The Pontiac Aztek killed a car company.
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 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.
“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.....
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.
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).
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.
Companies come, companies go, that’s Capitalism.
I would add Xerox deciding not to market the PARC computer system because they were a “reproduction machine company. Would have hit the market years before Apple and Windows with an icon based, WYSIWYG, point and click system and with a laser printer.
Xerox tried to market office printers but few bought them. They remain as a maker of large-frame reprographic gear, reprographic software and as a patent repository. I cannot remember the last time I used a Xerox made walk-up copier.