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What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?

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Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?

#61

Post by ArkyBeagle »

npongratz wrote: post #26

>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…

The goal was to renormalize Germany back into the world economy. Unless you were Churchill, you didn't see it coming ( and Churchill could have easily been wrong ).

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.

Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?

#62

Post by ArkyBeagle »

hinkley wrote: post #56
npongratz wrote: post #26

>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.

The last thing I want a company to do for me is care about me. I see what they do to things they have to care about.

Benign neglect, please.

Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?

#63

Post by cholantesh »

singularity2001 wrote: post #42
rando444 wrote: post #11

My 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-...

Also Bayer for acquiring one of the most poisonous brands of our time (Monsanto)

Is that still true today? In my experience, people are increasingly becoming ambivalent to them, and it seems that despite all the negative attention, they continue to be successful with their target market (farmers).

Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?

#65

Post by apathy »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #23
apathy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

AFAICT, that delta was because there was high probability that Yahoo would have to pay tax on the profits if it tried to sell Alibaba, not because the market determined that Yahoo! had negative worth.

Ooh, I did not realize that! Thanks for the clarification.

Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?

#66

Post by apathy »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #59
apathy wrote: post #7

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.

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 mode…

Wow, I just learned a lot about Muscle Shoals. Thanks. Didn't realize that the Black Keys recorded Brothers there, let alone the history of the place. I just had no idea!

Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?

#68

Post by reitanqild »

sevensor wrote: post #67
reitanqild wrote: post #5

Ironically Quoras own: let's publish anything a logged in user even thinks about clicking for everyone to see should be somewhere on that list shouldn't it? Googles Google+ launch also comes to mind.

Quora does that? Where?

Did at least. From wikipedia:

"""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.

Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?

#69

Post by AstralStorm »

creshal wrote: post #49
anexprogrammer wrote: post #38

Commodore, well Irving Gould, making Medhi Ali CEO. Or even employing the guy at all. 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…

> IBM selling Thinkpads to Lenovo. 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.

So it is a double fail for IBM, not just bad decision, but also a badly managed company?

Re: What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made?

#70

Post by AstralStorm »

Lordarminius wrote: post #50
ars wrote: post #33

I 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.......

But was Sears truly a mistake? 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.

They could have at least tried.
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