21–30 of 76 posts
1. Yahoo not buying Google? 2. Yahoo rejecting the Microsoft offer? Glad (1) didn't happen though. Pretty sure they'd have screwed it all up for everyone.
Blockbuster passing on the Netflix purchase... Yahoo! passing on Google...
Alright, these are existential mistakes up there with Decca. 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!
As recently as 2009, Nokia was estimated by Interbrand to be one of the top 5 global brands [1]. Interbrand's guesstimate at the monetary value rated "Nokia" as being worth over two times as much as "Apple". 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…
This one is easy: Decca recording turning down the Beatles. 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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel a cold pit in my stomach putting myself in the shoes of the developer that did the `cap deploy` that day. Yikes!
I'm a little surprised to see no mention of Osbourne computers. The name lives on with the Osbourne Effect: 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.