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.
Good point re Google.
Time Warner AOL is also up there.
But Microsoft did or almost did run Netscape out of town.
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.