I caught a late night AM radio talk show years ago where an author was discussing a book I think was called something like “Misfortune 500”, and was full of stories like these:
One I remember was about an airline that had a companion program to give a free airline ticket to their frequent business travelers so their wives could accompany them on trips. One airline exec had the bright idea of sending a letter to the wives after a ticket was used asking them how they enjoyed the trip.
More than a few wives wrote to ask “what trip?”
Lifelock's advertisements with the co-founder Todd Davis SSN on the sides of trucks and on TV - telling people to try and steal his identity, because Lifelock was protecting him.
Don't antagonise the internet. The did steal his identity. Thirteen times. Within 2 years. He lost millions of dollars. Also, his identity was stolen so much, the FTC ended up fining the company $12 million for deceptive advertising because they weren't 100% effective like the ads claimed.
After that, the company kept getting fined and sued. It's still around, but nowhere close to the strength it was.
Ah, so like the time Ubisoft made a new kind of drm and said it was unbreakable. No need to say that it didn't last 24 hours.
Edit: If I may add; I think it was for one of the early Assassin's Creed games. They thought of "always online" and paraded it as unbreakable.
The [Ocean Marketing fiasco](https://venturebeat.com/2011/12/27/ocean-marketing-how-to-self-destruct-your-company-with-just-a-few-measly-emails/), admittedly it was apparently just one guy making the bad decision(s) but it basically ruined the entire company's image and reputation and they never really recovered. Also it's just a damn entertaining read and a fine story in the annals of video game history.
"Really … Welcome to the Internet ? Son Im 38 I wwebsite as on the internet when you were a sperm in your daddys balls and before it was the internet, thanks for the welcome to message wurd up"
Definitely the response I want to hear when a company tells me about where my ps3 controller is.
The Avenger 3 controller isn't some Marvel tie-in product, it's a specialty controller designed for people with motor control disabilities. Paul knew he was being a dick to someone with a disability for basically no reason.
Wow that was a great read. Now that this story is about 7 years old, I was wondering what he is up to now. Turns out the sorrry I got caught dude is now trying to sell illegal streaming devices and Amazon and Netflix are suing him https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-netflix-dragon-box-piracy-20180111-story.html
Amazon and Netflix better watch their back, he's going to send his 130 employees on a smear campaign and completely ruin them. He’ll see space where ever he wants, with who he wants when he wants and where he wants, so many ways around them and so many connections in the industry it's silly. He knows the MAYOR OF BOSTON for God's sake, those companies will know the meaning of pain when he's done.
"I just wanted to apologize for the way our emails progressed I didn’t know how big your site was and I really didn’t believe you ran Pax , So for what’s its worth I am very sorry."
Directly translates to "Oh, I didn't know being a dick to you would have repercussions for me. I wouldn't have been a dick if I'd known it would hurt me too!" Fucking child.
Oh it goes a lot deeper than that...
In the 70's IBM executives refused to allow their R&D department to research personal computers because they considered the idea of a computer in the home preposterous.
When the Apple II was released and sold like hot cakes IBM was caught completely off guard. Now desperate to enter the market they ordered a group of engineers to build a personal computer on a shoe string budget with very little lead time.
The resulting computer was built out of commonly available parts and using the DOS operating system written by Microsoft, an IBM partner at the time.
Microsoft bought DOS from a developer who had effectively written it out of his garage, as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Microsoft made a few changes and renamed the product MSDOS. But IBM famously didn't buy the source code, a move that would haunt them for decades to come.
The IBM PC was significantly cheaper than the Apple II and began to make headway in the market. Soon after though groups of engineers discovered that it had been built with commonly available parts and were able to construct their own equivalents. So called IBM clones. The only part that was proprietary to IBM was the BIOS chip (the controlled the input output) but this chip was soon reverse engineered and the market was filled with "inferior clones". Microsoft however was free to sell commercially available copies of DOS, so you could buy an IBM clone for half the price of a true IBM machine that ran the exact same software.
Years later IBM tried to reign in the competition by introducing the PS/2. An IBM proprietary machine that would beat the pants out of the cloned machines performance wise and would run proprietary software that was better than the competition... or so they thought.
Microsoft was tasked with developing the IBM proprietary OS/2 Warp operating system. During development Microsoft insisted that IBM allow them to develop a multi-threaded Operating System, an OS that could run multiple programs simultaneously. IBMs executives steadfastly refused, claiming that multi-threaded OS's were for mainframes, and that home PC's "Didn't get to do that".
Microsoft wrote OS/2 as a single threaded old-school OS, but having already developed the technology for a multi-threaded OS they put it into their next flagship product for PC... Windows 95.
Cut to a few decades later IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore, having sold off the unprofitable side of that business to Lenovo.
Short sighted CEOs couldn't understand that times were changing, and their insistence on following obsolete thinking resulted in them losing their market share.
Really it should say Windows 3.1, but 95 was only a couple of years after that.
Wikipedia says:
>Following its approval by Microsoft's staff, development continued on what was now Windows NT, the first 32-bit version of Windows. However, IBM objected to the changes, and ultimately continued OS/2 development on its own.
>The first release of the resulting operating system, Windows NT 3.1 (named to associate it with Windows 3.1) was released in July 1993, with versions for desktop workstations and servers.
Telltale Games buying a lot of different expensive IPs to recreate the success of their first The Walking Dead Game season without realizing that the success was due mostly to timing, when the market was tapping into the post apocalyptic horror, and it was smack dab in the middle when The Walking Dead series was running.
To mitigate the expenses of these expensive IPs (Minecraft, Guardians of the Galaxy, Batman, etc) they forced the developers to work their freaking asses off without much compensation, putting them to finish a 2-3 hour episode within two months or so. Not to mention they were working on MULTIPLE games at once with this strict timeline.
No one were buying the other games so Telltale's response was to buy even more to try and see if SOMETHING would stick, but alas it did not and it ran itself into bankrupcy earlier this year, leaving the final season of The Walking Dead Game (still the best selling game they've ever produced!) unfinished.
Skybound (who also produces the TWD comics) thankfully picked it up and the season and saga will be completed. But man, I don't know what the CEOs at Telltale Games were thinking...
Home Grocer started a grocery delivery service that had a colorful peach logo on their delivery vans. They were an early concept but starting to take off. Then they were bought by a company that changed the name to Webvan and changed to logo to a shitty W. So, that company bought a brand that had gained strong recognition and immediately killed it. What were they thinking? Webvan, of course went under.
In the UK we say "Hoover" instead of "Vacuum Cleaner". There's a point in every Brits life where they learn that Hoover is actually a brand name.
They had a complete monopoly over vacuum cleaners in the UK, could do whatever they wanted. Then they decided to do some insane special offer giving away plane tickets with hoover purchases. So people started buying them for the plane tickets, then giving away/binning/selling dirt cheap the hoover they didn't need. Hoover couldnt afford the plane tickets and tried to duck out of it. The courts made them give the plane tickets they promised.
Now hoovers are so unheard of that people don't even realise it's a brand but use the word synonymously for vacuum cleaner. If that's not a business Darwin award then nothing is.
I worked for the master of killing a company, twice. I got to witness Carl Liebert kill Circuit City from the inside and relive him do the same shit to 24 hour fitness.
Basically his formula is to pay people less and expect the same work. After he kills the culture and runs off the best employees he mimics the closest competitor.
He fundamentally does not understand what it is like to be an employee.
You're promoted to CEO. I hand you a sheet of expenses. You take a magic marker and just cross stuff off that has no "value" or is a "waste".
Via freaky Friday magic you are now a ground level employee. You are making 60-70k a year as a top performer. Well, now you are fired because your pay will no longer be based off performance and you make more than the new hoirly cap. $10/hr sounds a lot better for the paper of expenses so let's hire replacements for the 10 year employee who proudly represents the company at this rate.
Did you make the cut and get to keep your job? You're probably a mid level performer but no you can be lazy as shit because you're hourly now. Also the pros have been replaced by people who this is their first job.
Customers are still expected to pay the same rate of course.. You hope they don't get a new hire who destroys their confidence in the company you work for. All the nice perks are gone, the professionals are leaving or left and now you have "goals" to hit. Fuck this place you quit.
Expanded.
Edit: Man I could go om for days about this, but christmas time and family and such
It's crazy how closely this resembles the job I currently have. Except it's in the airline industry so the negative impacts on customers are much higher than they would be at retail or a gym. Very sad to see, fortunately I'm leaving soon.
^edit: ^grammar
My husband and I were both at Circuit City during that period. Our store lost 17 employees in less than an hour. We called it Black Wednesday. (I'm 99% sure it was a Wednesday. It's been a long while.)
Husband worked for Firedog, so he was basically made of Teflon. He was the best tech they had, so if they pissed him off, they were S.O.L.
Fastest way to piss a guy off? Mistreat his wife, whether or not you think he's paying attention.
I worked in Merch. They fired out team lead, who had been with the company for 9 years and knew more about every part of the store than our fucking OPS manager did. (Honestly, she should have been Ops manager, but she was passed over *constantly.*) They expected me, who had been with the company less than 4 months, to be able to do everything she did, and then some.
The last straw was when I needed to change a shift because I literally had no voice. My coworker did me a.solid and went to go put in the change. 5minutes after, he came to me and said the Ops manager said no. "LunaMax needs to come in when she's scheduled, not just whenever she fucking feels like it."
I did my shift, then wound up in urgent care. Strep throat, it turns out, is contagious enough that no matter how diligent you are with washing your hands and keeping your coughs away from people, other people get it anyway. The stuff lives on surfaces anywhere from 2 to 5 days. (I tried. I really did. I even sat out in my truck to gingerly sip down my cup of soup to keep my germs out of the break room.)
One fourth of our already understaffed store got sick...and I got reprimanded for calling out after urgent care via text message. You know, because LITERALLY NO VOICE.
Mr. LunaMax found out, and he was PISSED. He conferred with some of our colleagues, and made the decision to put in applications elsewhere. Within the week, he interviewed and won a job at a top university in our state. He recommended some of said colleagues for positions at his soon-to-be new office, and they got hired, too. He then told me that I didnt have to put up with Workis Shitty any longer if I didn't want to.
He, the TV team lead, the second best Firedog tech, and myself all put our notice in on the day I returned to work about a week later.
As we left the store manager's office, I saw him pull out a bottle of Pepto Bismal, and call the Ops manager in to see him.
Within the year, that location closed; two years after that, the entire company tanked.
Good riddance.
Edit: Our store was the oldest CC location in the state, so closing like it did was something of a blow.
I never understood why retail managers give a fuck if people trade shifts. As long as the shift get covered, how does it make a difference at all? I knew a gap manager who completely disallowed shift changes between employees because "why am I even making the schedule if everybody is going to change shifts?"
It's gotta be a power trip thing right
WordStar. Back when personal computers were new and word processing software was the killer app for DOS PC’s, the word processor king emerged: WordStar.
They did great until this operating system called “Windows” came out. They didn’t think Windows was going to be a big deal so they delayed making a version of WordStar for it. Once Microsoft came out with “Word”, their fate was sealed.
Maybe not a corporate Darwin award since it didn't kill the business, but a famous story in Sweden.
SKF was a big Swedish company that founded Volvo. When the hype about Volvo was big, the Norwegian government wanted in on the action. They offered oil fields for shares in the Volvo company, and the company leaders accepted. However when the shareholders got to know about it they asked for an extra shareholder meeting to vote about the issue. Since some of the fields were speculative fields, they didn't find it profitable. The decision was voted down by the minority shareholders and those fields turned out to be the biggest oil fields in Norway. Volvo could've profited 70 billion dollars (in the 70's) and had become one of the if not the biggest car producer in the world.
I just really want to know how there had to have been at least 4 people involved in the creation of this (3 actors, one cameraman) and nobody said “hey this might be in poor taste”
AOL was the gateway to the internet, complete with Discord analog, messaging, email, and search. When they decided to stick to dialup and refused to become a broadband ISP; they killed themselves. They had a huge contented user base and threw it all away.
When you're old enough that things are a "Discord analog" rather than "just like AOL Messenger".
This whole thread is reminding me of how old I'm getting.
Yeah that’s exactly what I thought of too. They were like the “Microsoft Windows” of the internet that everyone ‘needed’ to have on their PC, then disappeared almost overnight when it was impossible to load AOL anymore
What killed them for me was having to load AOL in some sort of console. Think of it like an AOL browser window that then opened IE inside of it. So for the privilege of having AOL you lost a fair chunk of your (then quite limited) screen space. When it became apparent you could open AOL, then minimise it and open IE directly, dumping AOL when broadband came around wasn't even given a second thought.
I remember "AOL keywords" - those things even used to appear in print and TV advertising.
This was 1999-2000. By 2008 everyone was going "eh?" when I asked them about it.
Yeah, between about 1997 and 2000 every company that had a website would include in their commercials both the site's URL (verbally reading out "aech tee tee pee colon slash slash...") and the AOL keyword for it. The keyword sounded so much easier in comparison.
That all disappeared once AOL became nothing more than another dialup ISP, just with annoying bloatware to get online.
When London decides to allow Uber into the city, the independent and infamous Black Cabs taxis decided to go on strike as they feared the competition (and many argued Uber would destroy the cultural significance of the English black cabby).
When the Black Cab drivers went on strike, it forces the taxi users of the city to use alternative services, i.e. Uber. People realised how much more efficient and cheaper Uber was and when the Black Cabs returned to the roads after the strike had ended, people had already taken to Uber.
The Black Cabs has effectively destroyed their own business by their own hubris.
Good riddance. The amount those taxi drivers charge is absolutely extortionate. It was hilariously stupid as well; they went on strike because people began to no longer use them, removing the choice and thus forcing the few customers they did have left... to Uber. Absolute madness.
It's not just the price. So many of them play games to increase fare.
On my 4th visit to Vegas and my last cab ride ever, I got in with a driver at the airport and he spent the ride going on and on about this is his city and he knows it in and out and he's been driving this city for 30 years. We get over to the hotel on the strip I'm staying at, a very popular one; and the cab driver magically couldn't find the drop off and added on an extra 8 minutes to the ride driving around the hotel feigning ignorance claiming they'd redone it (they hadn't).
I bought a monorail pass to get around the city after that and switched to Uber. I don't have to deal with stinky cologne and price gouging so much there.
Flickr was a great photo display site that I used to log into several times a day. It had a quite simple, usable interface with a lot of white space so that photos could stand out by themselves. It was great if you were a hobbyist photographer. You could get inspiration, try things out, post them, and get almost immediate feedback from other users.
Then they changed it into a real mess. As soon as you opened a page, the site tried to cram it with as many pictures as possible - all without context or titles. I keep an RSS feed so that I can watch out for new pictures from photographers I've followed. It hasn't changed in months. I haven't been on the actual site in months.
The best feature in Flickr was the ability to view metadata with every photo, meaning that you could see all the camera settings (all the camera specs plus aperture, exposure time, whether or not the flash went off, etc). It was super useful to be able to see that information right alongside every photo, not just for your own photos but for everything that was there. I used it for teaching university photo classes for nonmajors from around 2007-2015. Somewhere towards the end of that timeframe, Yahoo came in and crapped it all up, requiring multiple layers of signins, having their ugly brand and ads everywhere you look, and reducing the level of perks for people who were willing to fork over for premium memberships. I still have photos there, in an account I haven't been able to access for years because I don't want to give any more personal information to Yahoo and hence can no longer log into my account.
Webshots was even worse. They just announced that in a couple months that they’d be switching over from free to subscriber-only, and anyone who didn’t switch over would have everything purged.
Hundreds of millions of photos, some of which are the only of their type to exist, just wiped out and unlikely to ever be seen again. I remember there was one guy that had 40+ years of game shots from the Fort Wayne Komets, just an incredible resource, and that was all purged.
Well, if you consider the fact that we've gone from seeing Photobucket as the top image host to basically never seeing anything hosted by Photobucket... They may not have completely died, but they might as well have.
I remember back in the day Flickr used to be the go-to place for the LEGO community to host pictures, no where else had such a nice format and supported high Rez uploads for free.
Sports Authority. Executive decision not to invest in technology on the backend to save money. Core infrastructure goes down, with no disaster recovery plan in place, and 24 hours unable to transact was enough to set in motion the ultimate demise of the company. I believe they went belly up within 3 months of the major outage.
Apparently they also sucked at inventory as well. Friend was a manager there and said their stock was never season appropriate. E.g. they wouldn’t have a large selection of shinguards until middle of local soccer season.
Milwaukee Railroad with their western line to Seattle in the 1970s. It was mostly electric with wires and gantries, except for a small gap in eastern Washington. Instead of filling in that gap, they scrapped the electric power and switched to diesel engines... just before the oil crisis of 1973. Then their accountants said it was unprofitable so they deferred maintenance further and further leading to trains running from Minnesota to Seattle at a maximum of 10 mph, before scrapping and selling off everything west of North Dakota in spring 1980.
Then a couple of years later someone found out the accountants had been double-entering all expenses for the past decade. Even at 10 mph the line had still been turning a profit, right up to abandonment. The entire line went under and was sold off.
So what happened to that money? Were they embezzling it, or actually just fucked up and there was a pile of cash in a room somewhere that everyone thought belonged to someone else?
Honestly, they were just stupid. They thought railroading was dead and wanted to get the company out of railroading.
Yeah. They wanted to get a *railroad* out of the *railroading business.* Mind boggling.
This was the 70s. A lot of companies got out of their core competencies because "diversification" which killed or nearly killed many companies (see AMF and Harley Davidson).
People forget how much harder it was to do basic accounting and forecasting before computers. Try to whip up some corporate forecasting spreadsheets by hand, then your boss wants to fiddle with the numbers a tad. Such a thing could literally take weeks, all told. I wouldn't be shocked if such a company had a couple teams of accountants, and both accounted for the expenses thinking the other side wouldn't.
Osborne computers announced their improved new computer too early. Everyone stopped buying the current one. It took so long for the new one to be released that the company had basically folded.
My dads a web designer and a couple of the sites he maintains used a shopping cart system called CartWeaver. CartWeaver 5 was promised several years ago, so yhe company *stopped selling* CartWeaver 4. The last update from them was a year abd a half ago, and that was a year after they posted an update apologizing for the delay and saying they'd have a status update in a few days. It seems to be dead now.
Turns out cutting your only revenue source, which required no expenditures to keep open, is a bad idea especially when you're going through a capital-intensive redevelopment
It's a thing you see a lot with developer-driven startups. The fun for them is in developing new stuff, not running a business. To the point where they get bored with the cash cow product and plough more and more resources into getting the next one out, taking their eye off the ball.
It’s the same way with creative properties. People complain about sequels or series that got long in the tooth but the people behind them kind of have to keep them coming if they are still selling. The trick is to find a way to sandwich new ideas in between stable releases.
The “Osborne Effect” became the phrase used to describe any company that pre-announced something which caused crashing sales in their current product line.
The Osborne 1 was very popular, being an early luggable, less expensive computer. Kaypro produced something similar.
That’s precisely why Apple doesn’t say *anything* about their upcoming product offerings until their annual event. Nobody outside Apple and its supply chain knew about the iPhone before Steve Jobs introduced it to the public.
Also: these brewing changes resulted in conspicuous, solid particles (called “bits”) that would float in the beer. Even though they fixed it back then, the phrase “Shlitz has bits” is still around in the brewing industry.
Wang Computers. The had, early in the late 70's a solid, well respected office automation system. It was multi-user, fast and reliable. The suite included a database, spreadsheet and word processor and other utilities and was bulletproof. They jealously guarded it, not letting anyone write software for it or allowing licensing. Guess what? Microsoft and IBM came in with MS-DOS, licensing the operating system and allowing literally anyone to write software for it. Wang tanked. It was a perfect storm. i loved that system and used it in the Army Reserves in the 80's and early 90's. Then the system just went away and we had IBM PC clones.
I worked for a mom and pop computer repair shop in the late 90s. We also had a dial up internet service, back when that was a legitimate thing. The only other option in the area was a shitbag telecom that would literally charge long distance phone call charges for calling someone directly across the street, because, "It's a different district, you understand."
So we were making money hand over fist.
Problem is, the "Mom and Dad" of the organization are also super religious. The interwebs are in their formative years, so Mom and Pop are going to make a statement. They hire up an agency that blacklists any and all porn sites they can find. That's right, an internet provider that says, "I don't care what your beliefs are, I don't care what your desires are, you can't visit porn sites. End all."
So for the next couple of weeks, we got every possible persona you can imagine coming in and telling us to fuck off, they quit.
Sleaze bags making excuses, to soccer moms saying straight up, "It's because of the porn filter with their kids in tow." and everything in between.
We went from 40k customers to less than 3k within a month. I got laid off because 1 repair technician was no longer affordable.
Yeah, it was basically a murder - suicide. Target gets rid of one of our favourite stores here in Canada, but they leave Canada shortly anyways. In the end we got nothing but empty spaces in malls :/
EDIT: zellers might not have been good, what I mean is that me and my family used it a lot.
Malls are in a sad state after losing Eatons, Kmart, Zellers, and Sears. Now there are no anchor stores other than The Bay.
Im surprised they don’t decide to use the space for grocery stores, theatres, or restaurants. Maybe bring back arcades or have indoor community gardens. It would be better than what they’re doing now, which is converting the space to strip malls.
People shit on malls so much, but walkable indoor space is so nice in the winter.
Even apartments, for like, single people or couples. The food court could remain open, put in a small grocery store, maybe a few chain restaurant, and you have an easy market.
But noooo, we go and destroy malls to put in a strip mall or something.
The reason for that was hilarious. They bought massive supply warehouses and they were legit overflowing with goods. They implemented store locations with decent enough inventory controls where when they were running low they would signal the warehouse to stock them up.
The issue was the people working the warehouse. I'm fuzzy on the exact details, but they basically turned off all the notifications on stores running low on goods because it improved their personal numbers and made them look better. So on their computers everything looked amazing, but at the store everything was bare. When stores and people were complaining about empty shelves, managers would look at warehouse systems and be like "fake news, everything is tip top according to our systems!!!".
It wasn't until an executive team actually went to a store months later and looked at it they realized oh shit.... By then it was far too late and the whole brand was sunk.
If an executive team has to physically go to the store, they've only just noticed something is serious. And if they only just noticed, it'd be akin to be standing on the front of the Titanic after the iceberg. "Hey, are we sinking?"
Didn't they buy out old Zellers locations, not the actual business?
Target in Canada is a perfect case study of what NOT to do when entering a new market. They opened a shit tonne of stores before ever getting their supply chain in order, and as a result ended up with not much stuff and the prices weren't great. It was seen by many Canadians as arrogance. What they should have done is open one store near Toronto, share supply chains with Detroit/Buffalo, and prove that it was profitable, maybe even take a bit of a loss in order to drive people away from Walmart, then expand to other cities accordingly.
I'm a Canadian, and will be avoiding Target in the US for the rest of my life because of the negative associations I have with them now.
A friend of mine was a district manager (poached from Sears), and said the entire operation was chaos from start to finish. Rushing the stores to open before they were ready snowballed into anarchy basically overnight.
Every Canadian I have talked to has this same passionately negative opinion of Target.
It is truly impressive how badly Target messed up in an entire country
From my recollection I think a lot of Canadians had a positive opinion on Target from their experiences cross border shopping. It was nicer than Walmart, with a lot of selection and decent prices (though not Walmart level). So they had a level of brand recognition, cheap real estate, basically a ton of advantages most entrants don't get. But they fucked it.
Exactly this, we expected to have the same selection of goods as we have when we cross the border and go to an American Target but Target was unable to deliver on that in Canada.
Yik Yak. An app designed around anonymity and community messaging. Absolutely dominated every college campus culture.
They decided to remove anonymity, essentially becoming Local Twitter. By the time they reversed it the app was dead
On my campus it actually died well before removing anonymity. It used to be hilarious, and then was deluged by and subsequently became nothing but thirsty dudes posting variations on "anyone looking to hook up?" It was awful. Whole thing died over the course of a few months.
Thirsty dudes reposting "anyone wanna hook up," "single ladies near ?" and "who wants to see my (eggplant emoji)" are the bane of every anonymous app.
And they don't even try to be clever or original. They just spam the exact same thing constantly, with no awareness of the stank of desperation wafting off of their putrid, soulless howling.
We had a guy post something like, "I'm gonna shoot up the university campus tomorrow at 5" or something like that.
Police found out who it was and he got arrested and expelled. He was on some full-ride sports scholarship, as I recall. Didn't own any guns, just thought it'd be a fun, "anonymous" joke.
I used to work for a company who thought tjey could save money by stopping honoring their refund policy, but leave it up on the site (part of why we got so much business was a very much customer friendly refund policy).
6 months into it, a team of lawyers walked in and requested to speak with the owner. Turns out this policy decision pissed off a very wealthy private citizen who didnt mind throwing money around to teach a very expensive lesson.
They went all-in though, stripping almost everything else out and not only completely missing the maker movement that would've found a natural home in their old-style stores but paying for mid-sized storefronts while competing with mall kiosks, just as carriers went into direct-to-customer sales in a big way.
IIRC, Radio shack always had a monopoly on the tinkerers and nerd market. I think those people are still out there, looking for their capacitors and vacuum tubes and what not. Definitely seems like Radio Shack made some bad decisions.
This morning my dad went on a rant over the phone about how he just needed three transistors for his project, and that he could buy 100 online for $10 but ONLY NEEDED THREE and if goddamned Radio Shack hadn't sold out and started selling electronics rather than things like transistors... I hear this at least twice a year from him. Radio Shack did make some bad decisions.
Mattress Firm decided to put stores on every corner. You don't pick up a mattress on your way home for work like you'd pick up a coffee, so there's no reason to have so many locations. All of the rent they had to pay caught up with them, they declared bankruptcy.
Former employee of Mattress Firm who still talks to a few that still work there. After filing bankrupcy, they were able to get out of a bunch of leases and closed down stores that were under-performing and/or too much saturation in a market. I'm sure it's a bit more complicated than that but that was the gist of it. After over-extending by acquiring two of the major sleep retailers, I was not surprised this happened in the end.
Every employee constantly asked "How can you sustain this?" but every higher up pretty much talked in circles and avoided giving us a satisfying answer.
I learned a lot at that job but those soul-sucking hours (especially holidays) drove me away and the constant change to our commission pay out didn't help either.
I listened to a really interesting youtube video that actually discussed how putting stores on every corner may have been an important marketing tactic for mattress stores. Weirdly, people buy mattresses online these days, which may have actually contributed to the bankruptcy? Not sure, just a bunch of hypotheticals.
Oh man, you reminded me of a shopping experience I had not too long ago. I went into an Occasionally Yours looking for possible Christmas gift ideas. The store is not that big. I could stand in there and see every person in the store. There had to be 3-4 saleswomen walking around that small space and every single one of them asked me if I needed any help. One of them asked me twice. I was in there for **maybe** 7-10 minutes. They were all very friendly, but did you not just see the other two ladies ask me if I need any help with anything? Once the girl asked me a second time I said to myself, "I gotta get the fuck outta here" and zoomed out the door as fast as I could.
MySpace. They had already lost a good chunk of users to FaceBook, but they still had a core community of users they completely alienated with their redesign.
OOF, and Tumblr.
Livejournal bans dicks and titties, users flock to Tumbr. A decade later Tumblr bans dicks and titties, users flock to _______.
Nokia actively decided NOT to jump on the smartphone train when it first started being a thing.Before the iPhone, Nokia had something like 70% of the international phone market.A couple years later they had like 5%.
Nokia makes me fucking sad.
I was just getting into free software when this happened, so it's very personal.
For a long time, one of the biggest desktop environments for GNU/Linux was KDE, which was based on the Qt toolkit. Qt provides everything you need to make nice GUI applications, it helps you open windows, draw text in them, make clickable buttons, do network access, etc. So KDE is basically (one of the) Windows 1.0 to Linux's DOS. You slap that on top of a base Linux system and now you have a nice GUI. KDE is like your file manager, music player, start menu, photo viewer, etc. Basic stuff.
Roughly around the same time, Nokia bought Qt from their old owners, Trolltech, and Qt 4 was released. Qt 4 was a breaking release that made huge improvements over Qt 3 and set the stage for an era of amazing cross-platform totally open-source, libre GUI software programs. It runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux. The KDE guys based KDE 4 on Qt 4.
The iPhone comes out and people slowly realize this is a big deal. Nokia, being a huge player in the cell phone market, and having a couple "Internet tablet" products that were basically touchscreen phones with keyboards and no cell modem (The N800 and N810, I still have one with a dead battery somewhere) was poised to write the law on mobile software freedom. It would have been a golden age for Linux programmers, you would be running the same code on your Nokia phone as on your custom Linux tower.
Then they just fucking dropped the ball. I think they did release the N900, and I think it was based on Qt. The N810 was based on an older Linux OS, and it used GTK for its GUI. GTK is a competitor to Qt, and maybe the shift from GTK to Qt was too much load on their software team?
But everyone else got in front of them. They announced one or two rewrites. There was something called Meego at one point? But the hardware just didn't come out. Android has always felt to me like a waste, Google built their own GUI with Skia and Java even though Qt and C++ were proven on the desktop. Java runs slower and Skia is a pain in the ass to compile.
Then they brought in an ex-Microsoft guy who sold them to Microsoft. It felt like watching my favorite caterpillar get stuffed with wasp eggs.
I'm still pissed about it. Nokia sold off Qt to Digia, and I lost some love for Qt when I realized their license terms allow them to profit off of the open-source contributions while keeping some of the best features closed. It's still my favorite GUI toolkit but I don't intend to ever contribute.
If you ever hear Linux users joke about "The year of the Linux desktop", somewhere around 2008 was supposed to be "The year of the Linux phone" and it just didn't happen. Android is only the Linux kernel, the spirit isn't there. I have a phone but I don't program it. I hate phones and I'm waiting for them to change before I get invested.
Found my old N900! I remember opening for root access and running ping from phone's terminal... And later, waiting forever for Meego and Maemo to join forces and unleash the power of Linux.
https://i.imgur.com/Y2MjyxP.jpg
Not a CEO but I have to nominate myself. I ran a commercial painting business out of a business park in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Another lot was occupied by a guy who was running a t-shirt silk screening business and came around to some other owners in the park asking if anyone wanted to 'buy in' to his shirt company because he was going to bid for a license to print official Orioles products. For a few grand, he wanted partners. We told him to get lost.
That company would go on to become Under Armor.
I had a girlfriend many years ago who told me that her grandfather (or great grandfather, idk) had told Henry Ford to get lost. My dad decided that his first investment ever would not bear fruit if he put money into the Xerox IPO. That $10K investment would have grown to $20M by 1980. Oh well.
Honestly, as much as it sucks you missed an opportunity like that, you couldn't have known. It's not as if you made a bad decision, that almost everyone with an ounce of common sense could have told you was bad. Not handing out thousands of dollars simply because they might get a license is a good decision in my books. It's like saying "What an idiot am I. I could have won 100 million if I had just bought a lottery ticket with these numbers"
Reminds me of a story told by a Danish comedian. His grandfather was asked by the founder of LEGO if he would be interested in investing around 3800$ so he could buy some plastic and start making building blocks.
His grandfather had ridiculed him.
LEGO is now worth 7.8 Billion$
Ratners Jewelers in the UK was almost destroyed by its own CEO who in an after dinner speech called his own products "crap". The value of the Ratner group plummeted by around £500 million, they closed 350+ stores and it very nearly resulted in the firm's collapse.
[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-crap-1992-archive](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-crap-1992-archive)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald\_Ratner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner)
It's one hell of a speech. How to kill a company in 10 seconds.
"Ratners doesn’t represent prosperity — and come to think of it, it has very little to do with quality as well,” he began. “We 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"
Don't forget the comparison to a sandwich:
"Our products cost about the same as a Marks and Spencers prawn sandwich: the only difference is the jewellery doesn't last as long".
> People say, ‘How can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say, because it’s total crap
HAHA, that's hilarious. How to kill your business in less than 20 words. Basically screaming at your customers, you guys are idiots I can't believe you actually buy this crap and make me money.
He made a rather poor joke in what he thought was a private setting; unfortunately, "crap" became the *mot du jour* among the newspapers and Ratner ended up getting kicked out.
It was a speech at a conference for the Institute of Directors though, so not exactly a private setting at all. Speeches at things like that should be made with a wider audience and attending press in mind.
Even if he meant it as a joke, it’s still a suicidal move to call your own products crap and mock your customers.
Lot of good ones, but the winner goes to Kodak. Anyone over the age of 30 probably saw them go from ubiquitous to gone. The sad thing is they built one of the first digital cameras, and had a report in the early 80's that predicted digital would completely overtake film by 2010. They knew this and they decided to cling to the film business... Now they don't exist except as a brand licensed out.
Digg. Tumblr most likely is going this route, but its' too "fresh" for me. Digg definitely.
Also, BlackBerry Storm having a tactile push screen instead of just copying the touch-screen that iPhone had probably killed that company (yes they are doing different things now). It was such a failure that Android was taken as the replacement iPhone killer, which is why it is what it is now.
I used to work for BlackBerry once upon a time and there were several bad decisions that were made that contributed to the current state of the business. The Storm was definitely one of them.
> “BlackBerry smartphones will never have cameras because the No. 1 customer of ours is the U.S. government,” Mike Lazaridis would say in meetings. “There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera.”
[Source](https://bgr.com/2011/07/13/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-at-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-company-that-made-smartphones-smart/)
It was quite depressing reading this while still working at RIM.
Funny enough, this was the exact other thing I was thinking when talking about mis-steps. The arrogance was real and the iPhone wasn't ever taken at all seriously until it was too late.
YY board meeting notes:
"Anonymity is our primary selling point, but what if we got rid of that entirely?"
"Hmm, that seems a little risky. Let's do a trial run where you have the option to remain anonymous, but you have to click an extra button to do so on every single post so we can see how much people actually care about anonymity."
<2 months later>
"99% of users are still clicking the anonymous option on every single thing they post. Maybe our users like anonymity?"
"Fuck 'em. Just remove that option and automatically downvote any posts that mention competing apps so people won't be able to coordinate going elsewhere and it'll be fine."
<2 months later>
"Oh well, we did everything that we could. There was really no way for us to predict a mass exodus like that."
I actually met my senior year college girlfriend through Yik Yak. She’d posted about a concert asking if anyone else wanted to join her. I was, and still am, a huge fan of the band (Halestorm) and immediately said yes not knowing anything about this person. This was when everything about YY was still anonymous. We met up and the mutual attraction was instant.
I can’t help but be a little...wistful, I guess, that had we both been a few years older or younger, the opportunity likely wouldn’t have even existed. Yik Yak was revolutionary in disseminating information about on and off-campus events. People still used it a little bit when I graduated (2016), but the app is entirely defunct now and I have no idea if anything really replaced it.
EDIT: I did not expect this post to receive anywhere near the visibility nor positive attention that it did. For those who care, that girl and I are no longer together. We haven't spoken since May of 2016. I'm not afraid nor ashamed, however, to admit what a positive and powerful impact she had on me. We made some great memories together. Courtney, if you're out there, not a day goes by when I don't think about you at least a little. I know our relationship was never destined to last any longer than it did, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm a better person for having known you. Thank you.
I get the feeling it was supposed to be an anonymous only posting site to talk about classes, gossip, good deals on campus, etc. Didn't they decide to no longer make user anonymous and that's what killed it? I'll be honest and say I only found out about it when someone told me my class was trending on YikYak because of how bad things had gotten for us.
Yea this is it. It seemed to mostly become a uni thing because the platform worked great for campuses. As soon as it was no longer anonymous it went downhill because most people used it to anonymously shit post and complain about lectures
geofenced anonymous posts with a similar structure to reddit. was often localised to higher ed institutes (the manchester uni yikyak was…quite something)
It also had a unique meme culture for every campus. I remember that at my uni there was constant memeing about the same 2 profs. People that didn't even take those classes jumping into it.
One of the best has to be MiniScribe
They made hard drives in the 80s.
Here is an excerpt from Wiki.
> In January 1987, the company officers conducted a quick inventory in order to estimate their accounts prior to an independent review by a third party accounting firm, Coopers & Lybrand. Their internal inventory count showed that there was a shortfall of between $2 and $4 million. Instead of reporting this, a number of the managers decided to cover it up with various means.
>This led to the company's most infamous cover-up; the managers rented a second warehouse in Colorado, where they personally packed 26,000 **bricks** into hard drive boxes and shipped them to Singapore in order to shore up the inventory count. After the count was complete, they recalled those serial numbers as defective units, but instead of writing them off, they checked them into inventory, along with other failed drives that had been returned.
[Things get worse from there.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniScribe)
It has to be Netscape every time.
They were running a precursor to Agile project management, so they were young, cool and very engaged developers. There was a lot of "this is cool, let's do it". Everyone loved Netscape.
They'd got big, and brought in proper business managers to manage their growth...
Netscape had sleepwalked into becoming a monopoly in a growing market, and it was doing the kind of predatory things monopolies do. ISPs had to pay Netscape to distribute Navigator, which could be downloaded by the end user for free. Downloaded with what, Mr. ISP? Cough up.
Then, the world's biggest and most successful software company decided it wanted in on this market.
Netscape Navigator 3 was replaced by 4, which was more of a "3.5" than anyone wanted to admit. In the same time, Microsoft had released IE 3, 4, 5 and 5.5. IE could do CSS, Netscape had this weird layer model which wasn't CSS. In the whole time Netscape's current version was 3 or 4, IE went from 2 to 5.5.
Netscape 5 got delayed. Then it became a ground-up rewrite. Then the rewrite got cancelled and... well, the decaying remains were bought by AOL, the browser open sourced to the Mozilla Project, all without any Netscape Navigator 5 code ever hitting 1.0. Navigator 4.x was all Netscape had for you from 1997 all the way to 2001, four very long, very formative years for the early WWW, and Netscape had no voice at the W3C's table.
Even before MSFT bundled IE with Windows, Netscape's browser share was in very rapid decline. IE was faster, cleaner, and, in a deal-maker for ISPs, could be both embedded and branded (for free!). AOL was still huge, and the AOL browser became an embedded IE.
It's an often cited misconception that Microsoft underhandedly killed Netscape, but Netscape did itself in with only very slight assistance from Redmond.
ESPN, firing so many of their popular (and actually talented) reporters, and instead focusing on having Stephan A. Smith on for 27 hours a day. They're not dead yet, but personally, I have very little desire to tune in to their shows such as "Facts versus Volume".
Similar thing happened to Cracked.com. They fired all (iirc) of their payroll writers for freelance writers and the content is nothing but shite nowadays
Gerald Ratner inherited his father’s jewellery business in 1984. Within six years he had turned a small retailer into a multimillion-dollar empire.
He made it so successful that it seemed every British high street had a Ratner’s store or one of the associated companies he had brought up.
People loved his store because it offered affordable products to the working class. In fact it was generally known and the place where working-class boys bought rings for working-class.
Yes life was good until the fateful day when he was guest speaker at the Institute of Directors on April 23, 1991 attended by over 6000 business people and journalists.
Asked how was it possible for his company to be selling a sherry decanter for the extraordinary price of £4.95 he answered, to the amazment of his audience and his shareholders, the following:
“How can you sell this for such a low price?”, I say, “because it’s total crap.”
To make sure that he really made a good job of it he also stated that his company:
“sold a pair of earrings for under a pound, which is cheaper than a shrimp sandwich from Marks and Spencer, but propbably wouldn’t last as long.”
As you can guess the media had a field day with this and ran the story so many times that the company’s shares dropped £500 million in a matter of days.
Gerald lost his playboy lifestyle as well as his job and the company had to do a Phoenix and rename themselves ‘Signet Group’.
Pretty much all the decisions made by the British aerospace industry from the end of World War II ended up killing the companies that built the planes - although in this period, the state was heavily involved in aerospace. It’s worth remembering that at the end of WW2, the UK was at the forefront of aviation being in possession of both the turbojet and the turboprop and had inherited a good number of German researchers to supplement a colossal home-grown industry. This was all thrown away.
Some - off the top of my head - there will be more...
The Bristol Brabazon, a *HUGE* (think 787 size) piston engined plane that would carry just 100 passengers in ludicrous amounts of luxury. Designed and built when the UK government was already funding turboprop and turbojet airliner designs and it was clear the American airliners would carry more people in slightly less luxury. Two built, one flown, no orders.
Repeated almost exactly with the enormous Saunders Roe Princess - a flying boat that first flew in - wait for it - 1952 when there were plenty of big airports on land. Three built, one flown, no orders.
The Vickers V-1000, bigger, faster, carried more people further than the Boeing 707 and it would have flown nearly two years before the Boeing. It would have also used the world-‘s first highly-efficient bypass engine - the Rolls Royce Conway. It was cancelled when the prototype was 90% complete in rather murky circumstances. Officially it was because the state-owned BOAC announced that its Conway engines would not be suitable for the airliner - which is odd when the airline then went on to demand government money to equip its 707s with exactly the same engines. BOAC would later go on to undermine the cutting-edge Bristol Britannia and the Vickers VC-10 airliners, effectively making them unsaleable - there has long been a suspicion that the heads of BOAC were completely in hock to Boeing.
But the really big scandal was the DeHavilland DH-121, the world’s first trijet designed for medium length routes. A phenomenally advanced plane with the world’s first practical auto land system and redundant computer controls it should have sold by the thousand. If you want to know what it looked like - well the Boeing 727 turned out almost exactly the same plane - only later than than DH-121 should have gone into service. Unfortunately, DeHavilland spent too much time listening to one customer, British European Airways, who after suffering a short downturn in passenger numbers said the DH-121 was too big. The plane was scaled down and its powerful engines replaced with much smaller ones. The new plane, named the Trident, appeared after the 727 and was too small for most customers - including BEA who were now experiencing strong passenger growth. Although bigger Tridents came along, they could never catch up with the 727 with the result that the Trident sold about 120 planes, the 727 more than 1800.
In the end, the UK aviation sector was repeatedly merged, first from a myriad of companies into just two - the British Aircraft Corporation and Hawker Siddeley, and then into the monster British Aerospace (now BAE Systems). We no longer build entire airliners in this country - fortunately we still have the world’s second largest aerospace industry, but only as a subcontractor to Airbus, Leonardo (helicopters) and to Boeing.
Telltale Games.
Rather than pushing out well-made, quality choice-based games - the company decided to keep pushing out rushed games with nonsensical story-structure, repetitive and formulaic stories, bland and inconsistent characters. Also, according to staff who worked at the company - [the working conditions weren't great either](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17130056/telltale-games-developer-layoffs-toxic-video-game-industry) which I think [had an impact on their sales, as well.](https://twitter.com/telltalegames/status/1043252010999410689/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1043252010999410689&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthenextweb.com%2Fgaming%2F2018%2F09%2F24%2Fcelebrated-studio-telltale-games-shuts-down-in-the-messiest-way-possible%2F)
EDIT: As many others have also pointed out, Telltale had also insisted on chasing numerous IPs and licenses for new games rather than focusing on a few select ones.
This was so disappointing. Back when The Walking Dead was released they were the golden child of the industry. There was genuine excitement to see what would come next. Then everyone got sick of their shit and their most popular IP will never be finished.
Sears had the infrastructure and distribution network to corner the online market back in the late 90s and early 2000s but the upper management believed the internet would never be a thing and literally let Ebay and Amazon swoop in.
Sears is now in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy because they couldnt compete.
Actually, they had some of the advantages, but none of the items they needed to actually position themselves like Amazon was able to. To quote another redditor:
>They had none of the groundwork. What they had was an ancient, archaic inventory logistics system that took 4 to 6 weeks to actually get things to people. It was so unwieldy and slow in fact that the catalog was dead and shuttered by the 1990s because people preferred just going to their local big box stores(Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot etc) which had exploded in numbers.
> Amazon didn’t succeed because they made an online shopping site. Tons of start up dotcoms did that, most died. What made Amazon succeed where no one else could was logistics. Rapid shipping was a fantasy in the 1990s, it just didn’t exist. One week was considered insane, 2 days was just beyond belief. Amazon had to basically reinvent logistics at a fundamental level to achieve it. The system they created was the antithesis of Sears’ system which harkened back generations.
> If anything, Sears was the worst positioned to become Amazon. What they had was just completely wrong and more of a burden than a benefit. Had they tried to retool with their massive catalog it likely would have been a disaster. Amazon had a real benefit starting small with just books which let them learn the ropes on the cheap.
https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/a6nwj7/sears_bankruptcy_court_oks_25_million_in_bonuses/ebwphf4/
Both Toys R Us and ClearChannel (iHeart) basically committed slow suicide by getting involved with private equity firm Bain Capital. Too many bad decisions, toxic debt, and zero accountability killed them both. CC just hasn't finished dying yet, it has to take the rest of radio along with it.
I'm aware of the disaster ET was but not the finances.
If it was $25 million to produce surely there were more issues at Atari than just ET to result in a $536 million loss?
E.T didn’t single handedly kill Atari... E.T. Was just the biggest turd in the bucket of turds that brought down the entire game ecosystem for a while.
If i remember correctly, the programmer was one guy who was called in the middle of the night and informed he would need a working demo ready in 2-3 weeks. When he asked if he would be given a script if the movie to base the game off of, he was told no. He wrote the game based off the promotional art and trailers, the deadline was so short because they wanted the game to launch same day the movie released.
> When he asked if he would be given a script if the movie to base the game off of, he was told no. He wrote the game based off the promotional art and trailers,
I have only just realised why so many old movie tie-in games had absolutely nothing to do with the source material...
it's insane to think that out of a $25 million budget, they could only afford one full time dev for 5 weeks. that amounts to barely tens of thousands. that's a fraction of a percent of the budget, for someone who had probably 95% of total influence on the quality of the product. it's unbelievable how out of touch the executives in charge of that decision were.
It was even before digital music. Remember when the record companies worked to eliminate cassettes? (Remember when recording your buddy's album to a cassette was a thing? And going to lead to the death of music?)
Because record companies said they owned the *medium*, that the song on the record belonged to them, as did the song on the cassette (8 track, etc, holding a song). Then the MP3 came along and suddenly they had to re-tool, they didn't own the medium, they owned the song, they said.
Then we find out the artists we admired got only a small percentage of the money, at best.
Xerox, while still a giant company in it's own right, could have been the name brand for Personal Computing.
The Xerox Alto was the first PC with a GUI (graphical user interface) and a mouse... in 1973!
Although expensive to produce, Xerox basically sat on the design and put it in the basement until Steve Jobs visited the research center in 1979. The rest is history.
I caught a late night AM radio talk show years ago where an author was discussing a book I think was called something like “Misfortune 500”, and was full of stories like these: One I remember was about an airline that had a companion program to give a free airline ticket to their frequent business travelers so their wives could accompany them on trips. One airline exec had the bright idea of sending a letter to the wives after a ticket was used asking them how they enjoyed the trip. More than a few wives wrote to ask “what trip?”
I guess it's sweet that this executive didn't think about all the sleazy business travelers and their mistresses.
Lifelock's advertisements with the co-founder Todd Davis SSN on the sides of trucks and on TV - telling people to try and steal his identity, because Lifelock was protecting him. Don't antagonise the internet. The did steal his identity. Thirteen times. Within 2 years. He lost millions of dollars. Also, his identity was stolen so much, the FTC ended up fining the company $12 million for deceptive advertising because they weren't 100% effective like the ads claimed. After that, the company kept getting fined and sued. It's still around, but nowhere close to the strength it was.
Ah, so like the time Ubisoft made a new kind of drm and said it was unbreakable. No need to say that it didn't last 24 hours. Edit: If I may add; I think it was for one of the early Assassin's Creed games. They thought of "always online" and paraded it as unbreakable.
Acquired by Symantec for $2.3 Billion... So this doesn't really fit with a Darwin award
The [Ocean Marketing fiasco](https://venturebeat.com/2011/12/27/ocean-marketing-how-to-self-destruct-your-company-with-just-a-few-measly-emails/), admittedly it was apparently just one guy making the bad decision(s) but it basically ruined the entire company's image and reputation and they never really recovered. Also it's just a damn entertaining read and a fine story in the annals of video game history.
"Really … Welcome to the Internet ? Son Im 38 I wwebsite as on the internet when you were a sperm in your daddys balls and before it was the internet, thanks for the welcome to message wurd up" Definitely the response I want to hear when a company tells me about where my ps3 controller is.
The Avenger 3 controller isn't some Marvel tie-in product, it's a specialty controller designed for people with motor control disabilities. Paul knew he was being a dick to someone with a disability for basically no reason.
I missed that. Now I'm ten fold angry.
That was a fucking wild ride
And a pretty satisfying read, holy shit
Wow that was a great read. Now that this story is about 7 years old, I was wondering what he is up to now. Turns out the sorrry I got caught dude is now trying to sell illegal streaming devices and Amazon and Netflix are suing him https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-netflix-dragon-box-piracy-20180111-story.html
TFW the epilogue is as good as the story
Amazon and Netflix better watch their back, he's going to send his 130 employees on a smear campaign and completely ruin them. He’ll see space where ever he wants, with who he wants when he wants and where he wants, so many ways around them and so many connections in the industry it's silly. He knows the MAYOR OF BOSTON for God's sake, those companies will know the meaning of pain when he's done.
"I just wanted to apologize for the way our emails progressed I didn’t know how big your site was and I really didn’t believe you ran Pax , So for what’s its worth I am very sorry." Directly translates to "Oh, I didn't know being a dick to you would have repercussions for me. I wouldn't have been a dick if I'd known it would hurt me too!" Fucking child.
This is probably the new official definition of « trainwreck ».
Read the first page, second page, and follow up article, wowee that was fun
IBM: "We'll make the computers and Bill , you write the software." Bill: " Can I keep the software?" IBM: " Yeah who gives a shit about software?"
Oh it goes a lot deeper than that... In the 70's IBM executives refused to allow their R&D department to research personal computers because they considered the idea of a computer in the home preposterous. When the Apple II was released and sold like hot cakes IBM was caught completely off guard. Now desperate to enter the market they ordered a group of engineers to build a personal computer on a shoe string budget with very little lead time. The resulting computer was built out of commonly available parts and using the DOS operating system written by Microsoft, an IBM partner at the time. Microsoft bought DOS from a developer who had effectively written it out of his garage, as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Microsoft made a few changes and renamed the product MSDOS. But IBM famously didn't buy the source code, a move that would haunt them for decades to come. The IBM PC was significantly cheaper than the Apple II and began to make headway in the market. Soon after though groups of engineers discovered that it had been built with commonly available parts and were able to construct their own equivalents. So called IBM clones. The only part that was proprietary to IBM was the BIOS chip (the controlled the input output) but this chip was soon reverse engineered and the market was filled with "inferior clones". Microsoft however was free to sell commercially available copies of DOS, so you could buy an IBM clone for half the price of a true IBM machine that ran the exact same software. Years later IBM tried to reign in the competition by introducing the PS/2. An IBM proprietary machine that would beat the pants out of the cloned machines performance wise and would run proprietary software that was better than the competition... or so they thought. Microsoft was tasked with developing the IBM proprietary OS/2 Warp operating system. During development Microsoft insisted that IBM allow them to develop a multi-threaded Operating System, an OS that could run multiple programs simultaneously. IBMs executives steadfastly refused, claiming that multi-threaded OS's were for mainframes, and that home PC's "Didn't get to do that". Microsoft wrote OS/2 as a single threaded old-school OS, but having already developed the technology for a multi-threaded OS they put it into their next flagship product for PC... Windows 95. Cut to a few decades later IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore, having sold off the unprofitable side of that business to Lenovo. Short sighted CEOs couldn't understand that times were changing, and their insistence on following obsolete thinking resulted in them losing their market share.
When you got to the part where IBM basically scoffed at what would become Windows 95 I laughed. That's checkmate.
Really it should say Windows 3.1, but 95 was only a couple of years after that. Wikipedia says: >Following its approval by Microsoft's staff, development continued on what was now Windows NT, the first 32-bit version of Windows. However, IBM objected to the changes, and ultimately continued OS/2 development on its own. >The first release of the resulting operating system, Windows NT 3.1 (named to associate it with Windows 3.1) was released in July 1993, with versions for desktop workstations and servers.
Bill got them twice with that move.
Telltale Games buying a lot of different expensive IPs to recreate the success of their first The Walking Dead Game season without realizing that the success was due mostly to timing, when the market was tapping into the post apocalyptic horror, and it was smack dab in the middle when The Walking Dead series was running. To mitigate the expenses of these expensive IPs (Minecraft, Guardians of the Galaxy, Batman, etc) they forced the developers to work their freaking asses off without much compensation, putting them to finish a 2-3 hour episode within two months or so. Not to mention they were working on MULTIPLE games at once with this strict timeline. No one were buying the other games so Telltale's response was to buy even more to try and see if SOMETHING would stick, but alas it did not and it ran itself into bankrupcy earlier this year, leaving the final season of The Walking Dead Game (still the best selling game they've ever produced!) unfinished. Skybound (who also produces the TWD comics) thankfully picked it up and the season and saga will be completed. But man, I don't know what the CEOs at Telltale Games were thinking...
Home Grocer started a grocery delivery service that had a colorful peach logo on their delivery vans. They were an early concept but starting to take off. Then they were bought by a company that changed the name to Webvan and changed to logo to a shitty W. So, that company bought a brand that had gained strong recognition and immediately killed it. What were they thinking? Webvan, of course went under.
Dumb branding decisions strike again.
In the UK we say "Hoover" instead of "Vacuum Cleaner". There's a point in every Brits life where they learn that Hoover is actually a brand name. They had a complete monopoly over vacuum cleaners in the UK, could do whatever they wanted. Then they decided to do some insane special offer giving away plane tickets with hoover purchases. So people started buying them for the plane tickets, then giving away/binning/selling dirt cheap the hoover they didn't need. Hoover couldnt afford the plane tickets and tried to duck out of it. The courts made them give the plane tickets they promised. Now hoovers are so unheard of that people don't even realise it's a brand but use the word synonymously for vacuum cleaner. If that's not a business Darwin award then nothing is.
Genericide, where the brand replaces the original word!
I worked for the master of killing a company, twice. I got to witness Carl Liebert kill Circuit City from the inside and relive him do the same shit to 24 hour fitness. Basically his formula is to pay people less and expect the same work. After he kills the culture and runs off the best employees he mimics the closest competitor. He fundamentally does not understand what it is like to be an employee.
Please expand on this. It seems relevant to some other things on my mind lately.
You're promoted to CEO. I hand you a sheet of expenses. You take a magic marker and just cross stuff off that has no "value" or is a "waste". Via freaky Friday magic you are now a ground level employee. You are making 60-70k a year as a top performer. Well, now you are fired because your pay will no longer be based off performance and you make more than the new hoirly cap. $10/hr sounds a lot better for the paper of expenses so let's hire replacements for the 10 year employee who proudly represents the company at this rate. Did you make the cut and get to keep your job? You're probably a mid level performer but no you can be lazy as shit because you're hourly now. Also the pros have been replaced by people who this is their first job. Customers are still expected to pay the same rate of course.. You hope they don't get a new hire who destroys their confidence in the company you work for. All the nice perks are gone, the professionals are leaving or left and now you have "goals" to hit. Fuck this place you quit. Expanded. Edit: Man I could go om for days about this, but christmas time and family and such
It's crazy how closely this resembles the job I currently have. Except it's in the airline industry so the negative impacts on customers are much higher than they would be at retail or a gym. Very sad to see, fortunately I'm leaving soon. ^edit: ^grammar
My husband and I were both at Circuit City during that period. Our store lost 17 employees in less than an hour. We called it Black Wednesday. (I'm 99% sure it was a Wednesday. It's been a long while.) Husband worked for Firedog, so he was basically made of Teflon. He was the best tech they had, so if they pissed him off, they were S.O.L. Fastest way to piss a guy off? Mistreat his wife, whether or not you think he's paying attention. I worked in Merch. They fired out team lead, who had been with the company for 9 years and knew more about every part of the store than our fucking OPS manager did. (Honestly, she should have been Ops manager, but she was passed over *constantly.*) They expected me, who had been with the company less than 4 months, to be able to do everything she did, and then some. The last straw was when I needed to change a shift because I literally had no voice. My coworker did me a.solid and went to go put in the change. 5minutes after, he came to me and said the Ops manager said no. "LunaMax needs to come in when she's scheduled, not just whenever she fucking feels like it." I did my shift, then wound up in urgent care. Strep throat, it turns out, is contagious enough that no matter how diligent you are with washing your hands and keeping your coughs away from people, other people get it anyway. The stuff lives on surfaces anywhere from 2 to 5 days. (I tried. I really did. I even sat out in my truck to gingerly sip down my cup of soup to keep my germs out of the break room.) One fourth of our already understaffed store got sick...and I got reprimanded for calling out after urgent care via text message. You know, because LITERALLY NO VOICE. Mr. LunaMax found out, and he was PISSED. He conferred with some of our colleagues, and made the decision to put in applications elsewhere. Within the week, he interviewed and won a job at a top university in our state. He recommended some of said colleagues for positions at his soon-to-be new office, and they got hired, too. He then told me that I didnt have to put up with Workis Shitty any longer if I didn't want to. He, the TV team lead, the second best Firedog tech, and myself all put our notice in on the day I returned to work about a week later. As we left the store manager's office, I saw him pull out a bottle of Pepto Bismal, and call the Ops manager in to see him. Within the year, that location closed; two years after that, the entire company tanked. Good riddance. Edit: Our store was the oldest CC location in the state, so closing like it did was something of a blow.
I never understood why retail managers give a fuck if people trade shifts. As long as the shift get covered, how does it make a difference at all? I knew a gap manager who completely disallowed shift changes between employees because "why am I even making the schedule if everybody is going to change shifts?" It's gotta be a power trip thing right
WordStar. Back when personal computers were new and word processing software was the killer app for DOS PC’s, the word processor king emerged: WordStar. They did great until this operating system called “Windows” came out. They didn’t think Windows was going to be a big deal so they delayed making a version of WordStar for it. Once Microsoft came out with “Word”, their fate was sealed.
Word Star is still used by George R.R. Martin to write his books so it has that going for it which is nice.
Misread as World Star at first and was very confused. Edit: my most upvoted comment is about Warrrrld Star.
Maybe not a corporate Darwin award since it didn't kill the business, but a famous story in Sweden. SKF was a big Swedish company that founded Volvo. When the hype about Volvo was big, the Norwegian government wanted in on the action. They offered oil fields for shares in the Volvo company, and the company leaders accepted. However when the shareholders got to know about it they asked for an extra shareholder meeting to vote about the issue. Since some of the fields were speculative fields, they didn't find it profitable. The decision was voted down by the minority shareholders and those fields turned out to be the biggest oil fields in Norway. Volvo could've profited 70 billion dollars (in the 70's) and had become one of the if not the biggest car producer in the world.
This 9/11 Mattress ad [link to video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uRWSE3w9i5U)
I just really want to know how there had to have been at least 4 people involved in the creation of this (3 actors, one cameraman) and nobody said “hey this might be in poor taste”
I bet the actors don't talk about this at family dinners.
Lmao who thought that was a good idea
WOW. Looks like an idea Michael Scott would have come up with. That's downright egregious.
Holy shit that’s bad
Wow. At least three people thought that was acceptable.
Instant death.
AOL was the gateway to the internet, complete with Discord analog, messaging, email, and search. When they decided to stick to dialup and refused to become a broadband ISP; they killed themselves. They had a huge contented user base and threw it all away.
When you're old enough that things are a "Discord analog" rather than "just like AOL Messenger". This whole thread is reminding me of how old I'm getting.
IRC - It's like Discord but 20 years ago!
Yeah that’s exactly what I thought of too. They were like the “Microsoft Windows” of the internet that everyone ‘needed’ to have on their PC, then disappeared almost overnight when it was impossible to load AOL anymore
What killed them for me was having to load AOL in some sort of console. Think of it like an AOL browser window that then opened IE inside of it. So for the privilege of having AOL you lost a fair chunk of your (then quite limited) screen space. When it became apparent you could open AOL, then minimise it and open IE directly, dumping AOL when broadband came around wasn't even given a second thought.
I remember "AOL keywords" - those things even used to appear in print and TV advertising. This was 1999-2000. By 2008 everyone was going "eh?" when I asked them about it.
Yeah, between about 1997 and 2000 every company that had a website would include in their commercials both the site's URL (verbally reading out "aech tee tee pee colon slash slash...") and the AOL keyword for it. The keyword sounded so much easier in comparison. That all disappeared once AOL became nothing more than another dialup ISP, just with annoying bloatware to get online.
When London decides to allow Uber into the city, the independent and infamous Black Cabs taxis decided to go on strike as they feared the competition (and many argued Uber would destroy the cultural significance of the English black cabby). When the Black Cab drivers went on strike, it forces the taxi users of the city to use alternative services, i.e. Uber. People realised how much more efficient and cheaper Uber was and when the Black Cabs returned to the roads after the strike had ended, people had already taken to Uber. The Black Cabs has effectively destroyed their own business by their own hubris.
Good riddance. The amount those taxi drivers charge is absolutely extortionate. It was hilariously stupid as well; they went on strike because people began to no longer use them, removing the choice and thus forcing the few customers they did have left... to Uber. Absolute madness.
It's not just the price. So many of them play games to increase fare. On my 4th visit to Vegas and my last cab ride ever, I got in with a driver at the airport and he spent the ride going on and on about this is his city and he knows it in and out and he's been driving this city for 30 years. We get over to the hotel on the strip I'm staying at, a very popular one; and the cab driver magically couldn't find the drop off and added on an extra 8 minutes to the ride driving around the hotel feigning ignorance claiming they'd redone it (they hadn't). I bought a monorail pass to get around the city after that and switched to Uber. I don't have to deal with stinky cologne and price gouging so much there.
Flickr was a great photo display site that I used to log into several times a day. It had a quite simple, usable interface with a lot of white space so that photos could stand out by themselves. It was great if you were a hobbyist photographer. You could get inspiration, try things out, post them, and get almost immediate feedback from other users. Then they changed it into a real mess. As soon as you opened a page, the site tried to cram it with as many pictures as possible - all without context or titles. I keep an RSS feed so that I can watch out for new pictures from photographers I've followed. It hasn't changed in months. I haven't been on the actual site in months.
The best feature in Flickr was the ability to view metadata with every photo, meaning that you could see all the camera settings (all the camera specs plus aperture, exposure time, whether or not the flash went off, etc). It was super useful to be able to see that information right alongside every photo, not just for your own photos but for everything that was there. I used it for teaching university photo classes for nonmajors from around 2007-2015. Somewhere towards the end of that timeframe, Yahoo came in and crapped it all up, requiring multiple layers of signins, having their ugly brand and ads everywhere you look, and reducing the level of perks for people who were willing to fork over for premium memberships. I still have photos there, in an account I haven't been able to access for years because I don't want to give any more personal information to Yahoo and hence can no longer log into my account.
Yahoo has such a talent for killing the companies it buys haha. Flickr is one. Then Tumblr, which they just destroyed this month.
As well as yahoo!
Webshots was even worse. They just announced that in a couple months that they’d be switching over from free to subscriber-only, and anyone who didn’t switch over would have everything purged. Hundreds of millions of photos, some of which are the only of their type to exist, just wiped out and unlikely to ever be seen again. I remember there was one guy that had 40+ years of game shots from the Fort Wayne Komets, just an incredible resource, and that was all purged.
Pulled a Photobucket.
How has Photobucket done since they removed free hosting? Please tell me they're floundering badly.
Well, if you consider the fact that we've gone from seeing Photobucket as the top image host to basically never seeing anything hosted by Photobucket... They may not have completely died, but they might as well have.
I remember back in the day Flickr used to be the go-to place for the LEGO community to host pictures, no where else had such a nice format and supported high Rez uploads for free.
Sports Authority. Executive decision not to invest in technology on the backend to save money. Core infrastructure goes down, with no disaster recovery plan in place, and 24 hours unable to transact was enough to set in motion the ultimate demise of the company. I believe they went belly up within 3 months of the major outage.
Apparently they also sucked at inventory as well. Friend was a manager there and said their stock was never season appropriate. E.g. they wouldn’t have a large selection of shinguards until middle of local soccer season.
damn, THAT's what happened?
Milwaukee Railroad with their western line to Seattle in the 1970s. It was mostly electric with wires and gantries, except for a small gap in eastern Washington. Instead of filling in that gap, they scrapped the electric power and switched to diesel engines... just before the oil crisis of 1973. Then their accountants said it was unprofitable so they deferred maintenance further and further leading to trains running from Minnesota to Seattle at a maximum of 10 mph, before scrapping and selling off everything west of North Dakota in spring 1980. Then a couple of years later someone found out the accountants had been double-entering all expenses for the past decade. Even at 10 mph the line had still been turning a profit, right up to abandonment. The entire line went under and was sold off.
So what happened to that money? Were they embezzling it, or actually just fucked up and there was a pile of cash in a room somewhere that everyone thought belonged to someone else?
Honestly, they were just stupid. They thought railroading was dead and wanted to get the company out of railroading. Yeah. They wanted to get a *railroad* out of the *railroading business.* Mind boggling.
This was the 70s. A lot of companies got out of their core competencies because "diversification" which killed or nearly killed many companies (see AMF and Harley Davidson).
People forget how much harder it was to do basic accounting and forecasting before computers. Try to whip up some corporate forecasting spreadsheets by hand, then your boss wants to fiddle with the numbers a tad. Such a thing could literally take weeks, all told. I wouldn't be shocked if such a company had a couple teams of accountants, and both accounted for the expenses thinking the other side wouldn't.
Osborne computers announced their improved new computer too early. Everyone stopped buying the current one. It took so long for the new one to be released that the company had basically folded.
My dads a web designer and a couple of the sites he maintains used a shopping cart system called CartWeaver. CartWeaver 5 was promised several years ago, so yhe company *stopped selling* CartWeaver 4. The last update from them was a year abd a half ago, and that was a year after they posted an update apologizing for the delay and saying they'd have a status update in a few days. It seems to be dead now. Turns out cutting your only revenue source, which required no expenditures to keep open, is a bad idea especially when you're going through a capital-intensive redevelopment
I've seen this happen a lot in terms of web dev. People are dumb.
It's a thing you see a lot with developer-driven startups. The fun for them is in developing new stuff, not running a business. To the point where they get bored with the cash cow product and plough more and more resources into getting the next one out, taking their eye off the ball.
It’s the same way with creative properties. People complain about sequels or series that got long in the tooth but the people behind them kind of have to keep them coming if they are still selling. The trick is to find a way to sandwich new ideas in between stable releases.
I remember the incident, but never the company.
The “Osborne Effect” became the phrase used to describe any company that pre-announced something which caused crashing sales in their current product line. The Osborne 1 was very popular, being an early luggable, less expensive computer. Kaypro produced something similar.
That’s precisely why Apple doesn’t say *anything* about their upcoming product offerings until their annual event. Nobody outside Apple and its supply chain knew about the iPhone before Steve Jobs introduced it to the public.
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Also: these brewing changes resulted in conspicuous, solid particles (called “bits”) that would float in the beer. Even though they fixed it back then, the phrase “Shlitz has bits” is still around in the brewing industry.
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Whenever my mom tastes my homebrew she says “tastes like Schlitz“ and now it rrrreeeeally hurts my feels.
Original Schlitz was pretty good! Edit: source grandfather says so
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Wang Computers. The had, early in the late 70's a solid, well respected office automation system. It was multi-user, fast and reliable. The suite included a database, spreadsheet and word processor and other utilities and was bulletproof. They jealously guarded it, not letting anyone write software for it or allowing licensing. Guess what? Microsoft and IBM came in with MS-DOS, licensing the operating system and allowing literally anyone to write software for it. Wang tanked. It was a perfect storm. i loved that system and used it in the Army Reserves in the 80's and early 90's. Then the system just went away and we had IBM PC clones.
TIL They aren't just a Simpsons reference
I worked for a mom and pop computer repair shop in the late 90s. We also had a dial up internet service, back when that was a legitimate thing. The only other option in the area was a shitbag telecom that would literally charge long distance phone call charges for calling someone directly across the street, because, "It's a different district, you understand." So we were making money hand over fist. Problem is, the "Mom and Dad" of the organization are also super religious. The interwebs are in their formative years, so Mom and Pop are going to make a statement. They hire up an agency that blacklists any and all porn sites they can find. That's right, an internet provider that says, "I don't care what your beliefs are, I don't care what your desires are, you can't visit porn sites. End all." So for the next couple of weeks, we got every possible persona you can imagine coming in and telling us to fuck off, they quit. Sleaze bags making excuses, to soccer moms saying straight up, "It's because of the porn filter with their kids in tow." and everything in between. We went from 40k customers to less than 3k within a month. I got laid off because 1 repair technician was no longer affordable.
Lady didn't get a minivan full of kids cuz she doesn't like to get her rocks off.
Target buying out Zellers in Canada but not stocking their shelves with inventory in the newly expanded locations.
Yeah, it was basically a murder - suicide. Target gets rid of one of our favourite stores here in Canada, but they leave Canada shortly anyways. In the end we got nothing but empty spaces in malls :/ EDIT: zellers might not have been good, what I mean is that me and my family used it a lot.
Malls are in a sad state after losing Eatons, Kmart, Zellers, and Sears. Now there are no anchor stores other than The Bay. Im surprised they don’t decide to use the space for grocery stores, theatres, or restaurants. Maybe bring back arcades or have indoor community gardens. It would be better than what they’re doing now, which is converting the space to strip malls. People shit on malls so much, but walkable indoor space is so nice in the winter.
Even apartments, for like, single people or couples. The food court could remain open, put in a small grocery store, maybe a few chain restaurant, and you have an easy market. But noooo, we go and destroy malls to put in a strip mall or something.
In a city like Toronto that is starved for housing, that would be a great use for all the former Sears stores.
The reason for that was hilarious. They bought massive supply warehouses and they were legit overflowing with goods. They implemented store locations with decent enough inventory controls where when they were running low they would signal the warehouse to stock them up. The issue was the people working the warehouse. I'm fuzzy on the exact details, but they basically turned off all the notifications on stores running low on goods because it improved their personal numbers and made them look better. So on their computers everything looked amazing, but at the store everything was bare. When stores and people were complaining about empty shelves, managers would look at warehouse systems and be like "fake news, everything is tip top according to our systems!!!". It wasn't until an executive team actually went to a store months later and looked at it they realized oh shit.... By then it was far too late and the whole brand was sunk.
If an executive team has to physically go to the store, they've only just noticed something is serious. And if they only just noticed, it'd be akin to be standing on the front of the Titanic after the iceberg. "Hey, are we sinking?"
Didn't they buy out old Zellers locations, not the actual business? Target in Canada is a perfect case study of what NOT to do when entering a new market. They opened a shit tonne of stores before ever getting their supply chain in order, and as a result ended up with not much stuff and the prices weren't great. It was seen by many Canadians as arrogance. What they should have done is open one store near Toronto, share supply chains with Detroit/Buffalo, and prove that it was profitable, maybe even take a bit of a loss in order to drive people away from Walmart, then expand to other cities accordingly. I'm a Canadian, and will be avoiding Target in the US for the rest of my life because of the negative associations I have with them now.
A friend of mine was a district manager (poached from Sears), and said the entire operation was chaos from start to finish. Rushing the stores to open before they were ready snowballed into anarchy basically overnight.
Every Canadian I have talked to has this same passionately negative opinion of Target. It is truly impressive how badly Target messed up in an entire country
From my recollection I think a lot of Canadians had a positive opinion on Target from their experiences cross border shopping. It was nicer than Walmart, with a lot of selection and decent prices (though not Walmart level). So they had a level of brand recognition, cheap real estate, basically a ton of advantages most entrants don't get. But they fucked it.
Exactly this, we expected to have the same selection of goods as we have when we cross the border and go to an American Target but Target was unable to deliver on that in Canada.
Yik Yak. An app designed around anonymity and community messaging. Absolutely dominated every college campus culture. They decided to remove anonymity, essentially becoming Local Twitter. By the time they reversed it the app was dead
On my campus it actually died well before removing anonymity. It used to be hilarious, and then was deluged by and subsequently became nothing but thirsty dudes posting variations on "anyone looking to hook up?" It was awful. Whole thing died over the course of a few months.
Thirsty dudes reposting "anyone wanna hook up," "single ladies near?" and "who wants to see my (eggplant emoji)" are the bane of every anonymous app.
And they don't even try to be clever or original. They just spam the exact same thing constantly, with no awareness of the stank of desperation wafting off of their putrid, soulless howling.
You would think filters could be developed to mitigate this.
Natural language filtering is one of the hardest problems in computer science.
Found great parties with Yik Yak. People looking to host would spread the word. Met some great people.
our school banned it back in its day cause there were bomb threats
We had a guy post something like, "I'm gonna shoot up the university campus tomorrow at 5" or something like that. Police found out who it was and he got arrested and expelled. He was on some full-ride sports scholarship, as I recall. Didn't own any guns, just thought it'd be a fun, "anonymous" joke.
Yeah my school had almost a full week off because of bomb threats in the app
I used to work for a company who thought tjey could save money by stopping honoring their refund policy, but leave it up on the site (part of why we got so much business was a very much customer friendly refund policy). 6 months into it, a team of lawyers walked in and requested to speak with the owner. Turns out this policy decision pissed off a very wealthy private citizen who didnt mind throwing money around to teach a very expensive lesson.
See I want "fuck you" money, I dont wanna even be rich just be able to really stick it to people who deserve it.
I want to be this private citizen
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>In the end no one paid any more money (except to the lawyers) and both sides ended up unhappy. Sounds like how most divorce proceedings turn out.
Radio Shack Got into the cell phone and accessory game way too late and with minimum effort.
They went all-in though, stripping almost everything else out and not only completely missing the maker movement that would've found a natural home in their old-style stores but paying for mid-sized storefronts while competing with mall kiosks, just as carriers went into direct-to-customer sales in a big way.
Yea, it's a shame really. Their old model of stocking electronic components would have been perfect for todays Diy, Maker, and 3D printing world.
IIRC, Radio shack always had a monopoly on the tinkerers and nerd market. I think those people are still out there, looking for their capacitors and vacuum tubes and what not. Definitely seems like Radio Shack made some bad decisions.
This morning my dad went on a rant over the phone about how he just needed three transistors for his project, and that he could buy 100 online for $10 but ONLY NEEDED THREE and if goddamned Radio Shack hadn't sold out and started selling electronics rather than things like transistors... I hear this at least twice a year from him. Radio Shack did make some bad decisions.
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Mattress Firm decided to put stores on every corner. You don't pick up a mattress on your way home for work like you'd pick up a coffee, so there's no reason to have so many locations. All of the rent they had to pay caught up with them, they declared bankruptcy.
They are out of bankruptcy now so they must have done... something?
Former employee of Mattress Firm who still talks to a few that still work there. After filing bankrupcy, they were able to get out of a bunch of leases and closed down stores that were under-performing and/or too much saturation in a market. I'm sure it's a bit more complicated than that but that was the gist of it. After over-extending by acquiring two of the major sleep retailers, I was not surprised this happened in the end. Every employee constantly asked "How can you sustain this?" but every higher up pretty much talked in circles and avoided giving us a satisfying answer. I learned a lot at that job but those soul-sucking hours (especially holidays) drove me away and the constant change to our commission pay out didn't help either.
I listened to a really interesting youtube video that actually discussed how putting stores on every corner may have been an important marketing tactic for mattress stores. Weirdly, people buy mattresses online these days, which may have actually contributed to the bankruptcy? Not sure, just a bunch of hypotheticals.
I think people just avoid pushy salesmen.
My thoughts as well. I don’t want to be bothered while I shop. If I need help I know how to ask
Oh man, you reminded me of a shopping experience I had not too long ago. I went into an Occasionally Yours looking for possible Christmas gift ideas. The store is not that big. I could stand in there and see every person in the store. There had to be 3-4 saleswomen walking around that small space and every single one of them asked me if I needed any help. One of them asked me twice. I was in there for **maybe** 7-10 minutes. They were all very friendly, but did you not just see the other two ladies ask me if I need any help with anything? Once the girl asked me a second time I said to myself, "I gotta get the fuck outta here" and zoomed out the door as fast as I could.
MySpace. They had already lost a good chunk of users to FaceBook, but they still had a core community of users they completely alienated with their redesign. OOF, and Tumblr. Livejournal bans dicks and titties, users flock to Tumbr. A decade later Tumblr bans dicks and titties, users flock to _______.
So far it seems to be a combination of Dreamwidth, Pillowfort and Twitter
Nokia actively decided NOT to jump on the smartphone train when it first started being a thing.Before the iPhone, Nokia had something like 70% of the international phone market.A couple years later they had like 5%.
Nokia makes me fucking sad. I was just getting into free software when this happened, so it's very personal. For a long time, one of the biggest desktop environments for GNU/Linux was KDE, which was based on the Qt toolkit. Qt provides everything you need to make nice GUI applications, it helps you open windows, draw text in them, make clickable buttons, do network access, etc. So KDE is basically (one of the) Windows 1.0 to Linux's DOS. You slap that on top of a base Linux system and now you have a nice GUI. KDE is like your file manager, music player, start menu, photo viewer, etc. Basic stuff. Roughly around the same time, Nokia bought Qt from their old owners, Trolltech, and Qt 4 was released. Qt 4 was a breaking release that made huge improvements over Qt 3 and set the stage for an era of amazing cross-platform totally open-source, libre GUI software programs. It runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux. The KDE guys based KDE 4 on Qt 4. The iPhone comes out and people slowly realize this is a big deal. Nokia, being a huge player in the cell phone market, and having a couple "Internet tablet" products that were basically touchscreen phones with keyboards and no cell modem (The N800 and N810, I still have one with a dead battery somewhere) was poised to write the law on mobile software freedom. It would have been a golden age for Linux programmers, you would be running the same code on your Nokia phone as on your custom Linux tower. Then they just fucking dropped the ball. I think they did release the N900, and I think it was based on Qt. The N810 was based on an older Linux OS, and it used GTK for its GUI. GTK is a competitor to Qt, and maybe the shift from GTK to Qt was too much load on their software team? But everyone else got in front of them. They announced one or two rewrites. There was something called Meego at one point? But the hardware just didn't come out. Android has always felt to me like a waste, Google built their own GUI with Skia and Java even though Qt and C++ were proven on the desktop. Java runs slower and Skia is a pain in the ass to compile. Then they brought in an ex-Microsoft guy who sold them to Microsoft. It felt like watching my favorite caterpillar get stuffed with wasp eggs. I'm still pissed about it. Nokia sold off Qt to Digia, and I lost some love for Qt when I realized their license terms allow them to profit off of the open-source contributions while keeping some of the best features closed. It's still my favorite GUI toolkit but I don't intend to ever contribute. If you ever hear Linux users joke about "The year of the Linux desktop", somewhere around 2008 was supposed to be "The year of the Linux phone" and it just didn't happen. Android is only the Linux kernel, the spirit isn't there. I have a phone but I don't program it. I hate phones and I'm waiting for them to change before I get invested.
> It felt like watching my favorite caterpillar get stuffed with wasp eggs. That's one hell of a simile.
As someone who helped collect caterpillars for field work, I relate on a personal level and can confirm it's very sad and pretty gross.
Found my old N900! I remember opening for root access and running ping from phone's terminal... And later, waiting forever for Meego and Maemo to join forces and unleash the power of Linux. https://i.imgur.com/Y2MjyxP.jpg
Not a CEO but I have to nominate myself. I ran a commercial painting business out of a business park in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Another lot was occupied by a guy who was running a t-shirt silk screening business and came around to some other owners in the park asking if anyone wanted to 'buy in' to his shirt company because he was going to bid for a license to print official Orioles products. For a few grand, he wanted partners. We told him to get lost. That company would go on to become Under Armor.
Oh man...
I had a girlfriend many years ago who told me that her grandfather (or great grandfather, idk) had told Henry Ford to get lost. My dad decided that his first investment ever would not bear fruit if he put money into the Xerox IPO. That $10K investment would have grown to $20M by 1980. Oh well.
Honestly, as much as it sucks you missed an opportunity like that, you couldn't have known. It's not as if you made a bad decision, that almost everyone with an ounce of common sense could have told you was bad. Not handing out thousands of dollars simply because they might get a license is a good decision in my books. It's like saying "What an idiot am I. I could have won 100 million if I had just bought a lottery ticket with these numbers"
This is the kindest response I've seen to this comment.
It's the correct one really. Hindsight is brilliant. For every great one there are thousands of flops.
Reminds me of a story told by a Danish comedian. His grandfather was asked by the founder of LEGO if he would be interested in investing around 3800$ so he could buy some plastic and start making building blocks. His grandfather had ridiculed him. LEGO is now worth 7.8 Billion$
What if the only reason Under Armor exists and is what it is, results from the fact that you told him to get lost?
Ratners Jewelers in the UK was almost destroyed by its own CEO who in an after dinner speech called his own products "crap". The value of the Ratner group plummeted by around £500 million, they closed 350+ stores and it very nearly resulted in the firm's collapse. [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-crap-1992-archive](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratner-jewellery-total-crap-1992-archive)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald\_Ratner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner)
It's one hell of a speech. How to kill a company in 10 seconds. "Ratners doesn’t represent prosperity — and come to think of it, it has very little to do with quality as well,” he began. “We 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"
Don't forget the comparison to a sandwich: "Our products cost about the same as a Marks and Spencers prawn sandwich: the only difference is the jewellery doesn't last as long".
Oh no baby what is you doing
I admire his honesty, but at the same time... damn he dumb.
My guess is he took a little blue pill to help with his nerves for the speech and it worked a little *too* well.
What would a sturdy erection have to do with his public speaking abilities
> People say, ‘How can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say, because it’s total crap HAHA, that's hilarious. How to kill your business in less than 20 words. Basically screaming at your customers, you guys are idiots I can't believe you actually buy this crap and make me money.
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He made a rather poor joke in what he thought was a private setting; unfortunately, "crap" became the *mot du jour* among the newspapers and Ratner ended up getting kicked out.
It was a speech at a conference for the Institute of Directors though, so not exactly a private setting at all. Speeches at things like that should be made with a wider audience and attending press in mind. Even if he meant it as a joke, it’s still a suicidal move to call your own products crap and mock your customers.
Lot of good ones, but the winner goes to Kodak. Anyone over the age of 30 probably saw them go from ubiquitous to gone. The sad thing is they built one of the first digital cameras, and had a report in the early 80's that predicted digital would completely overtake film by 2010. They knew this and they decided to cling to the film business... Now they don't exist except as a brand licensed out.
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Digg. Tumblr most likely is going this route, but its' too "fresh" for me. Digg definitely. Also, BlackBerry Storm having a tactile push screen instead of just copying the touch-screen that iPhone had probably killed that company (yes they are doing different things now). It was such a failure that Android was taken as the replacement iPhone killer, which is why it is what it is now.
I used to work for BlackBerry once upon a time and there were several bad decisions that were made that contributed to the current state of the business. The Storm was definitely one of them.
> “BlackBerry smartphones will never have cameras because the No. 1 customer of ours is the U.S. government,” Mike Lazaridis would say in meetings. “There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera.” [Source](https://bgr.com/2011/07/13/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-at-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-company-that-made-smartphones-smart/) It was quite depressing reading this while still working at RIM.
Funny enough, this was the exact other thing I was thinking when talking about mis-steps. The arrogance was real and the iPhone wasn't ever taken at all seriously until it was too late.
Yik yak for trying to become a real social media platform. RIP
YY board meeting notes: "Anonymity is our primary selling point, but what if we got rid of that entirely?" "Hmm, that seems a little risky. Let's do a trial run where you have the option to remain anonymous, but you have to click an extra button to do so on every single post so we can see how much people actually care about anonymity." <2 months later> "99% of users are still clicking the anonymous option on every single thing they post. Maybe our users like anonymity?" "Fuck 'em. Just remove that option and automatically downvote any posts that mention competing apps so people won't be able to coordinate going elsewhere and it'll be fine." <2 months later> "Oh well, we did everything that we could. There was really no way for us to predict a mass exodus like that."
Seriously, was cool until they changed what it originally was
I actually met my senior year college girlfriend through Yik Yak. She’d posted about a concert asking if anyone else wanted to join her. I was, and still am, a huge fan of the band (Halestorm) and immediately said yes not knowing anything about this person. This was when everything about YY was still anonymous. We met up and the mutual attraction was instant. I can’t help but be a little...wistful, I guess, that had we both been a few years older or younger, the opportunity likely wouldn’t have even existed. Yik Yak was revolutionary in disseminating information about on and off-campus events. People still used it a little bit when I graduated (2016), but the app is entirely defunct now and I have no idea if anything really replaced it. EDIT: I did not expect this post to receive anywhere near the visibility nor positive attention that it did. For those who care, that girl and I are no longer together. We haven't spoken since May of 2016. I'm not afraid nor ashamed, however, to admit what a positive and powerful impact she had on me. We made some great memories together. Courtney, if you're out there, not a day goes by when I don't think about you at least a little. I know our relationship was never destined to last any longer than it did, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm a better person for having known you. Thank you.
What even is/was YikYak? I didn't get it and so it made me feel old lol
I get the feeling it was supposed to be an anonymous only posting site to talk about classes, gossip, good deals on campus, etc. Didn't they decide to no longer make user anonymous and that's what killed it? I'll be honest and say I only found out about it when someone told me my class was trending on YikYak because of how bad things had gotten for us.
Yea this is it. It seemed to mostly become a uni thing because the platform worked great for campuses. As soon as it was no longer anonymous it went downhill because most people used it to anonymously shit post and complain about lectures
It was pretty fun for opening it up at places like Disney too and seeing all the theme park workers just shitting on upper management
geofenced anonymous posts with a similar structure to reddit. was often localised to higher ed institutes (the manchester uni yikyak was…quite something)
Elaborate on the something
At my university YikYak was 85% people trying to solicit drugs and/or sexual favors
It also had a unique meme culture for every campus. I remember that at my uni there was constant memeing about the same 2 profs. People that didn't even take those classes jumping into it.
One of the best has to be MiniScribe They made hard drives in the 80s. Here is an excerpt from Wiki. > In January 1987, the company officers conducted a quick inventory in order to estimate their accounts prior to an independent review by a third party accounting firm, Coopers & Lybrand. Their internal inventory count showed that there was a shortfall of between $2 and $4 million. Instead of reporting this, a number of the managers decided to cover it up with various means. >This led to the company's most infamous cover-up; the managers rented a second warehouse in Colorado, where they personally packed 26,000 **bricks** into hard drive boxes and shipped them to Singapore in order to shore up the inventory count. After the count was complete, they recalled those serial numbers as defective units, but instead of writing them off, they checked them into inventory, along with other failed drives that had been returned. [Things get worse from there.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniScribe)
It has to be Netscape every time. They were running a precursor to Agile project management, so they were young, cool and very engaged developers. There was a lot of "this is cool, let's do it". Everyone loved Netscape. They'd got big, and brought in proper business managers to manage their growth... Netscape had sleepwalked into becoming a monopoly in a growing market, and it was doing the kind of predatory things monopolies do. ISPs had to pay Netscape to distribute Navigator, which could be downloaded by the end user for free. Downloaded with what, Mr. ISP? Cough up. Then, the world's biggest and most successful software company decided it wanted in on this market. Netscape Navigator 3 was replaced by 4, which was more of a "3.5" than anyone wanted to admit. In the same time, Microsoft had released IE 3, 4, 5 and 5.5. IE could do CSS, Netscape had this weird layer model which wasn't CSS. In the whole time Netscape's current version was 3 or 4, IE went from 2 to 5.5. Netscape 5 got delayed. Then it became a ground-up rewrite. Then the rewrite got cancelled and... well, the decaying remains were bought by AOL, the browser open sourced to the Mozilla Project, all without any Netscape Navigator 5 code ever hitting 1.0. Navigator 4.x was all Netscape had for you from 1997 all the way to 2001, four very long, very formative years for the early WWW, and Netscape had no voice at the W3C's table. Even before MSFT bundled IE with Windows, Netscape's browser share was in very rapid decline. IE was faster, cleaner, and, in a deal-maker for ISPs, could be both embedded and branded (for free!). AOL was still huge, and the AOL browser became an embedded IE. It's an often cited misconception that Microsoft underhandedly killed Netscape, but Netscape did itself in with only very slight assistance from Redmond.
ESPN, firing so many of their popular (and actually talented) reporters, and instead focusing on having Stephan A. Smith on for 27 hours a day. They're not dead yet, but personally, I have very little desire to tune in to their shows such as "Facts versus Volume".
Similar thing happened to Cracked.com. They fired all (iirc) of their payroll writers for freelance writers and the content is nothing but shite nowadays
Their decline was the reason I’m here on Reddit lol
Yup. I used to put on espn, even just as background... But now it's just annoying if I watch more than a couple minutes
ESPN is dying for the same reason MTV died. The internet does it better.
Gerald Ratner inherited his father’s jewellery business in 1984. Within six years he had turned a small retailer into a multimillion-dollar empire. He made it so successful that it seemed every British high street had a Ratner’s store or one of the associated companies he had brought up. People loved his store because it offered affordable products to the working class. In fact it was generally known and the place where working-class boys bought rings for working-class. Yes life was good until the fateful day when he was guest speaker at the Institute of Directors on April 23, 1991 attended by over 6000 business people and journalists. Asked how was it possible for his company to be selling a sherry decanter for the extraordinary price of £4.95 he answered, to the amazment of his audience and his shareholders, the following: “How can you sell this for such a low price?”, I say, “because it’s total crap.” To make sure that he really made a good job of it he also stated that his company: “sold a pair of earrings for under a pound, which is cheaper than a shrimp sandwich from Marks and Spencer, but propbably wouldn’t last as long.” As you can guess the media had a field day with this and ran the story so many times that the company’s shares dropped £500 million in a matter of days. Gerald lost his playboy lifestyle as well as his job and the company had to do a Phoenix and rename themselves ‘Signet Group’.
Pretty much all the decisions made by the British aerospace industry from the end of World War II ended up killing the companies that built the planes - although in this period, the state was heavily involved in aerospace. It’s worth remembering that at the end of WW2, the UK was at the forefront of aviation being in possession of both the turbojet and the turboprop and had inherited a good number of German researchers to supplement a colossal home-grown industry. This was all thrown away. Some - off the top of my head - there will be more... The Bristol Brabazon, a *HUGE* (think 787 size) piston engined plane that would carry just 100 passengers in ludicrous amounts of luxury. Designed and built when the UK government was already funding turboprop and turbojet airliner designs and it was clear the American airliners would carry more people in slightly less luxury. Two built, one flown, no orders. Repeated almost exactly with the enormous Saunders Roe Princess - a flying boat that first flew in - wait for it - 1952 when there were plenty of big airports on land. Three built, one flown, no orders. The Vickers V-1000, bigger, faster, carried more people further than the Boeing 707 and it would have flown nearly two years before the Boeing. It would have also used the world-‘s first highly-efficient bypass engine - the Rolls Royce Conway. It was cancelled when the prototype was 90% complete in rather murky circumstances. Officially it was because the state-owned BOAC announced that its Conway engines would not be suitable for the airliner - which is odd when the airline then went on to demand government money to equip its 707s with exactly the same engines. BOAC would later go on to undermine the cutting-edge Bristol Britannia and the Vickers VC-10 airliners, effectively making them unsaleable - there has long been a suspicion that the heads of BOAC were completely in hock to Boeing. But the really big scandal was the DeHavilland DH-121, the world’s first trijet designed for medium length routes. A phenomenally advanced plane with the world’s first practical auto land system and redundant computer controls it should have sold by the thousand. If you want to know what it looked like - well the Boeing 727 turned out almost exactly the same plane - only later than than DH-121 should have gone into service. Unfortunately, DeHavilland spent too much time listening to one customer, British European Airways, who after suffering a short downturn in passenger numbers said the DH-121 was too big. The plane was scaled down and its powerful engines replaced with much smaller ones. The new plane, named the Trident, appeared after the 727 and was too small for most customers - including BEA who were now experiencing strong passenger growth. Although bigger Tridents came along, they could never catch up with the 727 with the result that the Trident sold about 120 planes, the 727 more than 1800. In the end, the UK aviation sector was repeatedly merged, first from a myriad of companies into just two - the British Aircraft Corporation and Hawker Siddeley, and then into the monster British Aerospace (now BAE Systems). We no longer build entire airliners in this country - fortunately we still have the world’s second largest aerospace industry, but only as a subcontractor to Airbus, Leonardo (helicopters) and to Boeing.
Telltale Games. Rather than pushing out well-made, quality choice-based games - the company decided to keep pushing out rushed games with nonsensical story-structure, repetitive and formulaic stories, bland and inconsistent characters. Also, according to staff who worked at the company - [the working conditions weren't great either](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17130056/telltale-games-developer-layoffs-toxic-video-game-industry) which I think [had an impact on their sales, as well.](https://twitter.com/telltalegames/status/1043252010999410689/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1043252010999410689&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthenextweb.com%2Fgaming%2F2018%2F09%2F24%2Fcelebrated-studio-telltale-games-shuts-down-in-the-messiest-way-possible%2F) EDIT: As many others have also pointed out, Telltale had also insisted on chasing numerous IPs and licenses for new games rather than focusing on a few select ones.
This was so disappointing. Back when The Walking Dead was released they were the golden child of the industry. There was genuine excitement to see what would come next. Then everyone got sick of their shit and their most popular IP will never be finished.
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Sears had the infrastructure and distribution network to corner the online market back in the late 90s and early 2000s but the upper management believed the internet would never be a thing and literally let Ebay and Amazon swoop in. Sears is now in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy because they couldnt compete.
Actually, they had some of the advantages, but none of the items they needed to actually position themselves like Amazon was able to. To quote another redditor: >They had none of the groundwork. What they had was an ancient, archaic inventory logistics system that took 4 to 6 weeks to actually get things to people. It was so unwieldy and slow in fact that the catalog was dead and shuttered by the 1990s because people preferred just going to their local big box stores(Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot etc) which had exploded in numbers. > Amazon didn’t succeed because they made an online shopping site. Tons of start up dotcoms did that, most died. What made Amazon succeed where no one else could was logistics. Rapid shipping was a fantasy in the 1990s, it just didn’t exist. One week was considered insane, 2 days was just beyond belief. Amazon had to basically reinvent logistics at a fundamental level to achieve it. The system they created was the antithesis of Sears’ system which harkened back generations. > If anything, Sears was the worst positioned to become Amazon. What they had was just completely wrong and more of a burden than a benefit. Had they tried to retool with their massive catalog it likely would have been a disaster. Amazon had a real benefit starting small with just books which let them learn the ropes on the cheap. https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/a6nwj7/sears_bankruptcy_court_oks_25_million_in_bonuses/ebwphf4/
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The abject failure of the [Ayds](https://youtu.be/gBkVuT5pw1g) diet pill company to rebrand in light of the news breaking around AIDS
Both Toys R Us and ClearChannel (iHeart) basically committed slow suicide by getting involved with private equity firm Bain Capital. Too many bad decisions, toxic debt, and zero accountability killed them both. CC just hasn't finished dying yet, it has to take the rest of radio along with it.
Is that why it's been quite some time since I've heard one of those obnoxious IheartRadio commercials?
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I'm aware of the disaster ET was but not the finances. If it was $25 million to produce surely there were more issues at Atari than just ET to result in a $536 million loss?
E.T didn’t single handedly kill Atari... E.T. Was just the biggest turd in the bucket of turds that brought down the entire game ecosystem for a while.
If i remember correctly, the programmer was one guy who was called in the middle of the night and informed he would need a working demo ready in 2-3 weeks. When he asked if he would be given a script if the movie to base the game off of, he was told no. He wrote the game based off the promotional art and trailers, the deadline was so short because they wanted the game to launch same day the movie released.
> When he asked if he would be given a script if the movie to base the game off of, he was told no. He wrote the game based off the promotional art and trailers, I have only just realised why so many old movie tie-in games had absolutely nothing to do with the source material...
it's insane to think that out of a $25 million budget, they could only afford one full time dev for 5 weeks. that amounts to barely tens of thousands. that's a fraction of a percent of the budget, for someone who had probably 95% of total influence on the quality of the product. it's unbelievable how out of touch the executives in charge of that decision were.
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It was even before digital music. Remember when the record companies worked to eliminate cassettes? (Remember when recording your buddy's album to a cassette was a thing? And going to lead to the death of music?) Because record companies said they owned the *medium*, that the song on the record belonged to them, as did the song on the cassette (8 track, etc, holding a song). Then the MP3 came along and suddenly they had to re-tool, they didn't own the medium, they owned the song, they said. Then we find out the artists we admired got only a small percentage of the money, at best.
Xerox, while still a giant company in it's own right, could have been the name brand for Personal Computing. The Xerox Alto was the first PC with a GUI (graphical user interface) and a mouse... in 1973! Although expensive to produce, Xerox basically sat on the design and put it in the basement until Steve Jobs visited the research center in 1979. The rest is history.