NBC made a pretty big mistake when it allowed Conan O’Brien to take over The Tonight Show without consulting Jay Leno first.
The book The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy by Bill Carter chronicles the whole mess.
Carter’s early book The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, & the Network Battle for the Night chronicles the backstage mess when Johnny Carson left and Jay Leno took over. NBC’s mismanagement there led David Letterman leaving NBC for CBS to compete in the same time slot of The Tonight Show.
Of course, this was also a huge mistake. At the time the thought was that the money was in the hardware, and software was not that important. Of course, the PC was successful because the hardware became a commodity, and it turns out software really resists commodification.
Kodak’s business was largely selling film and developing chemicals but in digital photography, people aren’t buying that but are buying digital cameras, and Kodak wasn’t really in the camera business.
And along the same lines as Baldwin’s failure to see that diesel was the future of railroading, Lockheed kind of missed the boat on commercial jets. In the 1950s, Lockheed bet that most airlines would be more conservative, and replace the majority of their piston powered airliners with turboprops. So while Boeing and Douglas were developing their first jets, they invested their resources in developing a large turboprop. Lockheed didn’t have a commercial jet on the market until the 1970s, the L-1011, which only saw mediocre sales, and by 1984 Lockheed was out of the commercial aircraft business.
Although some might argue that leaving the commercial aviation sector was a good decision, as Lockheed is doing quite well focusing solely on the defense business.
Surprised nobody has said “The Fingerpoke of Doom” yet. That, combined with revealing that Mankind would win the WWF Championship (seemingly not realizing how over Mankind was), was the beginning of the end for WCW.
The execs at Decca records after they heard the Beatles audition in 1962 rejected them and signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead. They could have made hundreds, no, maybe even thousands of dollars had they chosen otherwise.
The lesson here is that if your current business is going to be crippled, you’re better off doing it to yourself rather than letting somebody else do it to you.
You could amply stock this thread just by listing merger and acquisition failures.
I have trouble thinking of any small specialty business with an elite reputation that survived acquisition by a much larger entity. Either what made the small business special and successful is squashed under the giant thumb of Big Corporate rules and procedures, or quality declines, or both.
“My God, that gravy is horrible! They buy tap water for 15–20 cents a thousand gallons and then they mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste … And another thing. That new crispy recipe is nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.”
As for “Selling live plants is a natural complement to selling seeds”: you’d think so, but I’m unaware of any seed company that’s done a good job of it. The litany of complaints on ratings sites like Garden Watchdog suggests that such companies farm out plant production to dodgy wholesalers and then fail to establish meaningful quality control. I’d sooner get plants at a home improvement store than risk buying those firms’ mail order offerings.
Sometimes the core business changes and brings great success. Hasbro got their start in textiles, moved on to pencils and school supplies, and then primarily toys in the early 1940s. Wrigley started out with baking powder, moved on to soap, and switched to gum.
Similarly, something like a dozen publishing houses passed on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when submitted by an unknown author living on the dole.
Sure; there are quite a few companies that shifted focus. Nokia started as a paper company and then got into electricity generation. Nintendo started by making playing cards. The Indian IT outsourcer Wipro started as a vegetable oil company (Wipro = “Western India Vegetable Products Limited”).
Kodak wasn’t a major name in the 35 mm camera business, but it sold its Retina brand from 1934-1956.
And it sold tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of Brownie, Instamatic, Disk, and other special format cameras. And who knows how many slide and film projectors.
Kodak’s DNA was in cameras and making film and accessories for them. It couldn’t see a world without the pairing.
I can excuse Kodak for going with its greatness. The worse business decision was made by the University of Rochester. Because they owned huge numbers of the local stocks Kodak and Xerox, this relatively small college had an endowment that ranked in the top ten. Then they turned the management of it to its business school, geniuses of the Chicago-school style. They held on to those stocks until the bitter end. Today the endowment is ranked 30th. Very respectable, but a fraction of what it could have been.
IIRC, with the justification that “guitar bands are on the way out”. Yeah, great prediction for the 60s music scene… Granted, the next year they signed the Stones as fast as they could.
Lots of stories like these. YouTube began as a dating website. Both Wells Fargo and American Express (founded by the same people) began as “express” delivery services: Wells Fargo in California, American Express in New York before transitioning to banking and, in Western Union’s case, telegram delivery services. Toyota began as a manufacturer of looms, and was named after the guy who invented (at least in Japan) the automatic loom, Sakichi Toyoda. Shell Oil began as a curio shop in London, specializing in imported (wait for it…) seashells for use in home decorating. As they grew they began operating their own fleet of cargo vessels to bring the highly profitable seashells to market faster. When oil became a hot commodity they transitioned to shipping oil rather than kitschy home décor and the rest is history. WD-40 was invented not as a lubricant but to be used as a protective film (think car wax) over various bits of the Atlas rocket to prevent corrosion.
I worked for a global company that hit $1B in revenue, with 5000 employees and a solid customer base used to working with us in a particular way.
We got bought by Cisco for $5B in 2013, and they really interfered, slamming our business in with all its others without understanding it at all - just that it seemed like “synergy” with their previous purchases of similar companies.
Five years later, after many rounds of layoffs (including mine in 2017), and lots of “leadership” turmoil that decimated the business - which to be fair, changed a lot in that time - Cisco sold the remnants back to the VCs they bought it from for $800K.
That applies to Louisiana as well - other than New Orleans, most of France’s claim to the territory was on paper. Napoleon knew that his country couldn’t defend their holdings in a war, and if the British didn’t take them eventually, the Americans would. Of the two, he much preferred that the latter have it.
Kodak did make most of its money from selling film and chemicals, and also from doing film processing. They stuck with that far too long and ended up going through bankruptcy because they failed to respond to the digital revolution. Failing to capitalize on their early invention of digital photography is understandable. Failing to respond at all to market changes is not.
Kodak is one of the clearest examples of a company that became a victim of its own success. They were making so much money on traditional photography that they didn’t take new technology seriously. When something new comes along that could threaten your business, the smart thing is to invest in it. It didn’t have to be cameras. Kodak could have invested in making printer ink, printers, inkjet photo paper, SD cards, digital sensors, etc. They could have invested in on-line photo processing. There are all kinds of things they could have done. Doing nothing was almost fatal.