As a kid in the 60’s and 70’s I sold baseball cards and comic books at garage sales for chump change that decades later would be worth literally tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
D’oh!!!
AT&T buying NCR in the 1990s.
In 1995, Edgar Bronfman Jr (member of the family that owned Seagram and CEO) wanted to get into the movie business. So he sold the company’s roughly one-quarter ownership of DuPont so he could buy MCA (which owned Universal Pictures). They had owned the DuPont shares since the 1980s and the DuPont shares were responsible for the majority of Seagram’s earnings.
As a postdoc at Eli Lilly in the 1990s I heard the tale of a great erectile dysfunction drug that also improved libido in women. Great potential for a number of sensitive conditions. But the lawyers were concerned about liability. What if someone taking the drug committed a rape? The company could be liable. So they killed it.
A few years later Viagra came along and became an instant blockbuster. Lilly execs started kicking themselves and each other and the lawyers.
I don’t want to get all conspiratory, but I have heard the theory that New Coke was bad on purpose. The theory goes that Coke needed to find a way to replace the old Coke formula with something cheaper without people noticing the change. Thus, New Coke was made. Once the taste of the original Coke was out of people’s mouths for a bit, New Coke was discontinued and the “original” Coke was put back on the shelf. With New Coke in-between the change, people had nothing to compare the slightly different flavor to and would assume that the new formula was the same as the pre-New Coke one was.
Amazon?
Imo, you shouldn’t feel too bad. You dodged a bullet there in some regards. Would you have really wanted to work for a company that has done so much evil?
Snopes has a very long writeup about New Coke. You should read it.
Those were good! So were their cheese danishes.
Knowing a number of people who were there in ‘95, had I joined up, I could be crying myself to sleep these days on a giant mountain of money.
Haha! Yes, my wife knows a number of people with “two digit employee ids” at a company that was pre-IPO in the mid 1990s and is bankrupt and defunct now, but they will still be driving McLarens and living in oceanfront mansions for the rest of their lives.
Early Amazonians must be 100X times that.
I’m not enough of an aviation buff to get the details right, but the decision by Boeing to bury and downplay issues related to the 737 Max led to the subsequent 20-month grounding of the fleet. It cost the company $20 billion in direct costs from government fees and legal settlements and much more than that in indirect cost such as cancelled orders and reputational damage.
Hey man, don’t feel too bad about it. You win some, you lose some. I could have invested in Gamestop or Bitcoin. (Heck, everyone here could have invested in Bitcoin.) There was no way you could have known that Amazon happened to be “the one.”
Microsoft is littered with investments they made early but then cut too early. And will multi-billion dollar investments that were basically zero within a year or two.
Worst business decision, sports division:
In 1976, the NBA merged with the ABA. The ABA had six teams at that time, but two of them were in markets the NBA thought was too small. The Kentucky Colonels owners took $3.3 million in compensation for folding their franchise. The Spirits of St. Louis, however, struck a MUCH better deal, asking for 1/7 of all TV income from the four teams that did join the NBA. In perpetuity.
By 2014, the owners (well, their heirs at this point) had earned about $285 million from this deal. At that point they agreed to give up their rights for a lump sum of $500 million.
Nikola Tesla, genius designer of the AC electric system (i.e. that thing you plug everything into every day) made a rather bad business decision when he, in good (but stupid) faith, tore up the royalties contract between he and George Westinghouse, walking away from millions of dollars in royalties already owed and billions of dollars that would have accrued in the future. It would have made him one of the wealthiest people in the world.
Instead, he died penniless and alone in a NYC hotel.
Ever heard of an entire sports league that folded because somebody lost a match?
The MMA company EliteXC put all their eggs in one basket when they got the “Hotter than Hot” MMA Fighter Kimbo Slice who was an internet meme machine in the mid -00s. His flashy fights for the promotion noticed and they got all sorts of major TV deals off of it. However for one of his huge and well-hyped fights Kimbos original opponent got injured and a late replacement fighter was gotten. In a shocking upset, Kimbo lost early in the fight to this guy who hadn’t had the proper time to train anyway. Not only that, it turned out EliteXC executives had told the replacement fighter to try to artificially extend the match (either as a way to draw ratings or because they thought extending the match would give Kimbo a better chance of winning) and when this admission came out EliteXC came under serious investigation from both state and national athletic leagues about possible match fixing, which scared away most of their sponsors and less than a month after Kimbo Slices loss EliteXC completely folded.
Nickelodeon passing on Adventure Time, which would become a huge hit for Cartoon Network, and one of the best and most influential cartoons of the 2010s.
Nickelodeon also passed on Ed Edd n Eddy, which also became a hit on Cartoon Network.
And just in case you thought Nickelodeon’s decision making regarding which shows to pick up couldn’t get any worse, they passed on Phineas and Ferb, which became one of Disney Channel’s biggest hits.
Now, you can say that AT, EEnE, and P&F wouldn’t have been the same show or wouldn’t have been as successful on Nickelodeon, but that doesn’t change the fact that Nickelodeon passed on those shows, and they became HUGE hits for their competitors. It also doesn’t change the fact that Nickelodeon passed on those shows, and instead picked up OBJECTIVELY terrible shows like Fanboy and Chum-Chum, Breadwinners, and Planet Sheen.
There are tons of examples in Hollywood of cable and broadcast channels that turned down shows that turned out to be big for another network. Matthew Weiner was a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos, which was broadcast on HBO, so when he had an idea for a new show, he took it to them first. They turned it down and eventually it ended up at AMC, which previously had not produced an original drama series. So AMC rather than HBO got all of the attention and praise and Emmys for Mad Men.
A well-known seed company (Burpee) made a huge mistake in 2000 when it bought an iconic Washington state nursery and display gardens, Heronswood, for $4.5 million.
Apparently Burpee thought it could burnish its reputation and attempts at selling plants by taking over Heronswood and even making it a national operation. This would’ve been like McDonald’s buying a famous Michelin-starred restaurant and planning to franchise it.
Predictably, Burpee couldn’t even keep the original Heronswood afloat despite hiring the former owners as managers. Complaints from gardeners flooded in about radical paring down of the nursery’s offerings and poor quality. After a few years Burpee tried to sell the place back to the original owners for half what they were paid for it (they refused). In 2006 the property went on the block for an asking price of $11 million. No takers. Later, Burpee tried to sell it for $1.7 million to a horticultural conservancy, but that deal fell through. Ultimately it went at auction to a native American tribe which now operates it as a botanical garden and event center.
Burpee wound up with a black eye as far as gardeners were concerned, much like other once-respected seed houses (looking at you, Park’s and Jung) that branched out into selling plants but did a lousy job at it.