/biz/ - Business & Finance

[Anonymous No.55926459]

What are some of the biggest and dumbest blunders/missed opportunities/self sabotage in business history.
Picrel.

[Anonymous No.55928092]

>>55926459
Nokia and Kodak

[Anonymous No.55928100]

windows phone

[sage No.55928351]

>>55926459
Nobuyuki Idei that killed Sony.

[Anonymous No.55928388]

>>55926459
Had Blockbuster bought it, Netflix wouldn't be worth what it is today and might not even exist either. Bad management is bad.

[Anonymous No.55928480]

past: sears was well positioned to become amazon

future: intel will have been well positioned to catch up with nvidia

[Anonymous No.55928492]

>>55926459
god I miss blockbuster. it was superior to netflix in literally every way.

[Anonymous No.55928498]

>>55928388
>bad management
yea terrible how they couldn't keep hordes of immigrants from shoplifting in a business plan that was working perfectly just a decade earlier...you know before mass immigration

[Anonymous No.55928669]

>>55926459

Microstrategy and bitcoin

[Anonymous No.55928742]

>>55926459
At the time the internet could barely even stream video at 360p to most homes, and the only thing netflix was doing differently at the time was dvd-by-mail, hardly that much of an innovation.
It wasn't until 2007 that they began streaming.

[Anonymous No.55929010]

>>55926459
My favorite...Yahoo refused to buy google for $1million.
https://www.gadgets360.com/internet/news/when-yahoo-refused-to-buy-google-for-1-million-865458

[Anonymous No.55929083]

>>55926459
>missed opportunities
The biggest missed opportunity of all time was the Sears Catalog. It dominated sales from 1888 to 1993 when it was discontinued. Had it lasted 3-5 more years, Sears would have invented Amazon 20 years earlier, and dominated another century.

[Anonymous No.55929175]

>>55929083
Thats a good point.

[Anonymous No.55929388]

>>55926459
Yahoo in general but Mayer's tenure sealed them.

Possibly the biggest of all in tech was Ballmer focusing on the zune as a reaction to Apple's iPod. While Google built up Android and made deals with smartphone manufactures like Samsung, HTC, etc. to use their OS. Then again by the time Google had a foothold in mobile it was too late. The Windows phone was a joke.
Despite all this Ballmer is one of the richest men in the world while only being an employee and not founding anything.

[Anonymous No.55929475]

>>55929083
This. Their delivery infrastructure was incredibly massive too. They had all the pieces they needed to succeed in the new age, but ended up dismantling the catalog stuff first in order to build more physical stores. Kek

[Anonymous No.55929513]

>>55926459
Philips sold shares of TSMC and ASML as well as nxp
Philips would be Europes most valuable company if they held their shares but now they are worth less than 20 bil ( They had 1/4 of asml and 1/4 of tsmc as well iirc)

worst decision by far

[Anonymous No.55929547]

>>55929475
How hard would it have been in the early 90s to see just how big the Internet was going to become? Like to understand everything that could be done with it? Sometime in the mid 00s for the average person it became clear that a tipping point had been reached in Internet infrastructure. It was obvious that it would continue to grow and become incredibly important for business. But I wonder how much earlier some analyst at a non-tech company could have seen that.

[Anonymous No.55929599]

>>55926459
Nice thread.
Bump

[Anonymous No.55929689]

>>55928669
Every company except Microstrategy is screwing up big time. Unless your expenses are going to earn you more than double what you spent in less than two years, that money should have been spent on bitcoin. MSTR will be worth more the AAPL

[Anonymous No.55929710]

Blockbuster still exists. We have one in my town. Unfortunately its kind of a tourist trap thing for most of the year, but still in the shoulder seasons you can go. Obviously not the same experience, Blockbuster had a pretty smooth and cost effective business by the time its decline started. People spent a lot less renting movies than they do on their subscriptions, even inflation adjusted.

>>55929547
The computer was unusable for most people, partly because most people didn't grow up with them and partly because at that time those who did were not very influential. Even then, why would you want to?

Going to Blockbuster, picking out a movie, grabbing a snack or whatever...it was a nice experience. Until somewhere between 2005 and 2015 people actually liked to leave the house and do things. And they would invite people over
>Hey, I've got Twister on dee vee dee, you guys wanna come over?

Everyone sort of thought why would you mess with such a good thing?

[Anonymous No.55929723]

>>55928480
Past
>why don't we set up a shop to sell books. Online even maybe

Also past
>YOU CHOOFIN' c'HUNTIN' IDIOT!

[Anonymous No.55929852]

>>55926459
Anons buying Chainlink

[Anonymous No.55930036]

>>55929710
>why would you mess with a good thing?

Yeah those experiences are great from a customer perspective, but from a business perspective the internet has the ability to monetize everything like crazy. You can make it easier to buy just about everything. And if it's easier to buy, people will likely buy more. From the perspective of a marketing team, with some insight into how the internet works they may have been able to foresee just how many sales the internet could potentially unlock.

[Anonymous No.55930077]

>>55929547
I was like 8 years old around 2000, playing neopets, and talking to friends on msn, and it was obvious to me as a kid that the internet was going to be big.
I asked my parents about how buying stuff online worked and they told me it was a big hassle that required a lot of trust, like mailing cheques, cash, or sending credit card info, and I confused why it was so hard. Soon after paypal got big, of course, but it makes sense why stores wouldn't bother with online orders when there was so much risk.

I was young, but I saw enough to see the old world thinking of the early 90s though, the biggest challenge I remember was not everyone had a computer and there was a steep learning curve for people not technically minded, so that was the big thing holding it back, but desktops and operating systems were becoming increasingly cheaper and easier to use. Smartphones weren't a thing as well, battery tech sucked, and it was hard to imagine a world where everyone used the internet all the time like we do now. It was more like you sit down at a desk to use it, then stop and get up and go about your day.
There was also the question of returns, and stuff like "Why would you buy clothes or shoes online when you can't even try them on? You mean I have to mail them back to get my money if they don't fit? That's inconvenient, I'll just go to the mall".
I think amazon branding itself as a "book store" rather than a "sears killer" helped them as well, it made the top dog not even recognize they were being challenged until they already ate their lunch.

[Anonymous No.55930156]

>>55930077
I had a similar experience with the internet in the early 00s, kids really did grab onto it much faster. It's crazy that even today in the world of streaming, there are actually tons of older people who still pay for cable TV and watch shows that way. My mother in law was a VP at US Bank for many years and still gets spooked buying things online because she thinks it's some crazy new system.

[Anonymous No.55930159]

>>55930077
A lot of that Sears had already figured out with its catalog business; Sears was a trusted name, had its own credit card system (Discover credit cards were created by Sears, and later spun off in the 2000s), had plenty of physical stores that could handle returns, and so on. Which makes their abandonment of the catalog sales all the more stupid in hindsite.

[Anonymous No.55930336]

>>55926459
Blockbuster was correct but they were too stupid to see the future potential and the internet being the future.

Just the same as the retards that think crypto is a passing fad

[Anonymous No.55930344]

>>55928498
>whiteoid blames mexicans for the fall of dvds and vhs
nigger

[Anonymous No.55930353]

>>55929547
Same difficulty as trying to imagine all the things that can be done with crypto right now

[Anonymous No.55930356]

>>55930344
>its actually the spics jeets and muslims fault. someone get the feathers

[Anonymous No.55930381]

>>55928498
>>55930356
>unironically thinks shoplifting killed video rentals instead of the internet and the failure of companies to adapt

zoomers never had a chance

[Anonymous No.55930408]

>>55930381
damn this nigga just compared a streamed movie to a dvd. I could never.

[Anonymous No.55930427]

>>55928092
>Kodak
This. By far.

Kodak actually invented the digital camera. They invented OLED technology. They invented and innovated all sorts of processes and iconic products.
They absolutely dominated film. But they sold so much they didn't think it would ever stop...it did.
History of Kodak is fascinating.

[Anonymous No.55930435]

>>55930408
kek seethe, fag. you talk like a zoomer election tourist that got here in the late 2010s

enjoy trump's mugshot today, nigger

[Anonymous No.55930453]

>>55930435
cope commie never watching your le stream turns out we can just give up movies entirely if you make movies catering to immigrants in 480p

[Anonymous No.55930475]

>>55926459
being born into existence
biggest scam

[Anonymous No.55930531]

>>55928388
This. In that time, Netflix's business model was completely different

[Anonymous No.55930538]

>>55930077
Also keep in mind the complete fragility of the global telecomm network. It all can be knocked out in an afternoon and there really are no ways to protect it.

For basically the whole twentieth century you had antogonistic world powers that would never cooperate enough to allow things like the internet, global positioning satellites, Starlink, etc. to become ubiquitous. Military uses? Sure. Expensive niche industry uses like aviation? OK, but even today pilots are still taught navigation using the ancient E6B flight computers.

Nobody wanted to rely on this stuff because it was a dangerous proposition. That apprehension has gone away entirely because we acclimated to this new world order of one global superpower that nobody wants to antogonize. That's changing, and don't be surprised if somebody comes to the (correct) realization that you can cripple the American economy and way of life without it drawing a nuclear response.

[Anonymous No.55930572]

>>55929547
Just replace internet with blockchain and you can see it was obvious as fuck to anyone under the age of like 50. Which unfortunately doesn't apply to anyone who makes these big corporate decisions.

[Anonymous No.55930573]

>>55929388
>Yahoo in general but Mayer's tenure sealed them.
Yep. I have believed for years that Mayer was a trojan horse sent in by the Google founders to sabotage the company. The idiots at Yahoo, after having passed on a very good buyout offer from Microsoft, thought that poaching that blonde ding dong to revive Yahoo was a good idea. It only proved how stupid they were.
They approached Mayer with the offer, she went back to Larry and Serge and told them, they then formulated the plan for her to accept and then fuck Yahoo up to the point of ruin.
It worked.

[Anonymous No.55930613]

>>55926459
Interesting fact is that Blockbuster was starting to chip away at Netflix in the DVD by mail rental space. They even started their own streaming platform, but it sucked.
What really killed Blockbuster was their debt load. When the GFC happened, they couldn't refinance the debt. That was the beginning of the end.
Same thing happened with Tower Records. The first CFO kept the company out of debt while he was there. After he retired the new CFO came in and loaded the company with debt. Game over.

[Anonymous No.55930807]

>>55926459
yeah this was before Netflix was a streaming service.

remember that when Netflix started out, you had to order DVDs and return them by mailing them back.

[Anonymous No.55930989]

>>55926459
Gary Kildall, author of CP/M, fumbled his meeting with IBM when they were looking to obtain an OS for the upcoming IBM PC. This lead to Bill Gates buying 86-DOS and licensing it to IBM. This decision is what transformed Microsoft from a two-bit software company to an industry juggernaut in a few years.

Also nearly anything General Motors did in the late 70s and early 80s. That time period is riddled with half-baked ideas and corporate knee-jerk reactions that resulted in GM permanently losing market share to imports.

[Anonymous No.55931146]

>>55930572
To normies/boomers credit 90% of the money floating around in crypto is with scam projects that don't aim to do a fucking thing. And even for the younger people like us who DO play around with this space, they have no idea what any of the tech does or could be used for in the future. They invest based on short term gains. People "in it for the tech" also want gains, but the thought there is to buy in to programs that will actually last once blockchain/smart contracts go mainstream.

[Anonymous No.55932562]

>>55929852
You have to be 18 to post here.

[Anonymous No.55932652]

Atari and then SEGA.

[Anonymous No.55932667]

>>55926459
Blockbuster turned down Netflix buyout because it was already building it's own movies on demand service with Enron. It was a bad call, but blockbuster didn't think nobody wanted to do movies by mail or streaming

[Anonymous No.55932689]

>>55930989
bill gates is secret jew nobility, his dad was allegedly involved in the counterfeiting mafia

[Anonymous No.55932797]

The experience of browsing the latest dvd releases and old vhs tapes in a packed blockbuster on a saturday night is now nostalgia that will never exist again.
The worst part is that no one realized it would be missed until it was gone.

[Anonymous No.55932861]

>>55930807
yeah but that makes it an even simpler reason for them to buy netflix out. People loved netflix even when it was just dvd delivery. It was an emerging competitor that offered convenience and no late fees. Blockbuster should have launched it's own delivery service or just bought out netflix. I think blockbuster did eventually do a mail order thing but it was a number of years in.

[Anonymous No.55933430]

K-Mart and the like. Dollar General/Tree adapted to this era but they couldn't.

[Anonymous No.55933891]

>>55932797
People say we look at the past with rose-tinted glasses but I genuinely felt 'wow, the 90s are kino' while I was living through it. It's perhaps the last decade with a distinctive 'feel'.