
What is the biggest mistake that a big company has made? - sidcool
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-biggest-mistake-that-a-big-company-has-made?share=1
======
bbctol
The Scottish Darien Company attempted to establish a colony in Panama in the
late 1600s, to compete with England. Backed by almost half the money in
Scotland, they completely failed at establishing a colony, lied about it, got
more money and settlers who then also utterly failed at establishing a colony,
almost started a war with Spain, bankrupted Scotland, and set the stage for
Scotland to be absorbed into the United Kingdom in 1706.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme)

~~~
ncd
If anyone else is interested in learning more about this, I just finished a
fantastic book that covers it in some detail.

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-
World/dp/06...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Scots-Invented-Modern-
World/dp/0609809997)

------
pavlov
As recently as 2009, Nokia was estimated by Interbrand to be one of the top 5
global brands [1]. Interbrand's guesstimate at the monetary value rated
"Nokia" as being worth over two times as much as "Apple".

Just four years later, in 2013, Nokia had lost 80% of its value and Apple's
brand was estimated to be worth about 13 times more.

Such a tremendous collapse for a global brand seems unprecedented. (And no, it
wasn't Elop's fault because the landslide started before him.)

[1] [http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-
brands/previou...](http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-
brands/previous-years/2009/)

~~~
tomhoward
I'd been a very happy and loyal Nokia cellphone user for about 10 years up to
2008.

When the beautiful-looking N96[1] was announced early that year, I excitedly
signed up to be notified of availability, and waited expectantly for a call or
email.

I never heard anything.

A few months later, the iPhone hit the market in Australia. I bought one
shortly after, and have used only iPhones ever since.

Could they have done anything to rival the iPhone? Who knows, but I feel that
if only they'd been the kind of company that followed up with loyal customers
who'd expressed strong interest in buying their new release, they might have
had a better chance at building a competitive product.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N96](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N96)

~~~
sofaofthedamned
Anybody could see that Nokia were going under as soon as the first Android and
Apple handsets came out.

I'd been a Windows Mobile enthusiast for years - even though they had
unaccelerated display drivers and were for all intents and purposes crap they
had proper calendars, task lists etc.

For simple phone I loved Nokias, and owned at least 9 of them. Rugged,
reliable, they were brilliant. But at the time the Windows Mobile stuff were
something nebulous called 'smartphones', whereas the Nokia ones were 'phones'.
These things were very distinct and different at the time. A Nokia was a great
phone, it lasted 6 days on battery and you could type whilst driving (yeah)
from muscle memory.

The iPhone came and blew this up. It was a smartphone, it updated the screen
at 60fps, it was done properly, it synced your calendar etc and like the Nokia
it was a fucking good phone. Windows Mobile was shit for too long and paid the
price, as was Nokia - but for very different reasons.

Nowadays I can't stand Apple and their products, but you have to respect how
they sorted the crap out of the smartphone and phone markets and gave us a
whole new market that has pretty much changed the world.

------
rando444
My vote goes to Bayer for knowingly and willingly selling H.I.V tainted
medicine in the 1980s just to get rid of their inventory, not caring about the
hundreds or thousands of people they infected.

Possibly sadder is that the FDA actively helped Bayer to try and cover the
whole thing up.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/business/2-paths-of-
bayer-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/business/2-paths-of-bayer-drug-
in-80-s-riskier-one-steered-overseas.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
asciihacker
The HIV/AIDS hypothesis is a media hoax initiated by Felix Gallo, a convicted
cancer fraudster.

~~~
rando444
One would think that your unsubstantiated claim would have come up during the
trial where Bayer was forced to pay half a billion dollars to their victims.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood_products)

I believe you are probably making a reference to something completely
unrelated.

------
npongratz
>I feel that large companies back in the 90's didn't care about any of their
workers all they cared about was making money .

I'd suggest that companies of the 1990s had nothing on 1930s-1940s IBM: IBM
allied itself with the Third Reich to develop technology (punch card
databases) as a key facilitator of the mass identification, enslavement and
genocide of millions of people. They also backed another horse in that
gruesome episode, creating the punch card database key to running FDR's
Japanese internment camps in the western United States.

[http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/](http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II)

~~~
hinkley
Companies today don't care about their workers either, with the possible
exception of B corps, which there aren't enough of (yet!) to be statistically
relevant.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
The last thing I want a company to do for me is care about me. I see what they
do to things they have to care about.

Benign neglect, please.

~~~
hinkley
See also, "we're from the government and we're here to help"?

------
hinkley
How about Nestle killing babies?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott)

Selling baby formula in the third world. What could go wrong.

Edit to add: this was a case study in Business 101 at my school.

------
apathy
This one is easy: Decca recording turning down the Beatles.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles%27_Decca_auditio...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles%27_Decca_audition)

"We don't like their sound, and guitar groups are on the way out."

Sort of like Adidas turning down Michael Jordan for not being tall enough,
except that Adidas is still in business.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Isn't this common in publishing and in music? Every big hit seems to have been
turned down several times. A lot of publishing houses aren't the arbiters of
taste but instead have goals and metrics for certain types of work and only
shop for them. You may have a great historical novel on your hands, but if the
agents are only looking at sci-fi and YA stuff, then you might get turned down
until you find a publisher willing to take a chance on something the market
isn't necessarily asking for.

Also guitar groups were on their way for a while. The charts in the early
1960s were pop bands like the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, Andy Williams, The
Sensations, Ray Charles, etc. Obviously, rock became a powerful force by the
mid 1960s but that was difficult to predict. I don't think anyone saw the
British Invasion, Dylan, psychedelic rock, and the hippie counter-culture
coming.

~~~
apathy
Right, but when your job is to pick winners, this is a problem. Netflix has
been doing a spectacular job of this lately, essentially turning themselves
into a must-have "channel". HBO, too, by going _a la carte_.

Contrast with Blockbuster's decision not to buy Netflix. It may have been
understandable, and hindsight is 20:20 (I left Google because I couldn't
figure out how they'd ever make any money), but these are nonetheless big
mistakes.

------
sergiotapia
I always remember the company who lost all it's assets in one day due to a
deployment bug to one of their servers. They were a high frequency trading
company, so seconds/minutes to them were obscenely expensive.

I feel a cold pit in my stomach putting myself in the shoes of the developer
that did the `cap deploy` that day. Yikes!

~~~
0x0
You're probably thinking of this?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group)

~~~
sergiotapia
That's the one. God damn, imagine wiping out your entire company. Jesus
Christ.

"Hey guys let's do a DB rollback, something went wrong."

------
msravi
1\. Yahoo not buying Google?

2\. Yahoo rejecting the Microsoft offer?

Glad (1) didn't happen though. Pretty sure they'd have screwed it all up for
everyone.

~~~
s3r3nity
I was just going to bring this up - $45 BILLION just sounds wild.

Funny scenario: If Microsoft bought Yahoo, that would've ALSO been on this
list for consideration as the biggest mistake for a big company.

------
drzaiusapelord
I'm a little surprised to see no mention of Osbourne computers. The name lives
on with the Osbourne Effect:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation#T...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation#The_Osborne_Effect)

This is why, even today, big companies don't announce when a new product will
be available until the last minute as to not cannibalize sales from the
current production run.

~~~
hga
Except Osborne admitted in a _Wall Street Journal_ article that he made up
that excuse for their failure. It's been so long I can't remember the details
of the real reason, but it was the general sort of thing that companies like
that screwed up.

------
ars
I doubt any company comes close to Sears.

They had the Sears catalog, and even more important an entire distribution
network all over the US. They shut it down just before the internet became
big.

They also had the ISP Prodigy and a credit card company.

With just a slight change they could have been larger than Google and Amazon
combined.

Instead.......

~~~
Lordarminius
But was Sears truly a mistake?

Companies have lifespans like humans and cannot continue forever. I would
argue that Sears had gotten big and mature enough that its failure was a
matter of time. At that level of growth and capitalization it would probably
be impossible for any CEO to convince a board and shareholders to change a
proven strategy for a new fad, especially when there is no financial pressure
to do so.

~~~
AstralStorm
They could have at least tried.

------
david-given
One which I haven't seen mentioned for a while is the tale of Ratners
Jewellers, which in about 1992 had a massive presence in the UK and the US.
Then the CEO made a speech where he said:

> We also 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."

Cue half a billion pounds in losses... 1992 pounds.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner)

------
reitanqild
Ironically Quoras own: let's publish anything a logged in user even thinks
about clicking for everyone to see should be somewhere on that list shouldn't
it?

Googles Google+ launch also comes to mind.

~~~
sevensor
Quora does that? Where?

~~~
reitanqild
Did at least. From wikipedia:

"""Privacy concerns

In August 2012, blogger Ivan Kirigin pointed out that it was possible for
acquaintances and followers to see his activity including which questions he
had looked at.[46] In response, Quora stopped showing question views in feeds
later that month. By default, Quora exposes its users' profiles, including
their real names, to search engines."""

I cannot remember the details anymore but it is one of a few times when the
privacy implications of something has scared me. It goes something like this:

I'm about to hire Bob, I just want to do a quick background check to see that
there isn't anything I have missed. Bob has an account on Quora. Quora ranks
high on google. I search for Bob on google and find his account. I click in to
view it and can see that he has been reading a lot about depression lately. I
decide not to hire Bob, just to be safe.

Edit: They might have fixed it now, I don't care. The combination of full name
policy and literally telling the world anything I clicked on + the way they
completely didn't care back then, IIRC even after reports started to pile up,
convinced me to delete my account and then send a message asking them to
confirm that my account was completely and permanently removed from the
system.

------
batbomb
Umm, Bhopal?

Seriously I can't believe it's not even mentioned.

~~~
ars
> Seriously I can't believe it's not even mentioned.

Wasn't that an accident rather than a deliberate mistake?

I know their behavior in aftermath was bad, but the actual incident was an
accident, so I don't think it's part of this list.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Accidents can be caused by mistakes, no?

~~~
ars
I said deliberate mistake.

As in they said "This is the best way", later it turns out to have been a
mistake.

Negligence or neglect are not the same thing (they are bad, but they are not
educational, so they are not part of this list).

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Either way, their reaction afterwards was pretty bad.

------
thrusong
Not huge, but a pretty big mistake would be Target's venture to, and
disastrous failure in, Canada.

Almost everything that could go wrong did, and the whole story involves a lot
of arrogance and inexperience.

It will definitely be a business school case study, at least here.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
It is one. I've heard oral history from Larry Nichols of Devon Energy talking
about how examples like that were used by Devon to avoid disaster in
acquisitions they'd made in Canada. He's on the Tulsa University Oral History
"Voices of Oklahoma" website.

I was in a a startup acquired by a Canadian company and we had the converse
problem - the technology was rejected like an organ transplant by the
engineering staff. Bizarre, because the whole idea was to generate revenue to
support their other development efforts. Didn't matter - not invented here.

------
cookscar
Bank of America's decision to buy Countrywide during the financial crisis.
BofA inherited some $50 billion of legal liability:
[http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/banking/artic...](http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/banking/article9151889.html)

------
Donzo
Blockbuster passing on the Netflix purchase...

Yahoo! passing on Google...

~~~
apathy
Alright, these are existential mistakes up there with Decca.

I still chuckle when I think about Yahoo's total market cap being less than
the value of their share in Alibaba. The market determined that Yahoo! had
negative worth. Ouch!

~~~
bryanlarsen
AFAICT, that delta was because there was high probability that Yahoo would
have to pay tax on the profits if it tried to sell Alibaba, not because the
market determined that Yahoo! had negative worth.

~~~
apathy
Ooh, I did not realize that! Thanks for the clarification.

------
anexprogrammer
Commodore, well Irving Gould, making Medhi Ali CEO. Or even employing the guy
at all.

IBM selling Thinkpads to Lenovo.

Gerald Ratner, CEO of the Ratner Group, becoming famous for the "Ratner
Effect" which destroyed the group and his career. They had 1,000+ stores and
multiple brands in UK and US.

He gave a speech to the IoD London in 91 that included "How can you sell this
for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap."

Obvious and true, but it took £500m off the group share price overnight and a
year later, due to a consumer boycott, they were in the process of closing
300+ stores. He was fired by the chairman he recruited in late 92, and the
remnants of the group changed name to start rebuilding.

~~~
creshal
> IBM selling Thinkpads to Lenovo.

As much as I dislike the direction Lenovo took with the brand… IBM shed a
branch that was turning a massive loss because of IBM's management, and now
Lenovo is the second-largest laptop manufacturer in the world and turning
massive profits with the brand and the massive amount of spin-off consumer
products. I can't imagine IBM being able to do either themselves.

~~~
AstralStorm
So it is a double fail for IBM, not just bad decision, but also a badly
managed company?

~~~
creshal
Why? It was the consumerization of Thinkpads that made them turn a profit, and
IBM not wanting to become a consumer brand isn't necessarily bad management.
From a financial point of view, it made sense for IBM to get cash from selling
it to Lenovo.

------
runarb
IG Farben entanglement with the Nazi regime. They ended up being part of
countless deaths and the company was declared by the Allies to be too morally
corrupt to be allowed to exist and broken up after the war. Their successor
companies AGFA, BASF, Bayer and Sanofi are all still big today, so IG Farben
could have been a massive conglomerates if they have acted differently.

This was also not just a business failure where one lost money. IG Farben
participated directly on some of the worst crimes in human history.

More:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben)

------
digestives
A rather famous example in the UK, is of Gerald Ratner, a company chairman
attacking his own product. [1]

[1] - [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1573380/Doing-a-
Ratne...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1573380/Doing-a-Ratner-and-
other-famous-gaffes.html)

------
cosmins
Making people to sign on quora to read the answers.

------
esja
Barings Bank gave Nick Leeson responsibility for a) trading, and b) settling
his trades. $1.3 billion lost and the world's second oldest merchant bank
destroyed.

------
ArkyBeagle
I'd say Fordlandia had to be one big ole mistake.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia)

------
MarkMc
Time Warner's decision to merge with AOL.

------
pavel_lishin
No mention of Sears?

