for brands in the UK who secure it as it drives sales; 'if its good enough for the King its good enough for me'.
Hoover struggled through the 1980s recession and by the 1990s they were facing competition from a young upstart vacuum cleaning company called Dyson. Their sales numbers were rapidly dropping and in 1992 they found themselves with 50,000 vacumn cleaners that they couldnt sell. So to shift the stock their marketing team came up with an idea for a promotion. It was simple, buy £100 worth of Hoover products and you get two free return flights from the UK to the USA. The value of the flights was £600. The public couldnt believe that such an offer was available, for just £100 they could get a vacumn cleaner and two return flights to the US. So £700 worth of goods for just £100. Hoover expected to only sell the 50,000 units they had on hand but the promotion was so popular that very quickly they had orders for 300,000 units. They had to quickly increase production to manufacture the missing 250,000 units, at a massive loss to themselves.
And then when it came to the free flights Hoover delibritely put an overly bureaucratic process in place to do so. It involved filling out 3 application forms and posting them one at a time but each within a 14 day deadline. Customers were determined to get their free flights but Hoover had more obstacles in their way such as offering flights departing the other side of the country from where the customer lived or forcing them on to unpopular dates and times. There was fury among the public that this much loved British brand was doing everything they could to not give out the free flights to America. Protests broke out and then legal actions started on top. The BBC did a hugely watched documentary on the matter and newspapers ran and ran with the story for years after the initial free flight promotion. Every negative article about Hoover was basically like death by a thousand cuts.
At the end of it all Hoover as a popular and trusted brand was finished. Every time its name was mentioned in the media it was to do with that company who promised customers free flights but then reneged on the promise. People who hadnt even taken part in the promotion were disgusted with them. The Royal Family withdrew their Royal Warrant of Hoover products and sales collapsed. The entire marketing team at Hoover were sacked. Eventually Candy bought the brand out. It still exists as a brand today but the free US flights promotion in 1992 essentially turned them from a dominant market player with over half of all vacuum cleaner sales in the UK into a company that was despised and boycotted by the public at large.
NOKIA
They were not that big in the US but they dominated the mobile phone market in most of the rest of the world at one point.
When the first iPhone came out they were very dismissive of it, we all know how that turned out.
.... Why is Boeing not further up on this list?
Bought their biggest US competitor after they watched it torch itself with Jack Welch MBA cultists. Just ended up eating the MBA cancer too and now it's terminal.
777 - last 100% old B aircraft. Smooth rollout to unanimous praise. The last Great Boeing plane.
787 - amazing generational leap design, but some major problems with production and some typical teething problems with such a new & advanced design. MBA cultists start injecting their poison and production optimized to ~~crush their experienced union workforce~~ allow it to be "assembled like Legos" anywhere. All production moved to SC after 2021 despite continued production quality problems that won't go away at SC. Also fuck you WA taxpayers who gave B a huge tax break if 787 production stayed in WA, but holding B accountable would make B have a sad and politically hard and we can't have that now can we? MBA cultists are clearly now in control. Delays and problems cost B ~$6B as of Q1 23. Those extra costs mean less gas in the tank for new projects. Maybe.
737 Max - Old B engineers completely pushed out of all strategic decision making and after Airbus spooked management with the NEO in the 10's, decided to go with a quick slapped together new engine option plus some updating version of the 737 and abandoning project Yellowstone. This is despite old guard B engineers feelings that 737 NG was supposed to be "the last 737." Major hoops jumped through (including jumping through their own asshole) to keep on same 737 type rating at all costs. So much outsourcing. Avionics design flaw makes it through certification due to said outsourcing, corporate malfecense, and FAA regulatory capture and get their pee pee slammed in the car door. Yellowstone aircraft would have cost $10B. Max was supposed to cost $4-5B. Total costs for Max fuck up now north of $20B.
Between 787 and Max fuck ups, B now behind $25ish billion. Sure would be nice to have that money for the new aircraft they need to bring to market in the 2030's now wouldn't it? Don't forget closing down Long Acres campus in 2021. Old B is now dead.
SLS - What a complete disaster of a program. Over budget, behind schedule, and very nearly a PR disaster with the Artemis 1 launch. Test vehicles still can't even do what they are supposed to do. The worst example of govt pork barrel/make work program and corporate ineptitude.
Boeing is mostly staying afloat by virtue of being the sole large heavy aircraft production company left in USA and is "too big to fail." I dream that Boeing Commercial Aircraft is spun off and they can get back to their roots of designing amazing commercial aircraft.
General Electric. So many Jack Welsh acyolates destroying companies to make a quick buck for Wall Street.
We could call Bain Capital "Thanos" because half the companies it acquires die and the other half are maimed.
One of my favorite examples of a massive corporate failure is the bankruptcy of Blockbuster, which failed to adapt to the digital revolution led by competitors like Netflix.
The thing with Blockbuster is they actually *were* successfully competing with Netflix for awhile. They created Blockbuster Online allowing people to order DVDs over the internet, and then added this program where if you returned a DVD you rented online to their store you could rent a new DVD for free. They gained a ton of subscribers, it was growing like crazy.
... and then billionare investor Carl Icahn forced out their CEO, thought the whole online shit was incredibly unprofitable and not worth it, and installed a new CEO who basically killed it off.
Womp womp.
I'm going to have to go with Union Carbide for that one time when they bought a dilapidated, crumbling pesticide plant in the middle of Bhopal, India, did ***absolutely nothing*** to fix it up before taking over production, then acted all surprised when a massive chemical spill killed every man, woman, and child within half a mile of the place.
If you include all the birth defects and cancers that popped up in the following decades that were probably linked to the exposure, the death toll is estimated in the 500,000 range.
Yeah, they basically got away with it. The advantage of building a chemical plant in an Indian slum is that no one cares if something goes wrong. Non-Indian countries say that it's India's problem, and India says that they were all bottom-caste untouchables anyway, so good riddance.
I'm pretty sure that Union Carbide faced zero consequences in the US. I think they had to sell a bunch of shares and lost majority ownership of the company, or something like that. Other than that, American courts deferred to the Indian justice system. The Indian justice system fined a half dozen guys who were clearly the most responsible a few thousand dollars each. I don't think the corporation itself suffered any consequences in India.
My favorite is when A&W promoted a 1/3lb burger to compete with the quarter pounder. It failed because most people thought 1/3lb was less meat than a quarter pounder
This is the legend passed around, but is there any verifiable proof to this? It sounds more like a "Haha, people are dumb" joke than an actual researched position. A&W barely has a market presence to begin with compared to McDonald's. I've maybe seen 2-3 in my life.
The Walmart expansion into Germany was a total disaster. They blindly tried to force their way onto an extremely competitive market with a completely different work and shopping culture. Most Germans don't even know that Walmart ever existed in Germany and they have since completely left the country at a massive financial loss.
The merge between Mattel and The Learning Company in 2000. Read up on it if you are unaware, this was over twenty years ago and people still study why it soured.
Sears. Who had a store /delivery point in almost every town. They could have been Amazon or berry but like many companies they ignored the wave of internet store and got pummelled.
Imagine a Sears with a website like Amazon and either pickup sites in every town or door to door delivery.
I’m in Canada I kind of miss Sears. I grew up in a very small town and my family bought most things from Sears.
Having your brand be a common word (“Gotta tweet this” “Can you google that?”) is something marketing people would genocide for and companies pay billions to fail at it.
To take such and deliberately ruin it with a childish obsession with a letter… god damn.
Australian DIY chain Bunnings acquisition of UK-based chain Homebase. They came in guns blazing, fired the entire management team, and tried to remake Homebase in their image. Got rid of the Habitat and Laura Ashley franchises, the cycle service shops, cut down the plants and garden sections, and replaced all of this with a load of grim, cut-rate power tools.
Most critically of all, they brought in a huge - GINORMOUS - selection of barbecues and outdoor kitchens and the like. In a country where no one has a garden bigger than a bin store and it's too rainy to barbecue nine months of the year. They devoted literally a quarter of the (very large) shop floor space to these items which absolutely nobody wanted.
It lasted three years before they sold the chain for £1 to a retail recovery specialist and walked off from a £230 million loss.
Absolutely epic fail.
It's my "Favourite" in that it's the worst one I can think of and an excellent example about how a profit motive unrestrained by safety regulations is a ticking time bomb: [The Bhopal Disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster).
A pesticide plant in Bhopal, India owned by a subsidiary of Union Carbide Corporation, an American company, was expected to close in the near future due to anticipated unprofitability. To squeeze every last penny out of it possible, the company all but stopped training their employees and performing preventative maintenance, with the knowledge and approval of the American owners. On the night of 2 December 1984 the plant suffered a massive (preventable) gas leak, enveleoping the surrounding area with ethyl isocyanate, a highly toxic gas. The plant was situated in a highly populated urban area, leading to the immediate deaths of over 2000 people and the eventual deaths of nearly another 2000, and over 500,000 injuries which resulted in tens of thousands of people being permanently disabled.
The company was forced to pay a fine to the Indian government. Seven Indian employees who were at the plant and survived received two years in jail, but the owners, specifically The CEO at the time Warren Anderson despite it being documented that he was aware of the risk of a disaster and ordered the procedural changes, never faced punishment.
The American owners didn’t face any consequences for a very simple and important reason: they owned 50.1% of the Indian subsidiary, with the rest owned by the Indian government, the government of MP, and a number of state owned banks. So going after the American parent company would have resulted in a lot of the board minutes of the Indian subsidiary (with senior Congress politicians and cronies on the board) coming out in court and those people all having to take part of the responsibility as well. As you can imagine, they didn’t want this and this is also why the Indian government insisted on representing the interests of the victims and settling quite quickly, to avoid having all of that dragged through the court system.
New Coke was just HFCS sweetened Diet Coke.
Diet Coke was a HUGE hit for Coca-Cola. So executives wondered whether Diet Coke was the better formula. Pepsi was running ads with the “Pepsi Challenge” where customers overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi to Coke in blind taste tests. Coke ran some blind tests, found that New Coke was better was and made the switch.
What they didn’t count on was that what people enjoyed about Coca-Cola was that psychological connection, not the taste. (This is also why the Pepsi Challenge didn’t matter.) New Coke flopped. People who liked Diet Coke kept drinking Diet Coke and people who liked Coke wanted the old one.
Years later, Coke had more success with Coke Zero, which is the opposite of New Coke - artificially sweetened Coca-Cola Classic.
Also the thing about the pepsi challenge is it was one sip of soda. Your first sip of soda. Pepsi is a more sugar-forward cola, so many people might like pepsi more for exactly one sip, but it would be a cloying taste for a whole can. The test itself had many flaws.
My favorite conspiracy theory about this is they specifically designed it to fail so that they could switch over to high fructose corn syrup when they brought old coke back.
As auditor of Enron who corruptly blessed Enron's fraudulent activities, they deserved to do down hard.
This is less an example of bad business decisions and more an example of pure corruption.
The Enron scandal, one of the largest corporate frauds in history, involved Enron Corporation, an energy company. It exposed the company's systemic and creatively planned accounting fraud, designed to hide massive debts and inflate profits. This scandal led to Enron's bankruptcy, which was then the largest in U.S. history. Tut Tut.
Circuit City. In an effort to save money they fired all the good salesmen because they were making too much and hired people at minimum wage to try to sell tv’s. They soon went bankrupt.
Lenovo shipping laptops loaded with the Superfish malware. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/19/superfish-need-to-know/?sh=25a8a4133877](https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/19/superfish-need-to-know/?sh=25a8a4133877)
Sony rootkit DRM
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Sears was practically built on catalog sales and shipping items to customers. They had the infrastructure in place yet somehow missed out on internet shopping.
Sears had everything. They were the original everything store... You could even buy a house. - Retail catalog of just about everything that could have moved to electronic form - Experience with mail order logistics - They owned Discover card - They had a large stake in Prodigy, one of the first ISPs They could have had an online store that consumers felt safe using their Discover card at. They could have offered in store returns on goods bought online. They fucking blew it
I don’t fault them for not understanding Internet shopping at first. Plenty of people thought the idea was ridiculous. That being said, one year after Amazon Had started doing it is a different matter. By about 97-98 Sears should have been in the deep end selling online.
Agreed. I remember a time that you would not admit you met your partner through online dating. It was shameful for whatever reason. Now it's pretty standard.
I was convinced that online dating would never work. The whole idea was simply too embarrassing and weird. And yes, I definitely remember when people would refuse to admit that they met online. It’s really funny how attitudes change.
I’ve seen long Reddit write ups on how they couldn’t just Switch to online. All the work involved in digitizing pictures of each product and its own product page etc And every time they fail to mention that any other company would have had to do that too. Sears had every part of what they needed but the webstore. It would have been difficult but it would have been more difficult for anyone else.
They understood the internet unbelievably badly. Their website was so weird and insecure that people were very easily able to create fake listings on it which were then somehow purchasable and then when this got out their immediate reaction was to try to censor information about their security problems resulting in an out of control Streisand effect so big that "fuck Sears" gave reddit pretty much its first ever viral moment.
Not sure on security, but definitely remember how badly their site was designed. I remember they put the item name in the URL, and had the page display that. So people started writing super racist item names into the URL and sharing it, which the site happily displayed as the item name. So, so bad.
Eddie Lampert. https://www.businessinsider.com/rise-and-fall-of-sears-bankruptcy-store-closings#in-2015-sears-revenue-fell-from-362-billion-two-years-prior-to-251-billion-20
Exactly. Lampert used Sears as his personal bank account. Profited as he strip mined the company.
He didn't come in until like 2012. He ran it to the ground but it was already a sinking ship . Sears should have started investing big in e-commerce in the late 90s early 2000 like everyone else.
Probably Blackberry, they're an interesting case study in a company being sniped off of what ten years ago had been an undisputed market-leading position by failing to account for changing technology.
Years ago, I listened to a podcast where they talked about the first time BlackBerry engineers got hold of an iPhone and opened it. They deemed they were several years behind replicating the iPhone and didn't think it was possible.
Same with Nokia. An exec took the first iPhone home and his daughter asked if she could take "the magic phone" to bed with her. He knew then they were screwed.
Kodak, too. In almost the exact same way. Oh and Nokia.
Nokia made good phones, but they made every single software decision wrong.
Nokia yes, but Microsoft was worse. They were the smartphone market leader. They had just recruited the development team behind the hottest phone -- the Danger phone -- who planned a touchscreen phone for their follow-on product. And they blew it. Mostly because of their strategy of Windows Everywhere, and allowing that to override the experience of the Danger team. Who seeing as they were getting nowhere, dispersed. Later, when Apple had released the iPhone, Microsoft looked at the API and saw that Apple wasn't presenting a traditional UNIX API, but instead an API which placed huge responsibilities of applications to take action to save power. Exactly the reverse of the Windows Everywhere strategy. Nokia's problem was simply that they had a feature phone for every variation of every telco's marketing plan. They forgot that their customer was the phone user, not the telco. So when they needed a phone to appeal to directly to customers, they didn't know that Nokia had a smartphone. Worse still, Nokia's next-generation smartphone was full of "second system syndrome" issues -- too many features, lack of focus, late.
I am one of the few who actually bought a Nokia Windows phone. I really loved the little thing. It was a great little phone. It truly was. But, I ditched it after a while and went back to Android. No apps. It's a shame, really. It was a lovely little phone.
Kodak actually have digital camera technology but didn't bother to distribute it. They were too invested in film.
Kodak invented the digital camera
I worked there. There was a lot wrong with the company. They focused more on pushing their existing products into new markets when they should have been replacing their operating system. The old Java OS was very old and crusty. Apps didn't have separate memory. You could literally reach into another app and insert UI elements, so you'd see things like ads being inserted into BBM. The OS needed to be replaced. The purchase of QNX as a replacement was the right move but was a little too late. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Target's expansion to Canada was a disaster. They spent billions purchasing existing Zellers (Canadian department store) locations from Hudsons Bay Company (HBC). Then they spent 100s of millions more renovating them. They leased more locations to open stores. 133 in total. Due to a variety of issues, mainly distribution problems -they tanked, Target Canada declared bankruptcy and had to pay more millions to get out of leases and sell their owned real estate. This all happened in about 5 years. My favourite part of the story is the HBC took some of the proceeds from the sale of Zellers and bought Saks Fifth Avenue with it. They're recently begun re-opening Zellers
I remember walking into a target and alot of empty shelves. Their logistics must have been a mess. And yeah it was everywhere at once. They should have gradually entered the Canadian market like Walmart did. I think they were trying to hit Walmart head on but they really needed to work the bugs out. I’m not really sure what the difference is between target and Walmart in the US is but in Canada it just seemed the same to me. Except Walmart actually had full stock on their shelves.
Depending on the time period, there wasn’t much. Today Target tries to market itself as a higher end store with higher quality products. But when I was a kid, they were both selling more or less the same shit. Walmart really embraced the race to the bottom and started selling the cheapest junk that they could convince companies to put their brand on. Target stopped this after a few years of losing the race to the bottom.
Yeah, my experience shopping at both stores in the US (as a Canadian) is that Target stores are very clean and inviting, and well-organized. It shows, right down to the condition of the public restrooms - those are some of the cleanest, well-kept public restrooms in America. Even one I’d gone to in San Francisco was an 8/10. Their Canadian stores were basically Zellers with a new logo slapped on top. It was not the same store experience as in the US. I remember actually going out of my way to go to a US Target once in late 2013, when I had a Canadian Target nearby.
This is why I miss Sears in Canada. Sears had better quality stuff. A lot of Walmart items are junk.
The issues can almost 100% be blamed on an extremely poor SAP installation. The US wasnt using it but was planning on moving to it so they decided to do Canada with it. It was very bad.
Omg is this true? I'm a software developer and am constantly frustrated when I see implementations done poorly. Leadership is often nowhere to be found when solutions are being architected to meet the needs of the business... but then they are flabbergasted when those same solutions don't do what they want it to. If Target Canada failed due to software, this needs to be written up as a warning to other businesses on what not to do.
They had hilarious issues in the back end too. Your store needed 10x cases of tooth brushes because you’re out of stock? Congrats you order 10 cases on your end but, the distribution Center sees 10 individual brushes ordered instead of 10 cases.
Walmart did the same thing in Germany. https://ecomclips.com/blog/why-walmart-failed-in-europe-what-went-wrong-in-germany/
Walmart didn't fail on logistics and distribution, they failed by not giving a fuck about local culture and laws and then having to learn the hard way the error of their ways. One court pointed out that they couldn't violate the German constitution's first and second articles by telling their workers who they could and couldn't date.
Having the manager of their German division live in London was so incredibly emblematic for that entire boondoggle. In their minds, they were convinced they were going to show up and show those bumbling locals how it was done. Arrogance was their downfall.
Not researching the culture and labor laws of the host country was their first failure. The second was trying to enforce American work standards that were in direct conflict with theirs.
I wish Walmart failed here. I despise that company.
Target in Canada was a ghost town. Prices weren't great, and they didn't even have seasonal stuff out in the one near me. Really disappointing after hearing about the brand in the states.
I'm actually still salty about that. They bought up zellers, then imploded, leaving a giant hole in the retail market that has yet to be filled in again. HBC is starting to open zellers again, but in name only and only a few pilot sections inside hbc stores. I'd love to see a whole new rollout. EDIT - I also heard part of the failure of Target up here was a lacklustre (by their metric) holiday shopping season. They didn't quite clue in that Canadians aren't rabid shoppers like Americans.
Let me tell you this made my job in the states a fucking nightmare. I actually can speak pretty intelligently about the impact this had because I was an Executive Team Leader right out of college during this time, and helped to open one of the stores in a more remote region in Canada. There were a few issues at hand that caused the downfall. As you mentioned, logistics is the main one. They just really underestimated how much it would take to keep stores stocked when you're dealing with a new country, new weather, and the expanse of the region. Second which was interesting to me, they didn't realize that Canadians at the time were much more likely to make multiple trips to different stores to get the lowest prices possible. That is, they didn't realize Canadians were so price sensitive and unlike American convenience shoppers who would pay a premium for a one stop shop. How did this make my job a nightmare? Well, since Canadian stores were suffering and money has to come from somewhere, US stores hours would get shipped up to Canadia to help put out the fires. I ran a logistics process unloading trucks in a high volume store, and corporate would continually cut hours for stores to make up for the shortcomings. So while my predecessors would have, say, 30 people to unload trucks, I would get 18-20. It fucking blew and I'm so thankful I got out of retail. It feels like the Hunger Games thinking back on it. Here I am working 14 hour nights while fucking corporate has Beyonce perform for all the Store Team Leaders in Minneapolis. Whew. Okay I think I haven't worked through this trauma like I thought I had. 😂
My mom is still mad that we lost Target. It's always been one of the stores we have to visit when we're in the US.
Circuit City “cutting costs” by firing their most experienced salespeople. The chain was bankrupt in less than two years.
I was there when it happened. We all just laughed and knew exactly what was coming.
Circuit City’s salespeople weren’t very knowledgeable by the standards of the day. People shopped elsewhere and then went to CC for the low price. It did their competitors in. Then the internet did Circuit City in.
It wasn't just the internet, it was their fading relevance. As Best Buy eclipsed them in the early 00s, their playbook became "copy Best Buy, but not as good." Their last CEO was Philip Schoonover, someone I was told was a "big picture" guy at Best Buy before being lured over to CC. Their POS and inventory systems were ancient, their services lagged, their inventory not as good, their stores were progressively quieter and more. They failed to change in the big way that BBY had through their big customer centricity push 20 years ago. The ground beneath them had been eroding forever and by 2008, they only needed the incoming financial crisis to kick the can for them. One of their last moves was to get a spot in the movie "Eagle Eye" with Shia Labeouf, a film that wasn't good cradling a retailer that wasn't good enough.
Incredibly Best Buy starting to follow the Circuit City model
Honestly surprised they're still around.
Best Buy is last man standing, it was Computer City, then CompUSA, then Circuit City.
RIP, Fry’s.
Don't do my man Radio Shack dirty like that
With, I expect, the same result.
I worked for Kodak (Qualex) and I will never forget the meeting we had talking about 35mm film. A person said he’s noticing an influx of people looking to print digital photos. This was a senior Vice President of Kodak saying, and I quote “this whole digital think is just a fad, it will blow over soon”
I think it's a toss-up between Xerox and Kodak for the worst corporate failure. Both companies were on the leading edge of the revolution (Xerox even more so with there work at PARC) and somehow managed to fuck it up by being stupid.
Worked for Xerox for a while. The problem with these companies is they see how much money they are making from their proven processes and are unable or unwilling to believe someone can do it better. Then technology improves and they are bypassed by someone better and hungrier for their piece of the pie. Hell Xerox even invented the mouse at PARC and I believe a very fine graphic interface but never monetized it. The could not create the market for the products they invented. I think back to Blackberry. They OWNED the cell phone market in the 2000s and almost every big business had contracts with them. Instead of improving, they sat on their laurels and kept raking in those sweet business dollars. When Apple started to eat their lunch with the Iphone, they weren't concerned because they had all these business contracts, they let Apple have the personal phone market. Until people wanted to use their Iphones for business too. And all their revenue started drying up. Now they are just a footnote in the cell phone world and the last time they released a phone was in 2018.
PARC created "WIMP": Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pointer. The team was so demoralized they showed it to Apple without a NDA. Later Apple sued Microsoft for stealing windows and Microsoft reminded them they stole it too.
I believe several of the people on the Macintosh design team actually had worked at PARC. Like Xerox wasn't doing anything with all their tech, so they just went over to Apple who was.
RIM’s Jim Balsille was also more focused on buying an NHL team and moving it to Hamilton during the early years of the iPhone than on his own company. At one point any news about Balsille was about the Phoenix Coyotes and Gary Bettman and not BlackBerry.
The BlackBerry movie is quite fictionalized, but Glenn Howerton nails the way I remember the local vision of Balsillie: the most business-ass businessman in Canada, inexplicably obsessed with buying an NHL team instead of making RIM truly competitive during the smartphone explosion.
It's definitely Xerox. "The closest thing in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth is the late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC." Source: [Steve Jobs Visits Xerox](https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html#:~:text=The%20closest%20thing%20in%20the,had%20been%20developed%20at%20PARC).
You can throw Yahoo in the there. They could have bought Google in 2002.
And Sears…they were literally Amazon before it was cool, but didn’t embrace online. Bonus points for having started Discover Card and selling it off a couple of years before online blossomed. They had the customer base, the inventory, the distribution, and banking…would’ve been the reinvigoration of a major American retail giant if anyone had connected the dots.
This is so true. Sears was huge. They had every opportunity to become Amazon but they just made every single wrong decision possible.
And, on top of that, Sears’ largest competitor in the catalog business was Montgomery Ward. By the 1980’s both companies were struggling to stay alive. In a bizarre corporate version of brotherly competition, the CEO of Sears was Edward Brennan, and Wards was being run into the ground by his younger brother, Bernard Brennan.
Yeah but did their executives at least get their bonuses? I sure hope the employee pensions were quashed so the executives could get their bonuses.
Well in Sears case their last executive got his bonus and took all of Sears good real estate for his own company. Totally not a conflict of interest.
Not really. The internet in the 90s is not at all like it is today. If you opened a web page with a picture of someone modeling a sweater, it took a while for it to show up. It was a frustrating pain in the ass to shop online. Amazon worked because they started with selling books. You only needed to see the title and the author. The actual aesthetic of the product wasn't important. Also, people weren't quite ready then to put their credit card number "into the internet." It was a bit of a scary prospect. Finally, fast, free shipping was completely unheard of and Sears did not have the logistics to pull this off. You got things from them in about 6 weeks and that was common. Sears last catalog was in early 1993. Most people did not have the internet back then. That was my brother's first year of college and he was telling the family about the internet because no one knew what it was. It was still something new that mostly nerdy college guys were into. Nerdy 18 year old boys didn't shop from the Sears' catalog.
They had CompuServe too. Totally had all the pieces to be both AOL and Amazon and blew it all.
That's a survivorship bias. If Yahoo had bought Google, I doubt it would've become as big as it is today.
Yeah really, how many countless websites were bought up by giants, only for them to fail? In an alternate history they could have been the next Google too. It's like saying "lol the Chicago Bears are so stupid for drafting Mitch Trubisky instead of Patrick Mahomes". Who's to say Mahomes would have succeeded in Chicago over Kansas City? We'll never know. And in all likelihood he would have failed in Chicago. Things are the way they are because of the way things played out. Every situation will create a different outcome. It's like saying every cookie recipe will make the same exact product. It didn't work that way.
If you see how ubiquitous Yahoo! is in Japan you have a good idea of how they would look if they had bought out Google.
And both headquartered in Rochester, NY turning it into a depressed city
What's wild is Rochester did *way* better than Buffalo which mostly suffered the same fate as the rest of the rust belt, despite the cities being quite close to each other. Where I grew up it took a little less than an hour to drive to either one.
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What is ironic is that Kodak invented digital photography and let the patents expire without cornering the market, and by the time they decided to get into the game it was too late, because everyone else already had.
They invented it in the 70's and correctly realized it would take 20 years to be marketable.
Ah the ever optimist executive! Gotta love em. I worked at Ritz camera in 2000, so no corporate execs present. But us on the floor had just set up a display case with brand new 1.3 megapixel cameras. At that time, I’d say we still sold marginally more SLRs than digital. But the writing was on the wall. Come to think of it, it was really cool to be a part of that transition, seeing both types of customers at once.
It was a really cool time and this was in 2002 maybe 2003 he said that! Also I asked how we are monitoring digital customers vs 35mm when we had no digital capabilities so we were just turning them away.
I knew a guy who used to work at Kodak in Rochester. He told me that around the early 2000s, he was in a meeting and Kodak execs said something like "digital is coming, but we're figuring we have 20 years to sort things out/adjust to the new market". And ten years later they were done.
And to make it even more fucked, Kodak invented the first digital camera. And someone said, There is never going to be a use for that!
Southwest airlines last Christmas
It was the biggest meltdown in aviation history according to the IATA, and that’s a statistic no airline wants to have
[these big bitches don’t play](https://youtu.be/cN9ECvpIXkA?si=6Q2sSU-7vPqf-1WL)
I love flying SW because it's so damn easy to do everything with them, but I was cracking up at the "you showed your ticket at security, you good."
George Lucas offered to sell his computer animation company to Disney for $8 Million in the 1980s. Disney balked so he sold it to Steve Jobs instead and it became Pixar.
Speaking of George, his decision to get merchandising rights for Star Wars was genius
Still waiting for those Spaceballs dolls.
Tumblr!!! - 2013 “sold” for $ 1.1b in CASH to Yahoo. - 2017 - Verizon acquires Yahoo - 2018 bans porn - 2019 sold to Wordpress for $3m That’s a spicy meatball. Source - see updates below. Edit to correct facts. - better source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr - added in sales figures.
The entire Penn Central disaster. The railroad was massive but terribly managed and lasted less than 3 years before becoming the biggest bankruptcy in US history at the time
I'm not sure how Penn Central could've made it. My grandfather worked for the New Haven railroad, which I believe became part of PC. He liked to point out that the federal government gave automakers the Interstate highway system, but gave railroads nothing. That came home to roost.
I don't know if this counts as failure, but Skype had a 10-15 year head start only for zoom to swipe in during the pandemic.
This one is so odd to me, for a such long time everyone used skype. I dunno how they dropped the ball so hard. Suddenly the panini comes around and boom, people are using everything BUT Skype.
People used skype when it was good, then MS degraded it an people grumbled because for some reason there were no good alternatives. Lockdowns happened and everyone needed video chat and they were STOKED to jump on a skype alternative because the software had been hot garbage for years already and everyone was sick of it.
Damned panini ruined everything...
I want a bite of the panini.
Skype lives on under the name Microsoft Teams. Still uses the same sounds and broadly the same user interface. I'm not sure which one's better (I only used Zoom once, quite a while ago and it felt a bit rudimental), but Teams is pretty much the corporate/enterprise standard for video communication.
World War II was over. Germany was a bombed-out smoking ruin. The victors saw that communism was taking hold in countries with collapsed economies, so they wanted to resurrect the economies of Europe. They were desperate to just get people working again. They'd try anything that had a ghost of a chance at working. The U.S. essentially told Ford that they'd give them the Volkswagenwerk, the factory that made VWs. If Ford were to take over, just run this factory and make some cars, get people back to work, they could have it for free. Henry Ford II told his board of directors: "Gentlemen, what we're being offered here isn't worth a damn." And declined the offer.
Wow. Never knew this. Yeah, that's a blunder.
Naw Ford was just pissed off they killed the Nazi’s. Ford had received some sort of recognition by the Third Reich, he was in pretty good with Hitler.
Oh, not just some recognition. He was awarded the grand cross of the eagle, the highest award that could be given to a foreigner by nazis, and he received it happily. He was also the only foreigner regarded favorably in freaking Mein Kampf. Hitler saw Ford as a personal hero and aspired to be like him. Hitler kept a portrait, life size if I remember, behind his desk of Ford. Ford was a nazi.
Stalin considered Ford a hero too, and even wrote letters praising him for setting up factories in the USSR in the 20s when many countries refused to trade with the USSR. Stalin wrote a glowing letter about Ford to the Chamber of Commerce after the deal. Ford would business with anyone. As long as they had money. And were antisemtic.
> Ford was just pissed off they killed the Nazi’s That Nazi was grand*daddy Ford, the Ford Model T Henry, the decliner-of-VW bloke, Henry II Ford, was a son of Edsel Ford who was a son of Henry-Model-T-Ford. Henry II Ford was also the Ford vs Ferrari guy that gave Carroll Shelby a chance to show em MURICA in France.
It was actually the British that offered Ford the Volkswagenwerk - Wolfsburg was in the British zone. It was a British army major that got the plant going again, after Ford and Austin turned them down.
Adidas and Puma focusing on a sibling rivalry so much that they failed to notice when a relatively small newcomer called Nike overtook them to become #1 in the world
IBM. They let Microsoft retain the rights to the PC operating system they put on the IBM PC.
That's not their only mistake, alas ...
At the time IBM wasn't worried about other computers using DOS because DOS was only one half of compatibility with IBM PCs. The other half was the IBM BIOS, which is the firmware in ROM on IBM PCs that actually handled many low-level functions. A lot of early PC clones ran DOS but weren't BIOS-compatible, so they couldn't actually run software that ran on IBM PCs. IBM didn't believe anyone could clone the BIOS, and they thought they could sue anyone who tried for copyright infringement. They even published the assembly code for the BIOS in the PC manual to make it more difficult to avoid copyright infringement. What they didn't count on was companies like Compaq setting up a clean-room reverse engineering process so that they could win the legal battle with IBM to fully clone the PC. Not signing an exclusive contract with MS for MS-DOS was certainly a fuck-up, but keep in mind there were also alternative clones of MS-DOS available within a few years too. DR-DOS, for example. Clone PCs were probably inevitable even if MS-DOS had been unavailable. IBM had no patents on the PC architecture, so ultimately they couldn't stop anyone from copying it.
Yahoo was offered Google for a million dollars , three times and they turned them down.
if they had bought it though, they only would have the search engine. All the other Google innovations would never have happened. We’d currently be living in an iPhone vs Blackberry world.
That’s the thing there is an opportunity cost to investing in unproven technology. For every google and Netflix, there is an Ask Jeeves and Napster. Entrenched companies need to focus on protecting their market share and innovation companies strive to steal it.
A few with different outcomes. Kendall Jenner stopping riots with a can of Pepsi. Tumblr banning Porn Only fans [banning porn](https://time.com/6092947/onlyfans-sexual-content-ban/) Blockbuster not buying Netflix
You ever see the College Humor / Dropout video about Tumblr? https://youtu.be/CtUuab1Aqg0?si=MBQ2XhycxFaGQjeO
I am a simple man: I see Brennan Lee Mulligan, I upvote.
OF banning porn I'm convinced with nothing but a marketing ploy.
I believe it was banking companies and porn/sex child protection regulation related. The company had kinda been set up to be for artists, musicians and some nsfw stuff. Which isn't really a problem for credit cards and banking. However, they really pushed the NSFW stuff and new banking laws showed up. So they had to tighten some stuff down to be able to continue as a company. Credit card companies were rejecting payments probably because of the new laws.
Toys R Us expansion into Sweden in the mid 90s. They refused to follow Swedish labour market practice by not signing a [collectiva bargainaing agreement (cba)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_agreement) with the storeworkers union (Handels). The union took its memebers out on strike while non-union members continued to work. Eventually more unions joined in sympathy strikes which stopped deliveries, cleaning, mail and finally even financial transactions for Toys R Us in Sweden. It is briefly described in this article: https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/what-canada-can-learn-from-swedens-unionized-retail-workers\_n\_6888328 It's one of the most famous labour market actions in Sweden in modern time, where there are extremely few strikes otherwise. However the exact same scenario is happening right now with Tesla this time. I should also note that unions work very differently in Sweden compared to the U.S. In Sweden workplaces do not vote on "unionization", the union membership is personal and no one is forced to join a union. If a workplace is big enough and have enough union members the union, which is industry wide, will negotiate a standard industry wide cba with the company. The cba covers all workers even those not in a union. The cba only sets a floor with regards to wages, wage increases, insurances, pension pay etc. There are no fees to the union from non members or the company.
The same is happening to Tesla at the moment. They refuse to have a collective agreement and thus more and more unions (in Sweden as well as the rest of Scandinavia) align against them.
Tesla will go the same direction as toysrus. Latest I heard, Telsa is recruiting lobbyists for the scandinavian market, thinking they can buy new laws to abolish tradition that has been going strong since medieval times..
Universal’s Dark Universe. In the rush to create a cinematic universe to rival Marvel, Universal was going to do a reboot of their classic monsters (Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, etc). Alex Kurtzman was going to be their Kevin Feige, overseeing the entire franchise. The first film was going to be The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise. They made the big announcement that Johnny Depp was going to be the Invisible Man, Javier Bardem was going to be Frankenstein’s Monster, and Russel Crowe was going to be Dr. Jeckyl. But what happened? Cruise took over control of the Mummy, turning it into just another vehicle for himself. With fond memories of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films, audiences stayed away, and the Mummy flopped, taking the entire Dark Universe with it.
I can never forget when they accidentally released this as the trailer - makes me laugh every time. https://youtu.be/kRqxyqjpOHs?feature=shared
Which Tom Cruise scream is your favourite? For me, it's a toss-up between "AUGH-AUGH, AUGH-AUGH" and "OU^A^A^A^A"
Ended up becoming The Cruisiverse
M and M’s declining to be the candy of choice for E.T. I remember watching the movie in the theaters thinking, “Oh, Reece’s Pieces, that’s cute.” Huge mistake.
American car manufacturers in the 80s. I was buying my first family car and it was between a Ford Taurus wagon and a Toyota camry wagon. The Ford sales guy said "Yeah, the Japs have to learn they can't make cars that last 15 years!" and then laughed. We got the Camry. No wonder the American car manufacturers all had to be bailed out.
Meanwhile, that Camry is probably still going strong.
I have a 2005 Honda that still runs wonderfully.
I was selling cats in the early 90s. Customers who wanted Toyotas (the first lot I worked at) came in with consumer reports, invoice prices, and knew what the hell they were buying. I couldn’t sell anything. Chevy customers (my second lot) came in with “I ain’t gone buy none of that Jap shit.” They were so much easier to sell to, even though the Chevy products were clearly inferior. I had no problem selling cars then. (And don't even get me started on how shit the Corvette was compared to the Supra. Plastic dashboard versus leather? Really?) **Edit**: I was selling cars, not cats. Replying on a phone is "fun".
To this day, people haven't changed. Some people would rather by an "American" vehicle made in some other country that will have numerous issues than ever spend money on a Japanese vehicle that might even be made in the USA. All this to say, they buy American. For example full size GM trucks are made in Mexico
I remember getting shit from a coworker for driving a Japanese truck. He finally shut up when I mentioned how that Tacoma was built down the road in Fremont and two of our other coworkers had built it.
My in-laws refuse to buy anything other than Ford and give my wife and I crap all the time for driving Subarus. Their Ford is made in Mexico, my Subaru is made in Indiana.
To be fair, it can be difficult to sell cats.
Well, TBF, selling cats at a Toyota dealership seems like it'd be a tough sell regardless.
The Metaverse
Every month or so I'm reminded it exist. Then I promptly forget about it again.
I never quite figured out what that is.
A second life for Second Life...and Facebook. Zuckerburg's fan boy tribute to the movie "Surrogates" Facebook's attempt to encapsulate every aspect of your life in a branded & tightly controlled walled garden that they 100% own, including owning all the advertising & data exploitation opportunities therein. A way to sell more Oculus hardware, hardware where no one --NO ONE--who wears it can possibly look cool, fulfilling a longtime revenge fantasy of geeky awkward high school-aged Zuck
I sort of know what second life is. Sort of. It had a brief surge of popularity like 10 years ago? Is that right? BTW, even after your explanation, I still don't know what this is. Was like your bank in your facebook account? I don't get it.
Basically it is an attempt to give you a life that exists entirely within the computer. Everything that doesn't involve moving actual physical objects would take place there--socializing, business (knowledge work/paperwork/money transactions), education, etc Eventually haptic suits would allow simulation touch, and all-directional treadmills would allow physical exertion (these treadmills exist as a niche item already). The books "Ready Player One" and "Snowcrash" give a more robust description ("Snowcrash" is a hoot, particularly with its prediction about the pizza delivery business). When Zuck & Elon talk about making their software world's into banks, that's strictly to attract deep pocket investors. Sure, Zuck et al would love to corner the financial markets, but it would be much easier for them to set up this alternate world first& demand a slice of everyone else's transactions within it (ala Apple/Google App Stores).
Second Life was very popular in 2007. It also offered a space in which people could interact on the web. Think of it like a MMORPG, but without the organizing principles of an actual "game" with goals and loot boxes and stuff. People would create their avatar, decide what geographic location within the space they wanted to go to, then walk/fly around talking to other people/avatars Businesses started buying space in it because "that was the future of where business would happen". Soon the world realized there were more other spaces to hang and more fun ways to share, and poof! Second life disappeared for all intents and purposes.
Nobody knows what it is. Zuckerberg doesn't know what it is. He was convinced it was the next big platform though, similar to how mobile emerged 15 years ago or however long ago it was.
Pepsi ran a lottery in the Philippines but when there were more winners than expected they refused to pay out the cash prizes. There were actual riots, a few people died.
No it's not that there were "more winners", it's that they had the lottery everynight, announcing the numbers on tv. Prices changed everyday. 500 pesos being the least and 1 million being the max. On the day of the 1 million pesos prize, they announced the wrong code on tv and made 600 000 people winner of 1 000 000 pesos. Paying this would have crippled pepsi. So they settled to get every winner 500 pesos, the minimum prizes. Riot ensued.
Thanks for clarifying, I must have remembered the details incorrectly.
Yeah I was confused when they said “more winners” because doesn’t the lottery company control how many winners there are? Lo
My favorite Pepsi blunder is that ad with ~~Kylie~~ Kendall Jenner from 2017 where she joins a protest and de-escalates the situation by [handing a riot cop a Pepsi.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NApOXaynEJM) They took it down in like 48 hours. I almost couldn't believe it was real. It could have been a parody.
I loved the SNL skit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn8pwoNWseM
The Ford Pinto. Ford knew they had a problem, but they moved forward on the results of a cost-benefit analysis that showed it would cost more to fix the problem than to pay out lawsuits. The judgment in the first lawsuit blew their cost-benefit analysis out of the water because of the lowball number they used as the value of a human life.
And the Ford Bronco II. It was estimated that one in every 500 Bronco IIs ever produced was involved in a fatal rollover crash. By 2001 Ford had paid out over $2.1 billion in damages verdicts and settlements. But a Ford engineer had reported in the early 1990s that the Bronco II had a dangerously low stability index. In fact, Ford even canceled the J-turn test during the Bronco II testing procedures for fear of killing one of their own employees.
I had no idea about this. My freshman and sophomore years of high school I rode to school with an upperclassman friend that had a Bronco II. I can remember multiple instances of him having it up on two wheels. Guess we got lucky.
The only thing I know about the pinto is the gag from top secret.
A British corporate failure. Back in the 1980s the dominant manufacturer of vacuum cleaners was a company called Hoover. They were so dominant that the word hoover had become a verb, people spoke about "doing the hoovering". They even had a Royal Warrant which is a stamp of approval from the Royal Family and can be very valuable for brands in the UK who secure it as it drives sales; 'if its good enough for the King its good enough for me'. Hoover struggled through the 1980s recession and by the 1990s they were facing competition from a young upstart vacuum cleaning company called Dyson. Their sales numbers were rapidly dropping and in 1992 they found themselves with 50,000 vacumn cleaners that they couldnt sell. So to shift the stock their marketing team came up with an idea for a promotion. It was simple, buy £100 worth of Hoover products and you get two free return flights from the UK to the USA. The value of the flights was £600. The public couldnt believe that such an offer was available, for just £100 they could get a vacumn cleaner and two return flights to the US. So £700 worth of goods for just £100. Hoover expected to only sell the 50,000 units they had on hand but the promotion was so popular that very quickly they had orders for 300,000 units. They had to quickly increase production to manufacture the missing 250,000 units, at a massive loss to themselves. And then when it came to the free flights Hoover delibritely put an overly bureaucratic process in place to do so. It involved filling out 3 application forms and posting them one at a time but each within a 14 day deadline. Customers were determined to get their free flights but Hoover had more obstacles in their way such as offering flights departing the other side of the country from where the customer lived or forcing them on to unpopular dates and times. There was fury among the public that this much loved British brand was doing everything they could to not give out the free flights to America. Protests broke out and then legal actions started on top. The BBC did a hugely watched documentary on the matter and newspapers ran and ran with the story for years after the initial free flight promotion. Every negative article about Hoover was basically like death by a thousand cuts. At the end of it all Hoover as a popular and trusted brand was finished. Every time its name was mentioned in the media it was to do with that company who promised customers free flights but then reneged on the promise. People who hadnt even taken part in the promotion were disgusted with them. The Royal Family withdrew their Royal Warrant of Hoover products and sales collapsed. The entire marketing team at Hoover were sacked. Eventually Candy bought the brand out. It still exists as a brand today but the free US flights promotion in 1992 essentially turned them from a dominant market player with over half of all vacuum cleaner sales in the UK into a company that was despised and boycotted by the public at large.
NOKIA They were not that big in the US but they dominated the mobile phone market in most of the rest of the world at one point. When the first iPhone came out they were very dismissive of it, we all know how that turned out.
Kodak invented digital photography in 1975. Instead of capitalizing on it, they bought up small companies and focused on traditional film photography.
.... Why is Boeing not further up on this list? Bought their biggest US competitor after they watched it torch itself with Jack Welch MBA cultists. Just ended up eating the MBA cancer too and now it's terminal. 777 - last 100% old B aircraft. Smooth rollout to unanimous praise. The last Great Boeing plane. 787 - amazing generational leap design, but some major problems with production and some typical teething problems with such a new & advanced design. MBA cultists start injecting their poison and production optimized to ~~crush their experienced union workforce~~ allow it to be "assembled like Legos" anywhere. All production moved to SC after 2021 despite continued production quality problems that won't go away at SC. Also fuck you WA taxpayers who gave B a huge tax break if 787 production stayed in WA, but holding B accountable would make B have a sad and politically hard and we can't have that now can we? MBA cultists are clearly now in control. Delays and problems cost B ~$6B as of Q1 23. Those extra costs mean less gas in the tank for new projects. Maybe. 737 Max - Old B engineers completely pushed out of all strategic decision making and after Airbus spooked management with the NEO in the 10's, decided to go with a quick slapped together new engine option plus some updating version of the 737 and abandoning project Yellowstone. This is despite old guard B engineers feelings that 737 NG was supposed to be "the last 737." Major hoops jumped through (including jumping through their own asshole) to keep on same 737 type rating at all costs. So much outsourcing. Avionics design flaw makes it through certification due to said outsourcing, corporate malfecense, and FAA regulatory capture and get their pee pee slammed in the car door. Yellowstone aircraft would have cost $10B. Max was supposed to cost $4-5B. Total costs for Max fuck up now north of $20B. Between 787 and Max fuck ups, B now behind $25ish billion. Sure would be nice to have that money for the new aircraft they need to bring to market in the 2030's now wouldn't it? Don't forget closing down Long Acres campus in 2021. Old B is now dead. SLS - What a complete disaster of a program. Over budget, behind schedule, and very nearly a PR disaster with the Artemis 1 launch. Test vehicles still can't even do what they are supposed to do. The worst example of govt pork barrel/make work program and corporate ineptitude. Boeing is mostly staying afloat by virtue of being the sole large heavy aircraft production company left in USA and is "too big to fail." I dream that Boeing Commercial Aircraft is spun off and they can get back to their roots of designing amazing commercial aircraft.
> Why is Boeing not further up on this list? Endless inscrutable government money in the form of defense contracts, that's why.
General Electric. So many Jack Welsh acyolates destroying companies to make a quick buck for Wall Street. We could call Bain Capital "Thanos" because half the companies it acquires die and the other half are maimed.
One of my favorite examples of a massive corporate failure is the bankruptcy of Blockbuster, which failed to adapt to the digital revolution led by competitors like Netflix.
The thing with Blockbuster is they actually *were* successfully competing with Netflix for awhile. They created Blockbuster Online allowing people to order DVDs over the internet, and then added this program where if you returned a DVD you rented online to their store you could rent a new DVD for free. They gained a ton of subscribers, it was growing like crazy. ... and then billionare investor Carl Icahn forced out their CEO, thought the whole online shit was incredibly unprofitable and not worth it, and installed a new CEO who basically killed it off. Womp womp.
Nobody ever told Carl Icahn "No Carl, you Can't"
I'm going to have to go with Union Carbide for that one time when they bought a dilapidated, crumbling pesticide plant in the middle of Bhopal, India, did ***absolutely nothing*** to fix it up before taking over production, then acted all surprised when a massive chemical spill killed every man, woman, and child within half a mile of the place. If you include all the birth defects and cancers that popped up in the following decades that were probably linked to the exposure, the death toll is estimated in the 500,000 range.
How much did they actually pay out in damages for that? Like five dollars per human life? No, I’m not being sarcastic.
Yeah, they basically got away with it. The advantage of building a chemical plant in an Indian slum is that no one cares if something goes wrong. Non-Indian countries say that it's India's problem, and India says that they were all bottom-caste untouchables anyway, so good riddance. I'm pretty sure that Union Carbide faced zero consequences in the US. I think they had to sell a bunch of shares and lost majority ownership of the company, or something like that. Other than that, American courts deferred to the Indian justice system. The Indian justice system fined a half dozen guys who were clearly the most responsible a few thousand dollars each. I don't think the corporation itself suffered any consequences in India.
How are more people here not talking about Quibi? Funniest shit I ever saw
My favorite is when A&W promoted a 1/3lb burger to compete with the quarter pounder. It failed because most people thought 1/3lb was less meat than a quarter pounder
Why they didn't learn from this experience to release a 1/5 lb burger is beyond me
Brilliant
Is this a corporate failure or people being dumb as shit tho ?
It's corporate failure for not knowing people are dumb as shit.
This is the legend passed around, but is there any verifiable proof to this? It sounds more like a "Haha, people are dumb" joke than an actual researched position. A&W barely has a market presence to begin with compared to McDonald's. I've maybe seen 2-3 in my life.
The only source I've ever found for the claim is A&W themselves and people reporting on that original claim. I'm pretty sure it's a myth.
The Walmart expansion into Germany was a total disaster. They blindly tried to force their way onto an extremely competitive market with a completely different work and shopping culture. Most Germans don't even know that Walmart ever existed in Germany and they have since completely left the country at a massive financial loss.
The merge between Mattel and The Learning Company in 2000. Read up on it if you are unaware, this was over twenty years ago and people still study why it soured.
And now Kevin O’Leary is on Shark Tank
O'Leary is a garbage human.
Sears. Who had a store /delivery point in almost every town. They could have been Amazon or berry but like many companies they ignored the wave of internet store and got pummelled. Imagine a Sears with a website like Amazon and either pickup sites in every town or door to door delivery. I’m in Canada I kind of miss Sears. I grew up in a very small town and my family bought most things from Sears.
X
The platform formerly and still known as twitter.
I think a better alternative name might have been Twits
How to lose $20B in less than a year
Having your brand be a common word (“Gotta tweet this” “Can you google that?”) is something marketing people would genocide for and companies pay billions to fail at it. To take such and deliberately ruin it with a childish obsession with a letter… god damn.
The McDonald’s arch deluxe. They lost over $30M on it.
Nothing sells burgers like children making the yuck-face. Was a shame, they were actually good burgers
Australian DIY chain Bunnings acquisition of UK-based chain Homebase. They came in guns blazing, fired the entire management team, and tried to remake Homebase in their image. Got rid of the Habitat and Laura Ashley franchises, the cycle service shops, cut down the plants and garden sections, and replaced all of this with a load of grim, cut-rate power tools. Most critically of all, they brought in a huge - GINORMOUS - selection of barbecues and outdoor kitchens and the like. In a country where no one has a garden bigger than a bin store and it's too rainy to barbecue nine months of the year. They devoted literally a quarter of the (very large) shop floor space to these items which absolutely nobody wanted. It lasted three years before they sold the chain for £1 to a retail recovery specialist and walked off from a £230 million loss. Absolutely epic fail.
It's my "Favourite" in that it's the worst one I can think of and an excellent example about how a profit motive unrestrained by safety regulations is a ticking time bomb: [The Bhopal Disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster). A pesticide plant in Bhopal, India owned by a subsidiary of Union Carbide Corporation, an American company, was expected to close in the near future due to anticipated unprofitability. To squeeze every last penny out of it possible, the company all but stopped training their employees and performing preventative maintenance, with the knowledge and approval of the American owners. On the night of 2 December 1984 the plant suffered a massive (preventable) gas leak, enveleoping the surrounding area with ethyl isocyanate, a highly toxic gas. The plant was situated in a highly populated urban area, leading to the immediate deaths of over 2000 people and the eventual deaths of nearly another 2000, and over 500,000 injuries which resulted in tens of thousands of people being permanently disabled. The company was forced to pay a fine to the Indian government. Seven Indian employees who were at the plant and survived received two years in jail, but the owners, specifically The CEO at the time Warren Anderson despite it being documented that he was aware of the risk of a disaster and ordered the procedural changes, never faced punishment.
The American owners didn’t face any consequences for a very simple and important reason: they owned 50.1% of the Indian subsidiary, with the rest owned by the Indian government, the government of MP, and a number of state owned banks. So going after the American parent company would have resulted in a lot of the board minutes of the Indian subsidiary (with senior Congress politicians and cronies on the board) coming out in court and those people all having to take part of the responsibility as well. As you can imagine, they didn’t want this and this is also why the Indian government insisted on representing the interests of the victims and settling quite quickly, to avoid having all of that dragged through the court system.
Starbucks in Australia.
That's because we actually like coffee
New Coke.
New Coke was just HFCS sweetened Diet Coke. Diet Coke was a HUGE hit for Coca-Cola. So executives wondered whether Diet Coke was the better formula. Pepsi was running ads with the “Pepsi Challenge” where customers overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi to Coke in blind taste tests. Coke ran some blind tests, found that New Coke was better was and made the switch. What they didn’t count on was that what people enjoyed about Coca-Cola was that psychological connection, not the taste. (This is also why the Pepsi Challenge didn’t matter.) New Coke flopped. People who liked Diet Coke kept drinking Diet Coke and people who liked Coke wanted the old one. Years later, Coke had more success with Coke Zero, which is the opposite of New Coke - artificially sweetened Coca-Cola Classic.
Also the thing about the pepsi challenge is it was one sip of soda. Your first sip of soda. Pepsi is a more sugar-forward cola, so many people might like pepsi more for exactly one sip, but it would be a cloying taste for a whole can. The test itself had many flaws.
My favorite conspiracy theory about this is they specifically designed it to fail so that they could switch over to high fructose corn syrup when they brought old coke back.
THey actually switched to HFCS the year or 2 prior to New Coke.
[удалено]
Arthur Andersen scandel!
As auditor of Enron who corruptly blessed Enron's fraudulent activities, they deserved to do down hard. This is less an example of bad business decisions and more an example of pure corruption.
HTC diversifying from doing phones
MSN messenger
The Enron scandal, one of the largest corporate frauds in history, involved Enron Corporation, an energy company. It exposed the company's systemic and creatively planned accounting fraud, designed to hide massive debts and inflate profits. This scandal led to Enron's bankruptcy, which was then the largest in U.S. history. Tut Tut.
Circuit City. In an effort to save money they fired all the good salesmen because they were making too much and hired people at minimum wage to try to sell tv’s. They soon went bankrupt.