Posted on 10/17/2012 8:29:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
AMC started to rebound with the 1984 Jeep Cherokee and the 1986 YJ/Wrangler. The Grand Wagoneer, while niche, was a steady performer and was the forerunner of the 4-door Blazer (aka Tahoe) and Bronco (aka Expedition) lines.
The Eagle brand had hits and misses. The Talon (Mitsubishi Eclipse rebranded) was popular, the sedans not so much. The older AMC Concord and Eagle 4WD sedans and wagons were the predessors to crossover vehicles like the Subaru Outback and Volvo Cross Country amongst others. So in that regard AMC was really 15-20 years ahead of it’s time.
When I worked for AT&T in the 1990’s we had a company meeting on the front lawn where the plant manager talked about all of the different challenges we faced from other, mostly foreign, manufacturers. I brought up the point that Microsoft had just come up with a product that let you make calls without using the phone company and asked if they were doing anything to address this. He pooh-poohed it as a gimmick that would never go anywhere because they owned the phone lines the Internet ran on. That plant, which employed over 7000 people at the time, is now closed.
Hmm. Electron gun? Shadow mask? Deflection coils? Degausser coil?
I worked for a company, and the owner was stealing his own money... ya gotta think about that for a minute, but he stole from himself..
needless to say he went out of business..
Shadow mask. Although they called it an "aperture mask."
But Microsoft did or almost did run Netscape out of town.
The New Coke is often derided as a massive screw up, in fact, it was an incredible and resounding success.
At the time Coke was a stagnant product, the Pepsi Challenge was stomping it hard in TV ads and was the hip up and comer against Coke which was viewed as an ancient brand with no real loyalty.
The second they announced it the backlash was huge. The nightly newscasts picked it up, it was the front page of every newspaper in the country, feature stories in every magazine known to man. All in support of a product that was seemingly off the radar in most people’s mind.
The quick backtrack on the concept made people think about Coke and not take it for granted. Shortly after that Coke Classic stomped Pepsis growth trend cold like a German winter offensive in Russia.
Now when you look at where the two companies are its pointless to argue. Coke won and won big, or is winning big.
The New Coke in a military sense was a military feint followed by a knockout blow from the opposite flank.
Western Union turned down the telephone.
Which screwed up the worst? Kodak or Poloroid? Poloroid actually developed a very early digital camera. Management didn’t see the potential (or threat).
A behemoth company like IBM about-facing to dominate a new market, and such a monstrously huge market as personal computers, was a miracle. Its sheer unlikeliness trumps their accidental charity in giving Bill Gates his own mint.
Not that the continued success of Microsoft was made inevitable by its original foothold. That was something else altogether; they easily could have found themselves on the ash heap with countless other pan flashes.
The Spanish Armada was not a business investment. It wasn’t even that bad a military investment; England git lucky with the weather.
DEC made good hardware, and in its day VMS was da bomb. There are still folks out there playing with implementations of OpenVMS. I was sorry to see DEC basically run into the ground when they couldn't keep up with what was happening in the workstation and minicomputer arenas.
They did eventually buy into Unix, but like HP at the time, they appeared to have more loyalty to their own OS, (VMS for DEC, and MPE for HP), and just couldn't keep up with how fast processors were getting on the low end which would make inroads into the higher-power and much higher margin workstations and minis. MPE-V was the first OS that I really became familiar with, and I still like some of the conventions they used that fell by the wayside i.e., jobs could be written almost as if you were sitting right at a terminal running them interactively. Even today some of this functionality is missing in Unix unless you're using Expect-based scripting tools. HP was basically killed by Carly Fiona for many reasons, among which, she didn't understand the benefit to HP of their scientific instruments products or some of the other things the company did that helped them maintain a competitive technological edge. > Years on Fortune 500: 25 > Peak Fortune 500 rank: 27 (1990, 1993) > Peak revenue: $14.6 billion (1996) > Current status: Bought out The fortunes of Digital Equipment Corp., maker of commercial electronics known as minicomputers, began to decline in the 1990s. DEC was successful because its products were priced below mainframes, which were made primarily by International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM). DEC controlled the minicomputer market from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s but failed to enter the workstation and personal computer markets quickly. When DEC finally decided to get into PCs, it tried to use its own operating platform, VMS, without success. Meanwhile, companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and Sun Microsystems were able to gain market share in workstations by using UNIX operating system, which allowed for many more software applications than VMS. Meanwhile, computers from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, which were based on the Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) blueprint and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) OS, began to dominate the PC market in the late 1980s. Between 1991 and 1996, DEC lost money every year except for one, including more than $2 billion in 1992 and 1994. After joining the Fortune 500 in 1974, the company peaked in 1993 at 27th. In just six years, it fell to 118th place before Compaq bought it out in 1998.
Buckbee-Mears, right?
You can’t really blame companies for not seeing the future. Or you can, but it wouldn’t put them in the pantheon of bad decisions. This is a stupid article, but at least it only blames them for opting out of the obvious. Although, by the time some of these things became obvious maybe it was too late. You can’t turn the Titanic on a dime.
Anyway, had Microsoft jumped into the search engine game earlier maybe it would’ve ended up as Yahoo. We tend to forget that vision isn’t everything. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not the only nerds in the 70s to anticipate the PC revolution. Several others made fortunes off it. It’s just that for whatever reason their bets paid off more. We don’t like to admit how much of it is luck, in addition to a billion other factors.
Not many people know this, but Most of Windows NT’s lead developers, including VMS’s chief architect, Dave Cutler, came from Digital, and their background heavily influenced Windows NT’s development.
It is popularly believed that Dave Cutler intended the initialism “WNT” as a pun on VMS, incrementing each letter by one.
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