The Pontiac Aztek killed a car company.
Posted on 10/17/2012 8:29:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Pontiac Aztek killed a car company.
Mine may not compare in magnitude to these, but it’s still pretty large.
I know of a company - located in my neck of the woods - that borrowed $85 mil from Wall Street to expand its factory with three new state-of-the-art production lines in the mid-1990s. This factory manufactured a critical element used in every color CRT manufactured anywhere, and they were one of two or three dominant producers of this component world-wide.
Only problem was this: just as they got additional manufacturing capacity on-line, the entire CRT market collapsed due to the very rapid emergence of flat-panel display technology as a consumer product.
Now the factory, which employed hundreds of workers in the small town of which it was a part, is closed and empty.
IBM licensing software from Microsoft rather than developing their own.
Pretty short sighted. I can’t imagine the worst business decisions of all time happened in the USA in the last 30 years. What about the Italian crossbow manufacturers when they were getting stomped by the English Longbow? Japanese real estate investments? Spanish Armada? Scribes after the invention of the printing press?
I remember the day at NUMMI where they posted the new vehicle that GM would build there. It was the Pontiac Vibe. The photo shown on our screen was in the same yellow and angle as below. Take about negative halo affect. The groans in the audience told everyone all they needed to know about how well that vehicle was going to sell.
I still rank AOL-Time Warner merger as the biggest failure and corporate idiocy of all time.
American Motors does not belong on this list. The continuing march toward fewer and fewer mega car companies meant that makes like Studebaker and AMC were not going to survive the process at some point. The article itself points out no one decision that hurt the company. Instead, the thing to consider is how long AMC survived with the meager resources at its disposal to develop, tool, and market new cars.
I cant believe HP is not on this list.
IBM licensing software from Microsoft rather than developing their own.
Microsoft’s failure to see search as an exploitable technology, opening the door for Google, deserves honorable mention too.
I agree with the Time Warner- AOL merger.. wow what a mistake.
saw a movie called DOT.COM a few years back, about a company that was trying to get off the ground during the dot.com bubble in the 90s... they lost their shirt, got greedy...
a very interesting movie, by the way.
Good point re Google.
Time Warner AOL is also up there.
“New Coke”
I’ll say no more.
I remember hearing somewhere that Coca-Cola once had the chance to buy the Pepsi Company. If that is true that was a pretty bad decision although it hasn’t hurt the Coke people very much.....
Not exactly a company killer. IBM is doing quite well.
I agree and the conventional wisdom is that indeed it is the biggest failure and corporate idiocy of all time.
I vote for Jimmy Carter’s LET’S TURN DOWN THE THERMOSTAT AND PUT ON A SWEATER idea. I know that’s government, but his whole Democrat/liberal philosophy screwed up a lot of businesses.
I also vote for the WE’RE DETROIT AND NOBODY IS GOING TO WANT THOSE JAPANESE CARS, ANYWAY thinking.
They forgot Atari. (There’s MANY good reasons they went out of business so fast!)
Bombardier buying Adtranz from Daimler was amazingly stupid. The stock went from the 30s to the $3 to $4 dollar range. Besides a minnow swallowing a rancid whale, they never had a clue, and apparently till don’t, about how disfunctional Adtranz was and is.
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