Polavision was a clever system developed by Ed Land just a little too late. Consumer videotape was on the horizon. On top of which, the Polavision films were too damned dark, and required a special viewer (plus, of course, they didn’t record sound). If they’d come up with it a decade or two earlier, it might have taken off.
Somewhat related - I worked at Texas Instruments in the early 80’s; At that time I knew someone involved with making the the first Compaq CPU front panels by pouring urethane resin in a home garage! Anyway, TI had just bailed out of the home computer business because it wasn’t profitable.:smack: They still had a factory in Lubbock with silos for case plastics that had never been used. They also had the TI PC, a business computer technically superior to the IBM PC, but insisted on a 5-sector floppy disk versus the IBM standard of 4 sectors, because it was “just better” :rolleyes: , thereby ignoring the format that 98% of the home experimenters were working with. Maybe TI was just too corporate…
Enron going into the “Gas Bank” business was a pretty bad idea - essentially became a future trader in natural gas which ate up a LOT of short-term cash so to generate long-term cash flows. It was to support this Jeff Skilling idea that the off-book accounts and other shenanigans were created as to keep the bank going. Eventually, as we all know, it all blew up.
AOL/Time-Warner is seen as a classic “bad business deal”… but only if you were a Time-Warner shareholder. If you were an AOL shareholder you did fantastically compared to most of the other dot-bombs that were cratering at the same time. You essentially traded 45% of your worthless, accounting-challenged POS company for half-ownership of a media empire that included HBO, Time Magazine, People Magazine, etc. Even after everything went to shit, you, as the AOL shareholder, still had something.
Time-Warner shareholders feel free to counter-argue. 
20th-century Fox signing over all merchandising rights to George Lucas was a big error (in return, Lucas took a $20,000 cut in pay). But an even bigger error was made by George Martin, manager of the Beatles, who signed over ninety percent of the Beatles merchandising rights to a group that pretty much formed around when the Beatles were flying to JFK in Feb. 1964. The case can be made that George Martin was the single-worst manager of his corporations assets in history, an impresario who got WAY over his head and lost his charges tens-of-billions in cash flow. From bad deals with the record companies to the merchandising disaster to bad publishing contracts where he never captured the value of Lennon/McCartney’s creations… the guy just didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
The Edsel.
AGI insuring derivative contracts.
Western Union was offered the patent on the telephone and turned it down, saying it had “no commercial possibilities.”
On a personal note, the agreement for the breakup of ATT had numerous pages about how to handle the phone book assets. One of the decisions was that companies who published ATT directories were not allowed to deliver them, which resulted in my family getting into telephone book distribution which was stupidly lucrative for the next 20+ years. But the “bad corporate decision”? ATT spent far less time thinking about cellular technology, giving all rights to MCI in language that was smaller than a single page of the agreement.
On another personal note, my father had the opportunity to invest in the first McDonald’s to be built in Milwaukee, WI… and turned it down, saying that “the concept wouldn’t fly.” While I probably would have appreciated being the heir of the Hamburger Baron of the Upper Midwest, I can’t stand cold weather and don’t really have many complaints as to how my life has turned out.
Brian Epstein, you mean?
Hindsight’s 20/20. Some innovative cars are hits, while others are flops. A corporate strategy that would have killed the Edsel before production might also have killed the T-bird or the Mustang.
One thing about the AOL/TW deal that makes it particularly egregious is that the CEO of TW didn’t ask for a “collar” - a common agreement for mergers and acquisitions that allow the deal to be restructured in the case of material changes in the stock price - saying that he was “confident” that the deal was a good one. When the deal was first announced, AOL was valued at $161 billion (about $90/share) while TW was about half that, at $83 billion.
By the time it was finalized, AOL stock had lost 50% of its value (to $42/share) and would have lost more if it weren’t for the TW deal supporting the price.
:smack: !
I originally started writing about “George Lucas” and obviously kept on the “George” track.
Was Compaq involved in CPU design?
It doesn’t help that they apparently called it “Singles”. 
Know what screams of desperation? Buying adult-sized baby food called “Singles”.
Seeing that on your shelf is sure to impress any dates you bring home … 
Reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Ms. Crabapple buys “Chef Lonely Hearts Soup-For-One” at the Quick-e Mart. Only, this is baby food, which adds a whole new level of sadness to the mix.
I’m quite puzzled by this statement. What cellular technology went to MCI?
The Baby Bells retained the incumbent phone company licenses to operate cellular service in their service areas. The cellular switching and cell site hardware/software business that Western Electric was in stayed with AT&T. Later AT&T acquired the McCaw cellular business which became AT&T Wireless. Then in the later trivestiture, the switching and cell site business went with Lucent and AT&T Wireless was spun off as in independent company.
That only leaves the handset business. I don’t recall AT&T or MCI ever becoming a player in that business.
Gerber was capitalizing on a brief fad for eating baby food (by adults). I think it was driven by a vague notion of healthiness, convenience, huge selection, etc. but then everyone realized they were living on puree and it passed.
Gerber being a corporation, they were slow on the uptake and missed the brief market window. But the notion of adults eating Baby Chow was not whomped up by their marketing jeenyuses.
The problem isn’t simply that they are marketing baby food for adults - the problem is, in part, that they are labelling it as “Singles”.
Whatever their intention, this product name creates an unfortunate ‘Bachelor Chow’ impression, with all that implies in connection with adults eating baby food -phrases like “incapable man-child” spring to mind effortlessly.
Now, there may have been a way to capitalize on whatever fad there was for adults eating baby food that did not create that unfortunate impression, but the Gerber ‘marketing jeenyuses’ were, apparently, unable to come up with it.
All that, too. However, it’s hard to see this goop as anything a couple would eat; it’s as solo as food gets without getting to Uncrustables. shudder
I guess it needed to be pitched as gourmet food or something to succeed with the 1) faddish 2) singles who actually form the market but 3) don’t want to be reminded that they are 2a) single or 4) pretty effin’ weird.
You know what? My cite is my father, who has been dead for 7 years… not really wanting to research this, I withdraw the statement.
One of the most puzzling to me was FedEx’s insane miscalculation with their new service, “Zapmail,” introduced in 1984.
Note the year there - this was a service in which you could “zap” documents from one FedEx office to another instantly. Yes, it was a fax. They rather horribly underestimated that companies would simply purchase their own fax machines as the technology got cheaper and cheaper.
But even if they didn’t predict that, they had to know that there would be problems with no color, low resolution copies sent from one place to another with no guarantee of confidentiality, since FedEx employees had to handle them.
All told they lost something like $200 million.
I don’t know about the TI business computer, but I do know how they killed the market for their home computer, the TI99-4A IIRC. They shut out third party programmers by making it impossible for outsiders to run “foreign” programs without paying them royalties. Since they were trying to break into the market held by IBM, third party programmers stayed away and then nobody bought the computer.
In a similar way, when DEC finally brought out a PC (five years after their founder Ken Olsen said that he could not imagine any reason why anyone would want a computer in their home), there was no way of formatting diskettes. You had to buy pre-formatted diskettes from DEC at an exhorbitant price. I think they sold hardly any machines. Too bad; since Dave Cutler was a briliant programmer for DEC, they might have had something like NT at least 10 years before MS. Dave Cutler led the NT team at MS, BTW. My brother, a professional systems analyst claimed that the DEC OS was the best OS he ever saw.
[QUOTE=Derleth]
Was Compaq involved in CPU design?
[/QUOTE]
I suspect they meant to say “computer” front panels.
I don’t think Compaq itself did any chip design, but they did acquire both DEC and Tandem over the years before their acquisition by HP, and both of those companies did have some unique designs.
When Compaq bought DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) in 1998, they almost immediately killed the DEC Alpha processor design efforts. Too bad - at the time, the Alpha AXP was the fastest thing available, especially on floating-point. Eventually, in 2001, Compaq sold the Alpha designs to Intel.
AFAIK, Tandem didn’t design any processors, but their fault-tolerant NonStop system was literally bulletproof. I can’t find it now, but I remember seeing a demo somewhere around 15 years ago where they unloaded a shotgun into a NonStop server and it kept running.
I was one of those who really loved New Coke.
Of course, I also drove an Edsel (two actually) by choice from 1976 to 1988 so ---------------
In 1976, as compensation for the team being folded, the NBA agreed to grant, in perpetuity, the owners of the ABA St. Louis Spirits a 1/7 share of the TV rights of the 4 other ABA teams that would be absorbed into the NBA. At the time, essentially no money was being made from basketball on TV, so the League probably thought they were getting one over. It’s wound up costing them about $300 million in the years since. The League had been trying for years to get out of the contract, and apparently they finally did this year (with new media contracts looming) for an upfront payout of $500 million.
Here’s a few more that come to mind.
J.C. Penny’s “no sales, just everyday low prices” strategy. The only problem with it was that Penny’s didn’t sell anything that the typical consumer wouldn’t wait for someone else to have a sale.
The Bricklin SV-1 sports car. Among its many flaws, the car featured a fiberglass/acrilyc body. Unfortunately, the fiberglass/acrylic bonding process was flawed and body panels cracked before they were even put on the car.
Sears spent $2 billion to buy Land’s End. Twelve years later they spun it off for $500 million. What’s worse, Land’s End is doing better now than it was as a part of Sears.
KHJ Radio in Los Angeles once had a contest where a dj would drive to a location and then give prizes to the first person who found him. Two teenagers chased the dj at high speed and then plowed into another car, killing the driver. The driver’s family sued and won, and the station lost the subsequent appeals. There have been a lot of bad radio promotions, but AFAIK this was the only one that actually led to someone dying.
Also, Radio Shack. I can’t point to a specific idea, but they must have had some very bad ones.
There was one radio station-sponsored contest a few years ago called “Hold Your Wee For A Wii” where the person who drank the most water without urinating won a Wii. The person who “won” ended up dying from hyponatremia.