News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million. It sold it five years later for $35 million.
But that’s not the worst part. At one point it was valued at $12 billion. With a “b”.
The Xerox Palo Alto tale is not simply sad. Xerox itself became Xerox thanks to companies like IBM turning down Chester Carlson’s patent. A story made famous in a book subtitled “The Billions Nobody Wanted”. And yet just 3 decades later, Xerox was on the other end of the tale.
I have heard many times that if Xerox had marketed the Alto computer, there would have been no Sun, Apple, etc. (I used the Alto. It was an amazing machine.) They dropped on the ball on GUI, laser printers (and associated proto-PDF software), a bunch of bit-mapped display stuff, network file servers, etc. They only released Ethernet because a consortium of other companies talked them into it.
Lesson to remember: Don’t bring in a US car company exec (who brought in his buddies) to run a tech company.
Remember the really stupid part of the AOL-TW deal. This happened after the tech bust started. Everybody with two brain cells already knew AOL was immensely overvalued.
It’s antiquated and perhaps it made the company a small fortune at the time, but quack radioactive “health” treatments like the Revigator would irradiate your water overnight with its uranium and radium lined vessel.
The ET debacle. Basically giving one guy 6 weeks to design such a high-profile game. The game was initially a decent seller, but overall resulted in a loss of about $100 million.
Pac-Man for the 2600. This was another rush job, facing significant technical limitations based on the available memory on the system. Though it ended up being the top selling video game at the time, Atari produced WAY too many copies, and the poor critical reception damaged the company’s reputation.
The lack of any verification chip, which allowed third-party companies to produce games for the 2600 without quality control by Atari. This resulted in a glut of very low-quality games, and even 8-bit porno (such as the infamous “Custer’s Revenge”).
These were major factors that led to the crash of the video game industry in the US in 1983-84.
Allegis has got to be up there. In 1985, United Airlines was one of the best-known brand names in America. So… let’s change it, just because. Of course, there were a whole bunch of other fuckups that compounded the error.
I have to disagree with this one. Nobody knew about Custer’s Revenge in the early 80s outside of small groups, it didn’t become really infamous until the internet got the story out.
Was there some shovelware? Sure. But the same lack of Atari control also brought us Activision, Imagic and other creators that provided content as good, if not better than, “official” Atari releases.
Sure, but the shovelware (and the resulting consumer outrage) certainly played a role in the death of Atari. That’s why Nintendo maintained such tight control (probably too tight) over NES third party developers: it had seen what might happen if it didn’t.
My best friend bought Pac Man for the 2600 when it first came out and played it to death. I played it and was like, “Um, I’m 8 and I could make a better game than this.” In my version, the ghosts would have actually been visible and Pac Man would have faced in the direction he was moving.
ET I never had the misfortune of playing, although I did eventually get the Atari computer version which was acceptable.
I suspect every tech company had plans for a socketed game adapter and a library of copied games. I worked for a company that had access to free EPROMS (QC rejected but still functional) and staff would take turns buying new release games for distribution to the participants. Now, if only I can find those 8" floppies that had the copied code…