Microsoft charged manufacturers a license fee for Windows Phone, whereas Android is free. That’s kind of an important difference.
A decade later, Boston and Rush also experienced multiple rejections from record companies.
I thought it was Facebook, not You Tube, that started out as a dating website.
Facebook started out as a way for people at Harvard to rate the hotness of the female class.
Dad, 1961-ish: “Yeah. I don’t think the concept is going to fly here in the Midwest. People prefer eating full dinners when they go out. Thanks for the offer, but I’m going to let someone else be the first McDonald’s franchisor in Milwaukee.”
don’t get it. Can someone fill me in?
ET. The original script had ET being lured by M&M’s. The manufacturer of M&M’s refused to have their product shown in such a lurid manner, so Spielberg, et al, reached out to the Hershey Company who used the movie to promote their relatively new product, Reese’s Pieces (introduced in 1978)
Short version. The, producers of E. T. approached Mars, Inc. for permission to use M&M’s candy in their movie and Mars refused. They then went to Reese’s, who gave them permission to use Reese’s Pieces, and the success of the movie earned Reese’s millions.
Edit - Curses, ninja’d!
I had an iPaq back in 2001. I find it fascinating that they had all the things to make a smartphone, including a lower case i and failed to realize what they had.
Rax Roast Beef restaurant hit its peak in the ’80s with 504 locations in 38 states. It was poised to be a major player in the fast food industry. Then, it made a business blunder in diversifying its menu and changing restaurant design with the intent of becoming the “champagne of fast food.” This resulted only in alienating its core customer—working class people.
The nail in the coffin was doubling down on a (what should have been obvious) failed ad campaign—an unattractive, unfunny, un-relatable mascot (Mr. Delicious, a sport-coat wearing, briefcase-toting divorcee) and coupling it with the equally uninspired tagline—“you can eat here.” Rax filed for bankruptcy 3 months after the campaign started.
I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to slap a mascot before now.
It’s not so simple. The OS is “free” in some sense but Google requires phone makers to bundle the Play Store, Google, Search, etc. (aka “Google Mobile Services”) which requires licen$ing. (And there’s non-open source software involved in that.)
You can go without those addons, Amazon’s FireOS is the most famous, but you have to write your own code for those services, provide an app/media store, etc. (As well as DIY upgrades to new versions of Android.)
Free OS versions such as LineageOS take a lot of work to install, and not just rooting the phone. Someone has to have ported it to your device (most devices are unsupported). The manufactures proprietary drivers and such have to be incorporated. And installing the Google services can be quite a chore.
That’s like straight out of a spoof, ie. the least-sales-increasing mascot imaginable.
Makes you wonder if someone from Burger King was either part of the same group that came up with that idea, or saw it and said “Hey this is a great idea!”
That really sounds like the same people. This makes me remember that they really did put much stock in ‘the store experience’ and that customers love it and so they didn’t need to really consider our idea…as we were ‘overblowing it’.
The subtle thing is WE WERE NOT HIRED TO COME UP OR EVALUATE the ‘movies by mail’ idea. It was just so freaking strong that it came out in many ways from the analysis. We felt COMPELLED to inform them because it was just so strong. They also dismissed our data that their stores were not as a positive experience to customers as they thought. In short, they hired us to evaluate…we did…they didn’t like our results and pretty much dismissed them.
They did the same with their ‘no late fees’ idea. It was the second worst potential campaign I had seen our company evaluate and I was there a long time. The rejection of the campaign concept was HUGE.
The only other 2 clients we had that were bad at doing this were Sonic and Best Buy. Ugh…Best Buy. I was involved in their brand stretch into appliances. It just did not make sense and it was confusing and not well accepted by the public in our research. I know they are still doing this and maybe they are doing well now…but that would be through sheer doggedness. I know they had issues at the start. My research had suggested 3 other brand stretch ideas…one being medical equipment (believe it or not it seemed to work…in theory) and no…appliances it will be! Why did you hire us then?!? Sonic? Those people were completely dismissed from reality. Our sales peeps didn’t even bother trying to keep them as clients after a couple of studies.
Anyway I digress 
That reminds me of when I did student teaching way way back in the Stone Age. yes, I initially went into teaching…but to redeem myself somewhat I saw what it was and got out of it fast and went to graduate school…then into being a statistician.
I was student teaching math and computer science and they put in mostly in computer science because they were dreadfully short on people to do that. During a staff meeting, the superintendent started pontificating that it was good I could teach math AND computer science (double major) as computers were a ‘flash in the pan’ and would quickly diminish in importance. This was in the earlier 80s.
Saturn was a weird WEIRD brand! One of the weirdest I have worked on.
It had both one of the highest satisfaction ratings of ANY brand, let alone cars, but also one of the lowest 'Will I buy again?" ratings. We did some research into it for them and the main gist was “It’s a GREAT first car! I love it! However, I am older now and have outgrown it and so will get an adult car next”.
I can think of very, very few brands that had a very high satisfaction and a very low repurchase feelings. That just doesn’t happen. They are usually very positively correlated.
I never understood the objection to late fees, barring the occasional shenanigans where negligent or malicious employees would cause late fees by not checking in overnightly-dropped returns promptly. But I’d think that people who were so clueless as to be gobsmacked by the existence of late fees would also savor the chance to not pay them and overlook the fine print as much as they overlooked the fine print when they incurred the late fees in the first place.
How were Sonic delusional? I’m curious how a fast food place can make extremely bad decisions that aren’t just “You know what the public needs right now? Fast food spaghetti!”
OMG, I first read this as Raw Roast Beef, and I thought: Yuck, a restaurant that only served raw meat?
Although, I’ve never heard of Rax, either.