I think I have to either nominate Gerber’s adult baby food, yes large jars of pureed baby food marketed to single adults! Ok beyond the texture issue, why exactly they thought single adults in particular would eat baby food is beyond me. Has to be one of the single most baffling ideas in business, check out the pic!
Or something JohnClay on this very board brought to my attention, Lucent’s Inferno OS:
Why with demonic and underworld themed names this is sure to be a hit in the USA and other countries that are majority christian! :smack: The sad thing is no matter how good the OS was that naming pretty much guaranteed it would go nowhere.
Well the idea of introducing a new variety of Coke with a taste closer to Pepsi which had gained market share wasn’t so out there, but why they replaced the original formula and stopped making it and at first did not even give any indication or marketing yea that was bafflingly stupid! If they had just introduced it alongside the original formula and called it Nu Coke or something as an alternative it probably would not have been such a blunder.
It’s a shame that Blizzard or Lamborghini didn’t sell any Diablo(s). Or countless things called Devil or Demon. Or the Towering Inferno. And naming something after something that make most people think fire and not hell. It’s not called Hail Beezelbub OS.
From what I understand, the new flavor tested well with focus groups. However, because they didn’t ask what the focus groups would think if they replaced the old formula with the new, they assumed that the new flavor going over well was all they needed to consider, and did the swap. They didn’t realize how much they’d succeeded in getting the old formula’s claws into the American mindset.
One of those is a videogame where you fight monsters marketed to the younger crowd, like Doom. Towering Inferno is a movie.
Inferno was a OS who depended on stuffy middle aged professional office types for adoption and success, different market where the name was more likely to be an issue.
No, the IT staffs make those choices and they’re fine with the names. One of the main concepts in Unix systems is daemons and no one bats an eye. Heck, the OS is a corruptions of eunuchs and most folks don’t notice. I think this was a non-issue.
Alamo Rent A Car spent lots of money to renovate their rental facilities in their major locations . A changing room, playground, even a concession stand. They didn’t do the common sense idea of better staffing the rental office so people wouldn’t have to wait in line for an hour! No need for a playground or concessions when you’re in and out of the rental office in less than 10 minutes.
It would be hard to imagine a worse decision than that described by RobDog above. This one:
reminds me of the decision by IBM around 1986 not to sell a microcomputer based on the 386 chip because it would likely interfere with their minicomputer business. They were right about that, but Compaq had no reason not to sell such a computer and, although IBM later did sell such a computer, they were late to the party and eventually exited the micro business that they had caused to take off. I am not saying they started it, but they made it respectable for small businesses. Forty years earlier, IBM had declined to get into the business of making computers because they anticipated a world wide demand of at most five computers.
Then there was the decision of Time-Life to buy AOL, whose main buisness (selling dialup internet access) was obviously going down the tubes.
Xerox had a research arm in Palo Alto that invented the mouse, the graphical user interface and other things, but the suits back east were not interested since it had nothing to do with the copier business. Their inventions heavily influenced Apple, among others.
Back in the 19th century, Western Union turned down the possibility of buying the telephone because they could not see any demand. They imagined, I assume, that to use it, both parties would have to come to a local telegraph office to talk. They did not imagine that every office and, eventually, every home, would have an instrument.
Gary Killdall made a disastrous decision to go out flying the day IBM came to call.
There are grains of truth to all this, but it really comes down to two blunders. The new formula was given extremely wide taste-testing, but the test groups judged the flavor from a small sample - about two sips’ worth - and even then it was well-known that first-bite/whole portion judgments can vary considerably. That is, people preferred New Coke over Pepsi in a small sip, but Coke drinkers preferred the old flavor by the can.
(The second blunder was the misjudgment of the market’s real and tradition-driven desire for the old flavor, and doing the complete replacement rather than rolling it out as a new flavor. But the first step off the cliff was the bungled taste-testing.)
Qubes, possibly the most secure operating system, hasn’t caught fire anymore than Inferno.
At some point one has to get past the names and realise most people don’t give a toss about operating systems, nor security, nor nomenclature: but will just take the default.
Because it just almost works.
Red Lobster’s infamous “endless snow crab legs” promotion has to be somewhere in the Hall of Fame. It may not have been as costly or disastrous as a lot of other corporate bungles, but I think it gets extra points for just how poorly thought out and implemented it was.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Red Lobster has offered an endless snow crab leg promotion twice in its history. However, in 2003, the promotion resulted in parent company Darden Restaurants taking a $3 million charge to third quarter earnings, resulting in president Edna Morris’ departure from the company. The ill-timed promotion was launched amid high wholesale crab leg prices. The chain also underestimated how many times a guest would order more. Further complicating matters at the restaurant level was the amount of time a guest spent table-side in the restaurant cracking crab legs. This resulted in increased wait times in the lobby and overall diminished guest capacity per hour.
[/QUOTE]
On top of all that, I understand that they didn’t predict customers picking the easy meat out of each leg, leaving the rest, and ordering more, further reducing their margins. I don’t have a cite for that last bit, though.
For that matter, AOL had previously bought Netscape, somehow forgetting that the official AOL browser had to be IE or Microsoft would take away the “Signup for AOL” icon that appeared in new installations of Windows. Being bought and then ignored by AOL was the final death knell for Netscape.
I used to work for Xerox, right down the hill from Palo Alto Research Center, back in the late '80s-early '90s. We heard these stories all the time, and even had a name for those executives: “toner-heads.” Xerox/PARC not only invented the mouse and the GUI, but Ethernet, laser printers, and the touchpad. There’s a book called “Fumbling the Future” that describes how they lost control of all of their best inventions, which went on to make a lot of money for other companies (including Apple and Adobe, which was started by a former Xeroxer who got frustrated at the company’s failure to market ideas.)
1.) Xerox didn’t invent the mouse. Douglas Engelbart of SRI did. There are contemporary films of him describing it. Apparently the trackball was invented even earlier
2.) Xerox PARC was in existence for three decades before it divested. It’s still going strong. If “the suits back east” weren’t interested in what they were doing, they had a funny way of showing it by continuing to fund them.
