Time Warner's decision to merge with AOL.
What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
51–60 of 76 posts
Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
#52My vote goes to Bayer for knowingly and willingly selling H.I.V tainted medicine in the 1980s just to get rid of their inventory, not caring about the hundreds or thousands of people they infected. 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-...
The HIV/AIDS hypothesis is a media hoax initiated by Felix Gallo, a convicted cancer fraudster.
Joking right?
Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
#53I'd say Fordlandia had to be one big ole mistake.
Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Accidents can be caused by mistakes, no?
I said deliberate mistake. 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).
Either way, their reaction afterwards was pretty bad.
Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
#55I doubt any company comes close to Sears. 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.......
The Sears catalog was Amazon with six to eight weeks latency...
Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
#56>I feel that large companies back in the 90's didn't care about any of their workers all they cared about was making money . 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 gru…
Companies today don't care about their workers either, with the possible exception of B corps, which there aren't enough of (yet!) to be statistically relevant.
Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
#57Not huge, but a pretty big mistake would be Target's venture to, and disastrous failure in, Canada. 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.
It is one. I've heard oral history from Larry Nichols of Devon Energy talking about how examples like that were used by Devon to avoid disaster in acquisitions they'd made in Canada. He's on the Tulsa University Oral History "Voices of Oklahoma" website.
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.
Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
#58As 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…
I wish I could buy a Nokia phone now. But I'm one of those for whom the cult of personality surrounding Jobs was too much to take.
Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
#59This 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.
The Beatles were a dead letter[1] by around 1980. The had a significant renaissance in the '90s - kids re-buying their parents' records. If you are my age, the Beatles were "the band Paul played in before Wings."
[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.
Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?
#60This 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.
I doubt few if any of the people that we think of as icons today had the fortune of being immediately accepted. 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.
Elvis wasn't widely rejected. it was just a couple of people, and all within Sun. He was still at Sun, and Mr. Sam had dog eared his file. But Mr. Sam wanted crossover over the color line in music.
Almost nobody hits their first one out of the park.
Once "Blue Moon" hit, Elvis was on rails.