What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
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https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-World/dp/06...
Just four years later, in 2013, Nokia had lost 80% of its value and Apple's brand was estimated to be worth about 13 times more.
Such a tremendous collapse for a global brand seems unprecedented. (And no, it wasn't Elop's fault because the landslide started before him.)
[1] http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/previou...
When the beautiful-looking N96[1] was announced early that year, I excitedly signed up to be notified of availability, and waited expectantly for a call or email.
I never heard anything.
A few months later, the iPhone hit the market in Australia. I bought one shortly after, and have used only iPhones ever since.
Could they have done anything to rival the iPhone? Who knows, but I feel that if only they'd been the kind of company that followed up with loyal customers who'd expressed strong interest in buying their new release, they might have had a better chance at building a competitive product.
I am not by any means a product development expert but I consider Nokia to have made three mistakes (atop everything else the pundits divine):
1. Not creating a quality smartphone for the mass market
2. Selling the brand to Microsoft (which proceeded to decimate its value with its hideous windows OS)
3. Not trying again.
The battle for market share by smartphone makers in my opinion represents skirmishes in the larger war for lebensraum in a connected future; and that is not over by any means.
I'd been a Windows Mobile enthusiast for years - even though they had unaccelerated display drivers and were for all intents and purposes crap they had proper calendars, task lists etc.
For simple phone I loved Nokias, and owned at least 9 of them. Rugged, reliable, they were brilliant. But at the time the Windows Mobile stuff were something nebulous called 'smartphones', whereas the Nokia ones were 'phones'. These things were very distinct and different at the time. A Nokia was a great phone, it lasted 6 days on battery and you could type whilst driving (yeah) from muscle memory.
The iPhone came and blew this up. It was a smartphone, it updated the screen at 60fps, it was done properly, it synced your calendar etc and like the Nokia it was a fucking good phone. Windows Mobile was shit for too long and paid the price, as was Nokia - but for very different reasons.
Nowadays I can't stand Apple and their products, but you have to respect how they sorted the crap out of the smartphone and phone markets and gave us a whole new market that has pretty much changed the world.
Possibly sadder is that the FDA actively helped Bayer to try and cover the whole thing up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/business/2-paths-of-bayer-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...
I believe you are probably making a reference to something completely unrelated.
I'd suggest that companies of the 1990s had nothing on 1930s-1940s IBM: IBM allied itself with the Third Reich to develop technology (punch card databases) as a key facilitator of the mass identification, enslavement and genocide of millions of people. They also backed another horse in that gruesome episode, creating the punch card database key to running FDR's Japanese internment camps in the western United States.
Benign neglect, please.
The internment camps? People were almost universally quite racist, the Empire did everything they could to reinforce this (they were poorly served by the Bushido Code) and it's all very unfortunate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott
Selling baby formula in the third world. What could go wrong.
Edit to add: this was a case study in Business 101 at my school.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles%27_Decca_auditio...
"We don't like their sound, and guitar groups are on the way out."
Sort of like Adidas turning down Michael Jordan for not being tall enough, except that Adidas is still in business.
Also guitar groups were on their way for a while. The charts in the early 1960s were pop bands like the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, Andy Williams, The Sensations, Ray Charles, etc. Obviously, rock became a powerful force by the mid 1960s but that was difficult to predict. I don't think anyone saw the British Invasion, Dylan, psychedelic rock, and the hippie counter-culture coming.
Contrast with Blockbuster's decision not to buy Netflix. It may have been understandable, and hindsight is 20:20 (I left Google because I couldn't figure out how they'd ever make any money), but these are nonetheless big mistakes.
Elvis was rejected by nearly everone, JK Rowling's Harry Potter was rejected by a slew of publishers.. basically everyone who is currently famous has these stories, and often many of them.
The lesson though, is that the key to success is perseverance.
Almost nobody hits their first one out of the park.
Once "Blue Moon" hit, Elvis was on rails.
[1] except in certain radio markets in the US.
At the time, you had Brill building songwriters feeding generic groups organized by producer. It looked like a more robust "supply chain" than the business model used by the Beatles. That world was quite different - writing, singing, playing, recording were all industrial specialties.
That model lived on in Muscle Shoals really until about 1980 or so. You ignore Muscle Shoals at its peak at your peril.
Brian Epstein was a brilliant marketer. His plan worked. He knew how to make 'em wait. The individual Beatles have tried to credit him but I don't think they understand it, really.
I feel a cold pit in my stomach putting myself in the shoes of the developer that did the `cap deploy` that day. Yikes!
"Hey guys let's do a DB rollback, something went wrong."
2. Yahoo rejecting the Microsoft offer?
Glad (1) didn't happen though. Pretty sure they'd have screwed it all up for everyone.
Funny scenario: If Microsoft bought Yahoo, that would've ALSO been on this list for consideration as the biggest mistake for a big company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation#T...
This is why, even today, big companies don't announce when a new product will be available until the last minute as to not cannibalize sales from the current production run.
They had the Sears catalog, and even more important an entire distribution network all over the US. They shut it down just before the internet became big.
They also had the ISP Prodigy and a credit card company.
With just a slight change they could have been larger than Google and Amazon combined.
Instead.......
Companies have lifespans like humans and cannot continue forever. I would argue that Sears had gotten big and mature enough that its failure was a matter of time. At that level of growth and capitalization it would probably be impossible for any CEO to convince a board and shareholders to change a proven strategy for a new fad, especially when there is no financial pressure to do so.
> We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap."
Cue half a billion pounds in losses... 1992 pounds.
Googles Google+ launch also comes to mind.
"""Privacy concerns
In August 2012, blogger Ivan Kirigin pointed out that it was possible for acquaintances and followers to see his activity including which questions he had looked at.[46] In response, Quora stopped showing question views in feeds later that month. By default, Quora exposes its users' profiles, including their real names, to search engines."""
I cannot remember the details anymore but it is one of a few times when the privacy implications of something has scared me. It goes something like this:
I'm about to hire Bob, I just want to do a quick background check to see that there isn't anything I have missed. Bob has an account on Quora. Quora ranks high on google. I search for Bob on google and find his account. I click in to view it and can see that he has been reading a lot about depression lately. I decide not to hire Bob, just to be safe.
Edit: They might have fixed it now, I don't care. The combination of full name policy and literally telling the world anything I clicked on + the way they completely didn't care back then, IIRC even after reports started to pile up, convinced me to delete my account and then send a message asking them to confirm that my account was completely and permanently removed from the system.
Seriously I can't believe it's not even mentioned.
Rereading the details of the incident, it is striking how negligence at every level compounded the problem. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster) If not for a long string of terrible decisions, nobody would have been hurt, killed, or poisoned. Even worse than I remembered.
See also "Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia"(http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-be...). There are an appalling number of these incidents. It's quite depressing if you think about it.
Wasn't that an accident rather than a deliberate mistake?
I know their behavior in aftermath was bad, but the actual incident was an accident, so I don't think it's part of this list.
As in they said "This is the best way", later it turns out to have been a mistake.
Negligence or neglect are not the same thing (they are bad, but they are not educational, so they are not part of this list).
Almost everything that could go wrong did, and the whole story involves a lot of arrogance and inexperience.
It will definitely be a business school case study, at least here.
I was in a a startup acquired by a Canadian company and we had the converse problem - the technology was rejected like an organ transplant by the engineering staff. Bizarre, because the whole idea was to generate revenue to support their other development efforts. Didn't matter - not invented here.
Yahoo! passing on Google...
I still chuckle when I think about Yahoo's total market cap being less than the value of their share in Alibaba. The market determined that Yahoo! had negative worth. Ouch!
If they were acquired Netflix wouldn't have become the treasure it is today.
IBM selling Thinkpads to Lenovo.
Gerald Ratner, CEO of the Ratner Group, becoming famous for the "Ratner Effect" which destroyed the group and his career. They had 1,000+ stores and multiple brands in UK and US.
He gave a speech to the IoD London in 91 that included "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap."
Obvious and true, but it took £500m off the group share price overnight and a year later, due to a consumer boycott, they were in the process of closing 300+ stores. He was fired by the chairman he recruited in late 92, and the remnants of the group changed name to start rebuilding.
As much as I dislike the direction Lenovo took with the brand… IBM shed a branch that was turning a massive loss because of IBM's management, and now Lenovo is the second-largest laptop manufacturer in the world and turning massive profits with the brand and the massive amount of spin-off consumer products. I can't imagine IBM being able to do either themselves.
This was also not just a business failure where one lost money. IG Farben participated directly on some of the worst crimes in human history.
[1] - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1573380/Doing-a-Ratne...