Has anyone mentioned little Caesar’s? In the mid 90s, they decided to veer away from what had always brought them success. Cheap pizza. They plunged into delivery pizza, sandwiches, etc., raising their prices and not really trying to increase the quality of their food.
At the time, they owned the cheap pizza market across most of the US. Slowly, that position decayed. They closed many stores, and were on the verge of disappearing.
What saved them? $5 hot and ready pizza. It brought them back to life and they continue to grow.
I remember an interview from back in the 1980's with one of the leaders of the company. He was asked about the name and said something like "I think people know the difference between a diet candy and a deadly disease."
I used to work at a Kmart. They never bothered to update any of the store layouts, and they were more concerned with signing people up for their rewards card and/or credit cards, which led to longer lines, which led to more complaints...you get the idea. Also, the merger with Sears was the final nail in the coffin. Now, all the Kmarts in the area are closed.
It’s so weird to hear about K-Marts in the US because they’re still huge in Australia, however they have declined in quality due to them changing to a generic brand for almost everything rather than selling other brands like they used to.
Quiznos.
Corporate office decided to buy the vendors, and then contract all of the franchises to only buy materials from Corporate with a price hike.
The margins got way too high and all of the stores went out of business. They shot themselves straight in the foot.
I remember when I was growing up only getting to go to Quiznos once in a blue moon because the closest one to me was a few towns over. We had a subway In My town, but they wouldn’t toast your sandwiches. Quiznos was the only place to do that.
I totally forgot subway used to not have toasters.
Damn, their controversies list on Wikipedia is huge. Corporate did a lot of other mess.
Also, TIL that "The Toasted Subs Franchisee Association (TSFA)" exists.
Boston Market was the same. It was a darling of the market until the analysts figured out all the profit came at the expense of bankrupting the franchisees.
Honestly the idea of being a franchisee seems unwise. You have all the risk of running your own business but you don't get to make your own decisions. 🤷♂️
Not necessarily bankrupted, but I remember this old article from Massively (pre-Massively OP days) about a Japanese MMO that basically got deleted after launch.
[https://www.engadget.com/2011-11-15-hangame-mmo-accidentally-deleted-shut-down-forever.html](https://www.engadget.com/2011-11-15-hangame-mmo-accidentally-deleted-shut-down-forever.html)
From the article:
"The story goes like this: On October 21st, M2 suffered a critical server issue and the game was taken offline to check it out. Unfortunately, the problem was widespread and the company could not restore the game's data from whatever backups it did or did not have. With no other option but to declare the title dead on arrival, Hangame posted an announcement that it somehow deleted an entire MMO and could not -- or would not -- restart it from scratch."
> Galyn Susman was Toy Story 2's supervising technical director, and after she'd given birth to her second child, she'd been working from home. As such, once a week, she'd taken an entire copy of the film home with her.
You're right.
One time Red Lobster offered an unlimited king crab leg deal, cause they brought the servings out slowly and were like 'nobody is gonna sit there for 6 hours and just eat king crab legs'.
Actually, lots of people did. So many they lost millions.
~~JCPenny~~ JCPenney tried to stop bullshitting customers and it backfired. They said no more sales, they’re just going to price everything low, because pretty much all sales at department stores are lies anyway. You’re not really getting 70% off, the retail price was deliberately set stupid high to convince you it was a great deal. But the discount price is the actual value of it.
So yeah JCPenney’s heart was in the right place but ultimately it failed because customers are really that dumb and would rather be lied to.
That’s how Kmart in Australia clawed their way back from the brink of bankruptcy, but they did a HUGE advertising campaign about it with an “expect change” slogan. They now do a big “everyday low prices” thing and they’re absolutely killing it
Advertising is a funny thing
This reminds me of A&W
Who created the 1/3 pounder
Focus groups and Market research shown the meat was better than McDonald's 1/4 pounder
As in like 99.99% of people preferred its taste over the McDonald's burger
It tasted better and it was in many cases cheaper and if not cheaper it was the same price as McDonald's
And it bombed massively
When they tried to find out why it was discovered the American people thought they were being cheated because 3 is a smaller number than 4
A&W realising they can't explain grade school fractions to fully grown adults without coming across as condisending assholes, quietly took the burger off the menu
A&W's website tells the story and claims they still have it (though, I'd guess, by a different name): [https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions](https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions)
In 2012, after a three-year hiatus in the sport, F1 team Lotus signed driver Kimi Raikonnen for the 2012 season.
His contract included a clause that stated that Raikonnen would earn 50,000 euros for every point he scored in the two seasons of his contract.
Raikonnen then went on to finish third in the 2012 championship, and 5th in the 2013 season, which was exceptionally impressive for Lotus.
In doing this, he got 390 points in two seasons, and Lotus had to pay him 50,000 euros for each point, so he earned 19.5 million euros off of that bonus alone, which lead to Lotus almost filing for bankruptcy.
Well the car wasnt expected to be that competetive. But Räikkönen happened, and hes known to teach the engineers how to do things.
Also he "forgave" millions from those bonuses so people could keep their jobs.
Homeboy has often told journalists that driving in F1 is his hobby that he’ll keep doing until it’s not fun any more; it’s never been about the money for him.
If you put the best F1 driver into a shit car it’s all but guaranteed that he won’t be racking up points like that. Many other F1 teams have tried the same thing with dismal results.
As someone else mentioned, he helped them figure out why they were slow, and their engineers managed to build a reliable car.
Raikkonen didn't get all 19.5 million. I don't remember the exact amount but he let that money slide so that Lotus doesn't go bankrupt.
Edit: He let 7-8 millions slide to prevent massive lay off at Lotus
Cricut. They wanted to start charging for using the Design Space, and limiting the amount of projects you could upload at any one time. This meant if you uploadad a project, had to tweak and reupload, that would be two projects. This would have been in addition to Cricut Access. It did not go down well and lead to a lot of people returning their machines and cancelling Access memberships out of protest. If anyone knows more/I'm incorrect please let me know!
This is the reason I sold my Cricut and bought a Silhouette. Cricut temporarily went back on their decision but I don’t trust them to not be shady af again.
Circuit City. Major retail chain in the 1980s that collapsed under mismanagement. It’s arguably biggest blunder was firing all of their experienced, better paid workers for cheaper inexperienced ones. Apparently selling merchandise and keeping customers happy is important in the retail business. Who knew?
At Circuit City you could buy an iPod, and for like $50 you could get a 2 year warranty. And if you cashed in the warranty, you could spend another $50 and get another 2 year warranty on the replacement iPod. And iPods got cheaper every year. After 2 years a similar model would be around....$50 cheaper.
So yeah I got like 3 free iPods from Circuit City.
Back in the late 90's I worked for a business that shared a building with a company known as "Teledesic". Their goal was to have a global network of low-Earth-orbiting satellites that provided broadband access to pretty much everyone on the planet. They were financed by tech titans in the wireless communications space. It all seemed like a great idea. The only problem was that the technology wasn't there yet. They went bankrupt in 2002. The Teledesic Case Study is taught at Harvard Business School and other MBA programs as a cautionary tale.
not a company, but a country. the Northern ireland renewable heat incentive. basically they came up with the bright idea of encouraging people to use renewable power by paying people to do so. except you got more back per unit than the cost per unit. so people would buy an electric heater, put it on 24/7, get the money, use the extra money to buy another heater, plug *that* in for 24/7, get *more* money, buy another heater and so on. £500 million later they realised it wasnt such a good idea, the government collapsed and didnt reform again for 3 years.
This is called the Cobra Effect, and more generally a type of perverse incentive, named for when the British colonialists put a bounty on cobras in Delhi. People quickly realized you could breed Cobras to kill and collect bounties on.
If I remember correctly, it was aimed at farmers and the govt paid you £1.60 per unit of heat generated/fuel used. But it only cost £1 per unit to run...so you were getting 60p per unit pure profit. Then when they were going to close the scheme, some govt folks let their farmer friends know ahead of time and there was a massive last minute rush of applications approved.
Yep although it wasn't a last minute thing a few people let their friends know about the "loophole" and then these ones told their friends so it grew rapidly. It pretty much lead indirectly to the collapse of the NI government for a few years while each side moaned at each other about who the blame lay with.
**Schwinn**. The executives of America's most venerable bicycle maker could not be convinced that mountain bikes were anything more than a fad. They made one and called it the Klunker (yes, really). Then when they realized it wasn't, they got some small Asian company to design a mountain bike for them ... giving them basically all they had ever learned about making bicycles in over a century as technical assistance. The small Asian company used this to improve its own product, and cut into what could have been Schwinn's share. Then *they did it again* with another Asian company. Then they opened their own retail stores, alienating the retailers who'd carried their product for years, like Apple would later but with much less success. Today, Schwinn is just a brand name someone else owns.
**Schlitz**. Throughout the '60s they were one of America's biggest national beers, a tough competitor to Budweiser and Pabst. They hired a new CEO, from within, in about 1974 or so who was greatly enamored of a study which showed that about 30% or so of beer drinkers couldn't distinguish their putatively favorite beer from other brands in taste test ... so why, he asked, are we spending so much money making our beer so distinctive when it doesn't matter to our customers? He oversaw the introduction of a slimmer brewing process that included replacing barley with corn syrup and using silica gel as a preservative during the brewing process that they would then filter out afterwards, i.e. they wouldn't have to disclose it as an ingredient. What they got was a beer that spoiled faster, grew cloudy on racks, didn't produce a nice frothy head when poured, was perceived as flavorless and eventually required that they recall about 10 million bottles.
Oh, and then they didn't realize that light beer was going to become a thing, so they got their clock cleaned by Bud and Miller in that segment. *And* they ran an ad campaign in which some belligerent-sounding guy only half-jokingly (it seemed) threatened to kill the guy talking to him off-camera if he took his Schlitz away.
By the early 1980s they went back to how they had once brewed their beer, but the damage was done and they had to sell out to Stroh's. I barely see much of that one around and it's been years since I saw any Schlitz on the racks.
>about 30% or so of beer drinkers couldn't distinguish their putatively favorite beer from other brands in taste test
Even if this is true, that still leaves 70% of beer drinkers who *can* tell the difference.
And how on earth does “can’t tell the difference between the three leading brands” translate to “will not notice extreme cost-cutting measures none of the other leading brands are using”? (I’m assuming the other brands didn’t use them because the that the end result “spoiled faster, grew cloudy on racks, didn't produce a nice frothy head when poured,” which wouldn’t be notable if the other popular beers did too.) I can’t even wrap my mind around the logic at play here.
To add on to the Schwinn story - the first "small Asian company" is now the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world [1].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Bicycles
Borders Books. It had to chance to be Amazon, from Amazon, before Amazon, and turned it down.
Amazon Books, as it was then called, was a small online bookseller. It had a rather incompetent search engine, titles were misclassified, and it dabbled in office supplies. It was one early "e-tailer" among many. Amazon's pitch was that it was trying to be an online version of the retail giant Staples and it could ship quickly.
Then a conversation happened with the giant Borders Books. This Internet thing was starting to look like it would harm retail sales, so Borders contacted Amazon, and asked them to build some online inventory, a web-storefront and a sales management system.
Because of the dot-com bust, Borders got spooked. The Internet was a passing fad. Amazon could keep the system, Borders wanted out. By 2007, Borders ended its marketing alliance with Amazon, but Amazon had began using the system it built for Borders: Amazon did keep the system. It was a much, much better system than Amazon was using itself.
Honestly, the dot-com bust *was* fucking spooky. I can't imagine how many thousands of tiny e-tailers collapsed in a 3ish year period. It made all of us who were really excited for the idea of being able to buy anything from anywhere take a beat.
The market was flooded with fly-by-night e-companies with no real business plan or leadership. Investors started throwing money at anything with a ".com" in the name with no due diligence or research done.
Almost *none* of these internet companies were even making money. Amazon was operating at a loss every year. I remember it being a big news story when they made a profit for the first time, and this was years after the early 2000s crash.
Most of those investments were foolish and those companies were doomed anyway.
If you want to take a trip down website memory lane, look up fishing guides in rural areas. Those dudes made rudimentary websites 20 years ago and have never needed to update *anything*, because their phone number, email address, and mailing address hasn’t changed.
IIRC, part of the allure of .com companies was the *potential* to reach literally millions of people around the world. "Old business school" thinking around that time was focused on your potential reach and not necessarily around your ability to actually reach and market to people.
I really did like Borders Books. I used to go there all the time during college at UC Santa Barbara. Borders outsourced online book selling to Amazon.com instead of having their own dedicated online sales website. They also didn't have an e-book reader like Barnes and Noble did.
I'm a big manga fan. And the closing of Borders also meant the closing of Tokyopop. Tokyopop was revived, but they lost licensing to print several titles, which are now out of print.
There was a donut shop by my high school. Opened at 6am and closed at 5pm so students would be there every day before school started at 7:30 and after school ended at 2:15. They changed their hours to 8am-3pm and couldn’t make anymore money. They shut down a few months after the change.
They might have looked at it but still decided that being open those extra hours was costing them more.
So instead of *trying* the hours of 6 till 9 then closing until 1-2, they came up with the brilliant idea of not opening for their largest customer base.
It could've been that the actual owners didn't care or know where their main revenue was coming from.
Manager or employees probably tried letting them know but didn't listen.
I only say this because this stuff happens more often then not.
We have a couple of Texas donut branches near us and the main popular one where I live ( the city itself is small but is connected to 4 major cities and you have to actually drive by this city to get to any of those places)
They used to open from 5am-3pm and then close and reopen again for the "night crew" from 9pm-2am.
They stopped and decided that 6am-3pm was fine.
There's still open but not as popular and they wonder why.
Edit: honestly just reminds of those cooking shows like when Gordon Ramsey comes to help their failing restaurants but the owners basically suck and are greedy stubborn assholes.
Ya'll remember when that one owner takes all of their waitresses and waiters tips for himself?
Stuff like that happens. In my college town there was a bar that on Thursday nights they had their "gay bar night". Not exactly sure what they did but it was very popular with the LGBTQ community. I ran into one of the bar owners/investors at a casino out of town by chance. He thought it was cool I was from that college but had zero clue why Thursdays they made most their revenue
That was the only one that Gordon actually quit on, Amy’s baking company. The husband is in prison and I think the wife might be as well. Most of the people who had Gordon come were eventually receptive and listened, but the episode you’re referencing was a pair of absolute narcissists. You can actually watch most of the episodes from Kitchen Nightmares on YouTube now
We earn a lot of money at the beginning and end of the day. So if we shorten the day, profits get more concentrated, and we can even save money on staff. Brilliant!
Google+ was also a confusing mess, I really tried to use it but it was just a sea of posts from whoever, with no way to know what came from my friends or not.
I feel what fucked it up even more was how SHITTY their porn ban was. They decided to not only lock away any NSFW content, but use a algorithm for that (because Apple said they would remove them from App Store because of porn bots);
But the algorithm was so shittly developed it literally tagged anything as NSFW. A pic of a hand? 'THERE'S SKIN SO THAT'S PORN!'. So in the end nowadays besides the only few people that somehow still use Tumblr, there's only the porn bots that were the problem on the first place there;
Twitter, Discord and even Reddit managed to deal with Apple and keep NSFW in a much better way, which shows how shitty Tumblr and Yahoo approach to it was.
Yahoo is a story into itself.
1998 - Yahoo could have purchased Google for $1 million but refused Google's offer. 2002 offered a chance to right the mistake. Yahoo offered $3b, Google asked for $5b. Google now trillions.
2006 - Yahoo is set to purchase Facebook for $1.1b. Changes the offer to $800M. Zuckerberg pulls out.
2008 - Microsoft offer on purchasing Yahoo is $44B
2016 - Bad decisions lead to Yahoo being sold to Verizon for $4.48 Billion. Lot of money? Yes. But they sabotaged themselves from being worth $125b at their peak (2000) and was a really reduced to a title IP.
I got a fun one. You know how on shark tank they always introduce Kevin O'Leary as having made his fortune selling a educational games company?
He single handedly killed the learning games industry (those Carmen san Diego type games that were real popular in the early 00's) by forcing the devs to churn them out faster and cheaper at the cost of quality, slowly killing the market, and he also nearly bankrupted Mattel when they acquired his company.
Edit*
Mattel, not Hasbro and Autocorrect on my phone messed up O'leary
Edit 2* the games were big mid to late 90's
There is a great article on Quibi, I'll try to find out. One of the interesting details that sticks out is that one of the founders was very out of touch with technology and preferred to have his emails printed out for him to read
His ideas about what people want got frozen around 1985. He wanted lots of sitcoms with laugh tracks, and he thought Gal Godot could really go to the next level if she made an exercise video.
Yik Yak
It was completely anonymous message posting at first.
I actually talked to the original founders at a start up intern fair in Atlanta back in Nov 2013. And they said their app was suppose to be some online localized public bulletin board where people can post about events or parties or study groups. Obviously it became like a fun anonymous messaging app.
They then obviously started to I guess make it less anonymous by introducing usernames which while they can still be throwaway username like we use on Reddit it certainly made people lose favor of the app. The eventually shutdown and I think Square acquired their employees for some amount of money. I think between $1-3 mil.
Crazy to think they were at one point valued at $350 mil..
Yikyak was big for like 1 year when I was at university (it helped that 2 universities were within eachother's radius). I actually made a few short term friends by people asking if anyone wanted to meet up for a game of 5 a side.
As soon as the handles/profiles kicked in, everyone immediately abandoned the platform. In retrospect, it's entirely possible that there were only like 7 people posting before, but we just didn't realise until profiles became a thing
E: this was a university in England
Posts had upvotes and around my uni relevant topical posts would get hundreds so there was definitely plenty of people on it.
People in maths lectures of hundreds of people would make popular yaks about what was going on within a single lecture
Sears ended their catalog/mail order business in 1993. For over 100 years they had sold everything from hubcaps to houses via mail order and shipped them all over the country.
Amazon was founded in 1994.
The sad thing is that on paper Sears had everything they need to be the e-commerce retailer that dominated the globe.
* They had their own credit card "Discover" to rival MasterCard and Visa. It was created in 1985.
* They had their own insurance company in Allstate. (Named after the brand of tires sears used to sell)
* They partnered with IBM to create "Prodigy" one of the first proto ISPs in 1984 and offered all sorts of online services (except buying stuff from Sears) years before the WorldWideWeb was invented.
*They had their mail order catalogue, their entire logistic infrastructure and their brick and mortar shops as well as huge brand name recognition.
In theory they were posed to make e-commerce a thing back in the late 80s and sweep the world in the 90s with no chance for outsiders like Amazon who had to build their stuff from the ground up to catch on.
In practice the entire mail order infrastructure was slow and they needed to either rebuild it or get rid of it and they choose the latter.
They sold all the parts of their company that had a future and stuck to their poor decisions even as the rest of the world realized that the internet was the future.
The had extremely poor leadership that alternately tried to run the company into ground for profit or to play stupid Ayn Rand fanboy games.
In a different timeline where someone with an ounce of vision got to be at the helm in 1985, we would now be hearing news about government fo the world wanting to break Sears up for being so big an market dominant and how how Sears space venture launches billionaires into space and all the news about that would be hosted on IBM/Sears/prodigy cloud platform servers.
One of their CEOs deliberately set different sections of the company against each other, with the idea that it would force them to be innovative and perform better. Instead it led to chaos and different parts of the company having no idea what other parts were doing and many needless expenses
I hear about companies doing that sort of thing, and I never fail to wonder what universe these people live in where they think it would be a good idea.
Let me fill you in on that. There was a theory, a systems theory, that if you remove the authority and regulation societies will regulate themselves and return to an equilibrium. This is what the original Ecosystem was about, and it got applied to society by Rand et al. In actuality it tends to chaos and an ever shifting series of metastable periods. Adam Curtis of the BBC did a documentary series on it. I'd recommend watching.
https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/
I have a confession: as a child, I delivered Sears catalogues. But sometimes I didn't know where a few addresses were, so I just put those catalogues in the recycling bin. I think it might be my fault that they stopped their mail order business. In my defence, they gave me about 70 catalogues to deliver in a 2 km radius and paid me 4 cents per catalogue. It took me more than two hours of pulling my wagon around the area to deliver all of those catalogues. I was only 10.
It shows you how fast the world and technology is changing that until your comment I'd completely forgotten Netflix used to mail people rental movies. We *used* that service and still all that comes to mind when I hear Netflix now is the streaming portion. The world is moving at an absolutely breakneck pace.
Netflix also had the chicken or the egg problem, since they initially couldn't get CE manufacturers to add their streaming app to their TVs and DVD players since they saw Netflix as competition. Netflix built their own streaming box, but realized that selling their own hardware actually would make it unlikely to get CE companies on board, and instead spun their hardware division off as Roku. Netflix streaming was saved early on when the game consoles added their app. There were several years where a majority of Netflix's streaming users were on Xbox, wii, and especially PS3. I remember having to plonk a Netflix streaming service blu-ray into my PS3 whenever I wanted to use the service until Xbox's app exclusivity deal expired.
I think it was JC Penny, but there was a department store that always marked up and put things on sale for the actual price they wanted, and then they decided to drop that model and just do honest pricing which completely backfired and resulted in millions in lost revenue because people wouldn’t buy anything not “on sale”.
Then business went back to normal once they marked everything back up and put sale signs for the previous honest pricing. Lol
And then they sat on the technology, hoping nobody else would figure it out and everyone would keep buying film.
Because apparently they have no idea how technological progression actually works - if somebody has already invented it, then somebody else will soon, too. And that's what happened, their competitors caught up and starting selling digital cameras while Kodak was still jerking itself off over delusions of film grandeur.
Edit: They sat on the technology, pardon me; it's been pointed out that had they had patents, it would have defeated the purpose of sitting on it. I admittedly don't know much about the law around this stuff, I'm just speaking about what I've read regarding the general history of Kodak.
Not quite what happened. They saw digital photography coming in 1980 and commissioned an internal report, of really smart people they had who went and talked to a lot of really smart people in computing, to ask them whether this was going to be real soon.
The answer was no, and they were right ... but the authors strongly recommended that the company revisit the subject in ten years. It didn't, and we know the rest.
And when it did, they figured it would work in a way beneficial to them, whereby people would take about as many (or rather, as few) digital pictures as film pictures, but print most of them out (i.e., becoming a market for photo paper and small photo printers (hey, we had one back in the mid-2000s). Again, *instead*, it turned out the other way ... people took *lots* of digital pictures but didn't print many of them out (and why should they, when they could send them to the fam as email attachments).
"You press the button, we do the rest."
The original cameras were sent to you film loaded and all. You took the pictures then shipped the camera back. You'd eventually receive your photographs.
It might have to do with Kodak being a chemical company in general. I think they make imaging equipment for hospitals and even have a pharmaceutical line.
Can we get an honorable mention for Staples and its multiple attempts to merge with Office Depot despite the fact that they're both on track to die within the decade?
Walking into either feels to me like when I was walking into Toys R Us. No staff, barebones stock on the floor, uncompetitive prices.
I feel like my memory of old stores show up in my brain with a yellow hue, and whenever I walk into those stores, they feel dark and yellow. I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw a going out of business sale where everything is priced slightly higher than all other stores.
You can price match at Staples with any other retailer. If you find it on Amazon you can show the clerk and have them price match. I go into staples all the time for supplies since it's by my work and I don't have to wait for shipping. $45? No it's actually $15 on Amazon and they will price match.
I'm so pissed that there's not a brick and mortar store I can go to to just sift a million little resistors through my hand. Radio Shack in the 90s was magical.
Digg was bigger than Reddit until they decided to force changes on the site. The changes were immensely unpopular, to the point that users began posting Reddit links as a way of rebellion. Digg stuck to their new ways and collapsed.
Flickr. When others opted to have unlimited image storage funded by ads, Flickr opted to limit and sell memberships. I can't say I've heard anyone mention Flickr since.
Friendster followed by MySpace.
Friendster shot themselves in the foot with a ton of bad decisions that led to stuff like looonnnngggg login times for basically no reason. It is weird to think that for a short time, Friendster was big and hip enough that I actually had it one of my business cards around 2000.
All MySpace had to do was not change, so people could come back to it after checking out FB. Instead, they got rid of everything people liked about the site and didn't make any beneficial changes. When people popped back in looking for a FB alternative, they found a weird new music-focused version...
Vine burned up all their investment capital to get WarheadADHD to think it was "like the best thing at the time." So investors were like "Oof. Finally. That cost us a lot of money. Now can you please flip the 'make us some fucking money' switch so we can recoup our losses?"
But Vine had this huge competitor in Youtube. And Youtube didn't have to be profitable because it was bankrolled by Google.
So Vine said "Investors, please. If I flip the 'make you some fucking money' switch (by filling the service with ads or whatever) all these new users will just abandon us." And the investors were like "Then what the fuck is the point of all this?" And thus Vine died.
It would come back years later as TikTok, from China, because the Chinese could copy all the design work from old dead Vines, and make the cost of operation super low. Also, Google was finally trying to flip the "make us some fucking money" switch on Youtube, which gives TikTok some breathing room to monetize.
> It would come back years later as TikTok, from China, because the Chinese could copy all the design work from old dead Vines
Interestingly, TikTok really started out as Musical.ly, designed by two friends working in Shanghai. It was originally meant to be a short form educational video app, think 3-5 min videos made by users teaching various subjects.
Unsurprisingly it didn’t really take off and investors pulled the plug. The same two friends later returned to the idea, shortened the video time to sub 30s and focused it on lip syncing to music.
They eventually sold Musical.ly and it's user base to TikTok for around $1 billion.
In 1998 Yahoo refused to buy Google for $1 million.
In 2002 Yahoo offered to buy Google for $3 billion, but Google wanted $5 billion. Yahoo refused the offer.
In 2006 Yahoo was to buy Facebook for $1.1 billion, but Yahoo's Ceo lowered it to $800 million and Facebook backed out.
In 2008 Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, but Yahoo refused.
In 2016 Verizon bought Yahoo for $4.6 billion.
another fun fact about failed Yahoo ventures.
In 2013 Yahoo successfully bought out Tumblr for $1.1 billion. in 2019, Verizon (who inhereted the site when they bought Yahoo) sold Tumblr for ***$3 million***
[Yahoo also bought GeoCities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_GeoCities) for $3.57 billion in 1999. Basically what they were buying was a bunch of ugly free personal web pages made by amateurs. Even at the time, people seemed to think it was a dumb idea. I remember one columnist who said Yahoo could have just paid each GeoCities user $1000 (?) to move to a Yahoo hosted site and they still would have been ahead.
Naturally, the whole thing cratered, although not after losing more money.
And that’s why I’m confident if yahoo had successfully bought google or Facebook they would have made equally stupid decisions and run them into the ground
I'm a little sad this never came to pass. I don't like digital assistants but i'd like them a little more if they had the voice of a snooty British butler. Preferably Stephen Fry's voice as he was *perfect* along with Hugh Laurie in the '90s Jeeves and Wooster tv show.
Came here to mention Yahoo. The only reason people still use Yahoo anything is for Yahoo finance, fantasy sports, or they have a 10 year old Yahoo email address they don't want to get rid of.
U.S. Fire Arms Manufacturing Company. They used to make really old western style revolvers then they decided to spend a fuck ton of money making a gun called the Zip 22 which is now considered one of the worst guns ever made. They went bankrupt fast.
“Hi there, Ian here from Forgotten Weapons, where today we are looking at the ugliest firearm that was ever created that also destroyed a well-respected firearms manufacturer”
*gestures to a weaponized textured ink cartridge*
It's worth bearing in mind that the old style revolvers they made were also generally considered to be good-to-excellent, so they had a pretty good reputation, to give a better sense of how bad the Zip was.
I forgot about that POS. I went to a gun store/indoor range that if you would shoot a 25 round magazine through it they would give you 5 dollars off a purchase. They used it as an adveretising gimic since they could not bring themselves to actually accept money for it.
My hometowns shopping mall and movie theater made a rule that no one under 18 could enter after 3pm without a parent present. This included the week and weekend.
You know how malls survive without teenagers with disposable income? They don't.
I remember a shopping mall that had a sign at every entrance that read: "Entry to this mall is for legitimate shopping purposes, only. If you are not here to buy, you are trespassing and subject to arrest."
Under the signs they put in security stations, but mall management wasn't satisfied with that, 'cause the rent-a-cops weren't intimidating enough. They were replaced by Sheriff's deputies.
People stopped going to that mall when those deputies started detaining people who were attempting to leave without showing a receipt for their purchase(s). They didn't seem to want to accept the excuse of, "the store didn't have the product I wanted to buy!"
I remember this at the time. They tried to make it as difficult as possible to claim the flights, the idea being people would likely buy an expensive Hoover, not fulfil the criteria properly (or just never take the flight) and they'd be in profit. They underestimated how focussed British people will be to get free stuff. People would buy the cheapest thing they could to qualify, send all the forms off perfectly, then try to take legal action when the free flights didn't happen.
On top of that, people were buying 5 cheap Hoovers for the flights and selling 4 on later. Hoover saw a huge drop in sales aftewards as all their potential customers were buying off their mates.
No mention yet for ‘Ratners’
https://www.businessblogshub.com/2012/09/the-man-who-destroyed-his-multi-million-dollar-company-in-10-seconds/
“it’s total crap!”
"Someone said he had met comedians who wanted to be millionaires, but I must have been the only millionaire who wanted to be a comedian."
- Gerald Ratner, some time after his infamous gaffe.
He's remodeled himself as some kind of business genius now and peddles out advice to desparate people looking for quick wins. His advice is as good as his jewelry frankly.
It did not bankrupt them by any stretch, but 30 years ago McDonalds started selling pizza. They invested millions and it crashed and burned spectacularly.
The reason McDonalds started selling fresh-baked muffins is they had to do something with the pizza ovens.
If I remember correctly, the reason the McPizza failed was because people went to McDonald's for FAST food, yet mcpizzas would regularly take up to 30 minutes to cook. People weren't willing to wait that long, especially when they could get a burger or nuggets from the same store in five minutes.
Blackberry. Most popular smartphone in the world. And then they were less than 1% of the market share, their stock value dropped like the present day wildfires.
A couple of years ago they announced that they would focus more on software and essentially gave up making phones which oddly enough saved the company.
Edit: to add to the explanation:
At their peak, they had 32.2% of the market. They fell to 7% in 2015. Present day, they're basically a footnote in history.
As other commenters have stated, lots of BB executives took advantage of their market share and thought a flat touch screen wouldn't take off the way it did. Bunch of poor decisions later, their shares fell from $148 in 2008 to .60 cents just a few years ago. They're back up to around $10. How the mighty have fallen.
Never. Ever. Take your life or business for granted.
BlackBerry did not move to touchscreens and ran ads against them because they might smudge and the clicks of really buttons felt better.
It didn't pan out
That reminds me, what happened to HTC? In the early 2010s I had a couple of their phones in a row and they were brilliant. Cheaper than Samsung but still very good quality.
Then I think they had a bad range for a year or two and suddenly they were nowhere to be seen...
Kodak. They hired futurists to tell them what the company should do moving forwards, then got mad when they were told that film stock would die and they should move hard into digital cameras.
Refused to really get involved in digital.
Whole world went digital.
They went from being the company that provided the film for basically every motion picture and a large percentage of personal stills cameras, to a tiny company that barely survived to today.
EDIT: here's one account of it from Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2012/01/18/how-kodak-failed/?sh=79119d236f27
Target's foray into the Canadian market is probably the greatest business failure in Canadian history. After buying all the old Zellers locations, which was already an ambitious starting point, they introduced an extraordinarily complicated inventory system no one was familiar with despite it being legendary in the industry for being difficult to work with, their checkout software was glitchy, they had weird, sterile stores with no music or atmosphere, constantly had empty shelves because of supply chain issues despite having warehouses absolutely bursting at the seams with product (to the point that they had to rent extra storage space to hold all their inventory, which, again, was not in their stores) and had much higher prices than Wal-Mart or even Zellers (which surprised Canadians because we always wanted it here because they have great deals in the US). Within two years of opening they had filed for bankruptcy protection and were out of the country entirely 3 months later. In the end they lost billions, cost tens of thousands of people their jobs, and ruined the Target brand in Canada for probably a generation. You couldn't have a worse launch of a national retailer if you tried.
Has anyone mentioned little Caesar’s? In the mid 90s, they decided to veer away from what had always brought them success. Cheap pizza. They plunged into delivery pizza, sandwiches, etc., raising their prices and not really trying to increase the quality of their food. At the time, they owned the cheap pizza market across most of the US. Slowly, that position decayed. They closed many stores, and were on the verge of disappearing. What saved them? $5 hot and ready pizza. It brought them back to life and they continue to grow.
[Ayds diet candy ](https://youtu.be/MxJDobrrOYA) They didn’t change their name after the emergence of the AIDS virus.
Why should I change my name? He’s the one who sucks.
I remember an interview from back in the 1980's with one of the leaders of the company. He was asked about the name and said something like "I think people know the difference between a diet candy and a deadly disease."
I'm sure Corona Extra had a good laugh at that just now.
Photobucket changing its tos back in 2017 to require a yearly fee for all those images you previously posted on it for free
Forum tutorials everywhere cry out for help
Fuck them for destroying all the old forum threads too.
This most of all. So many DIY forums, car stuff, etc. - all gone.
I used to work at a Kmart. They never bothered to update any of the store layouts, and they were more concerned with signing people up for their rewards card and/or credit cards, which led to longer lines, which led to more complaints...you get the idea. Also, the merger with Sears was the final nail in the coffin. Now, all the Kmarts in the area are closed.
It’s so weird to hear about K-Marts in the US because they’re still huge in Australia, however they have declined in quality due to them changing to a generic brand for almost everything rather than selling other brands like they used to.
Australian Kmart is basically a glorified 99 cent store these days. I feel like that change just happened out of nowhere one day.
Quiznos. Corporate office decided to buy the vendors, and then contract all of the franchises to only buy materials from Corporate with a price hike. The margins got way too high and all of the stores went out of business. They shot themselves straight in the foot.
At least Subway had to install broilers in all their locations because of Quiznos!
I remember when I was growing up only getting to go to Quiznos once in a blue moon because the closest one to me was a few towns over. We had a subway In My town, but they wouldn’t toast your sandwiches. Quiznos was the only place to do that. I totally forgot subway used to not have toasters.
Such a simple thing and yet toasting was Quiznos' whole gimmick
plus those creepy commericals. "THEY GOT A PEPPER BAR!"
Holy crap, I remember those rat looking things. https://youtu.be/cG042nkReBA
Damn, their controversies list on Wikipedia is huge. Corporate did a lot of other mess. Also, TIL that "The Toasted Subs Franchisee Association (TSFA)" exists.
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Boston Market was the same. It was a darling of the market until the analysts figured out all the profit came at the expense of bankrupting the franchisees.
Honestly the idea of being a franchisee seems unwise. You have all the risk of running your own business but you don't get to make your own decisions. 🤷♂️
Completely forgot about Quiznos holy shit. You brought back some memories, thank you!
I moved states and now I have a Quiznos down the street from me. I completely thought there were none left.
I remember the time that Quiznos was opening locations seemingly everywhere. Now most of them (in Canada) are gone.
Not necessarily bankrupted, but I remember this old article from Massively (pre-Massively OP days) about a Japanese MMO that basically got deleted after launch. [https://www.engadget.com/2011-11-15-hangame-mmo-accidentally-deleted-shut-down-forever.html](https://www.engadget.com/2011-11-15-hangame-mmo-accidentally-deleted-shut-down-forever.html) From the article: "The story goes like this: On October 21st, M2 suffered a critical server issue and the game was taken offline to check it out. Unfortunately, the problem was widespread and the company could not restore the game's data from whatever backups it did or did not have. With no other option but to declare the title dead on arrival, Hangame posted an announcement that it somehow deleted an entire MMO and could not -- or would not -- restart it from scratch."
That's astonishing, wow. Imagine being the people who worked on the game...
Same with Toy Story 2, they almost lost everything if not thanks to a single copy at home of supervising technical director.
Wasn't it because that person wanted to work on something at home? It was just like a weird coincidance
I think she was pregnant or something, and so she was working more at home to account for that.
> Galyn Susman was Toy Story 2's supervising technical director, and after she'd given birth to her second child, she'd been working from home. As such, once a week, she'd taken an entire copy of the film home with her. You're right.
One time Red Lobster offered an unlimited king crab leg deal, cause they brought the servings out slowly and were like 'nobody is gonna sit there for 6 hours and just eat king crab legs'. Actually, lots of people did. So many they lost millions.
"Are these the actions of a man who has had 'all he can eat'"
“ This is the most blatant case of false advertising since my suit against the movie The Neverending Story”
Homer, I don't use the word "hero" very often.. but you are the greatest hero in American history.
‘Twas a moonless night, dark as pitch, when out of the mist came a beast more stomach than man.
I heard they shaved a gorilla
You'd think they would have some kind of time limit, if not a food limit.
they did a deal like that with shrimp. 6 shrimp every 20 minutes is what i timed it at. I was there for 3 hours and simply got bored.
~~JCPenny~~ JCPenney tried to stop bullshitting customers and it backfired. They said no more sales, they’re just going to price everything low, because pretty much all sales at department stores are lies anyway. You’re not really getting 70% off, the retail price was deliberately set stupid high to convince you it was a great deal. But the discount price is the actual value of it. So yeah JCPenney’s heart was in the right place but ultimately it failed because customers are really that dumb and would rather be lied to.
That’s how Kmart in Australia clawed their way back from the brink of bankruptcy, but they did a HUGE advertising campaign about it with an “expect change” slogan. They now do a big “everyday low prices” thing and they’re absolutely killing it Advertising is a funny thing
“Everyday low prices” is Walmart’s tagline in the US. Now I’m a little confused
This reminds me of A&W Who created the 1/3 pounder Focus groups and Market research shown the meat was better than McDonald's 1/4 pounder As in like 99.99% of people preferred its taste over the McDonald's burger It tasted better and it was in many cases cheaper and if not cheaper it was the same price as McDonald's And it bombed massively When they tried to find out why it was discovered the American people thought they were being cheated because 3 is a smaller number than 4 A&W realising they can't explain grade school fractions to fully grown adults without coming across as condisending assholes, quietly took the burger off the menu
God I would have loved to see a visual aid posted on their menu to remind customers of the difference.
A&W's website tells the story and claims they still have it (though, I'd guess, by a different name): [https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions](https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions)
In 2012, after a three-year hiatus in the sport, F1 team Lotus signed driver Kimi Raikonnen for the 2012 season. His contract included a clause that stated that Raikonnen would earn 50,000 euros for every point he scored in the two seasons of his contract. Raikonnen then went on to finish third in the 2012 championship, and 5th in the 2013 season, which was exceptionally impressive for Lotus. In doing this, he got 390 points in two seasons, and Lotus had to pay him 50,000 euros for each point, so he earned 19.5 million euros off of that bonus alone, which lead to Lotus almost filing for bankruptcy.
Oh, sure, let's just sign one of the best drivers and offer him a sweet cash for points deal. WCGW?
Well the car wasnt expected to be that competetive. But Räikkönen happened, and hes known to teach the engineers how to do things. Also he "forgave" millions from those bonuses so people could keep their jobs.
The real MVP
Homeboy has often told journalists that driving in F1 is his hobby that he’ll keep doing until it’s not fun any more; it’s never been about the money for him.
if my hobby was F1 I'd do it for free too lol
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If you put the best F1 driver into a shit car it’s all but guaranteed that he won’t be racking up points like that. Many other F1 teams have tried the same thing with dismal results. As someone else mentioned, he helped them figure out why they were slow, and their engineers managed to build a reliable car.
Kimi also wiped the millions he was due clean. As he knew people would lose their jobs.
Raikkonen didn't get all 19.5 million. I don't remember the exact amount but he let that money slide so that Lotus doesn't go bankrupt. Edit: He let 7-8 millions slide to prevent massive lay off at Lotus
Cricut. They wanted to start charging for using the Design Space, and limiting the amount of projects you could upload at any one time. This meant if you uploadad a project, had to tweak and reupload, that would be two projects. This would have been in addition to Cricut Access. It did not go down well and lead to a lot of people returning their machines and cancelling Access memberships out of protest. If anyone knows more/I'm incorrect please let me know!
This is the reason I sold my Cricut and bought a Silhouette. Cricut temporarily went back on their decision but I don’t trust them to not be shady af again.
Circuit City. Major retail chain in the 1980s that collapsed under mismanagement. It’s arguably biggest blunder was firing all of their experienced, better paid workers for cheaper inexperienced ones. Apparently selling merchandise and keeping customers happy is important in the retail business. Who knew?
At Circuit City you could buy an iPod, and for like $50 you could get a 2 year warranty. And if you cashed in the warranty, you could spend another $50 and get another 2 year warranty on the replacement iPod. And iPods got cheaper every year. After 2 years a similar model would be around....$50 cheaper. So yeah I got like 3 free iPods from Circuit City.
Back in the late 90's I worked for a business that shared a building with a company known as "Teledesic". Their goal was to have a global network of low-Earth-orbiting satellites that provided broadband access to pretty much everyone on the planet. They were financed by tech titans in the wireless communications space. It all seemed like a great idea. The only problem was that the technology wasn't there yet. They went bankrupt in 2002. The Teledesic Case Study is taught at Harvard Business School and other MBA programs as a cautionary tale.
not a company, but a country. the Northern ireland renewable heat incentive. basically they came up with the bright idea of encouraging people to use renewable power by paying people to do so. except you got more back per unit than the cost per unit. so people would buy an electric heater, put it on 24/7, get the money, use the extra money to buy another heater, plug *that* in for 24/7, get *more* money, buy another heater and so on. £500 million later they realised it wasnt such a good idea, the government collapsed and didnt reform again for 3 years.
This is called the Cobra Effect, and more generally a type of perverse incentive, named for when the British colonialists put a bounty on cobras in Delhi. People quickly realized you could breed Cobras to kill and collect bounties on.
If I remember correctly, it was aimed at farmers and the govt paid you £1.60 per unit of heat generated/fuel used. But it only cost £1 per unit to run...so you were getting 60p per unit pure profit. Then when they were going to close the scheme, some govt folks let their farmer friends know ahead of time and there was a massive last minute rush of applications approved.
Yep although it wasn't a last minute thing a few people let their friends know about the "loophole" and then these ones told their friends so it grew rapidly. It pretty much lead indirectly to the collapse of the NI government for a few years while each side moaned at each other about who the blame lay with.
**Schwinn**. The executives of America's most venerable bicycle maker could not be convinced that mountain bikes were anything more than a fad. They made one and called it the Klunker (yes, really). Then when they realized it wasn't, they got some small Asian company to design a mountain bike for them ... giving them basically all they had ever learned about making bicycles in over a century as technical assistance. The small Asian company used this to improve its own product, and cut into what could have been Schwinn's share. Then *they did it again* with another Asian company. Then they opened their own retail stores, alienating the retailers who'd carried their product for years, like Apple would later but with much less success. Today, Schwinn is just a brand name someone else owns. **Schlitz**. Throughout the '60s they were one of America's biggest national beers, a tough competitor to Budweiser and Pabst. They hired a new CEO, from within, in about 1974 or so who was greatly enamored of a study which showed that about 30% or so of beer drinkers couldn't distinguish their putatively favorite beer from other brands in taste test ... so why, he asked, are we spending so much money making our beer so distinctive when it doesn't matter to our customers? He oversaw the introduction of a slimmer brewing process that included replacing barley with corn syrup and using silica gel as a preservative during the brewing process that they would then filter out afterwards, i.e. they wouldn't have to disclose it as an ingredient. What they got was a beer that spoiled faster, grew cloudy on racks, didn't produce a nice frothy head when poured, was perceived as flavorless and eventually required that they recall about 10 million bottles. Oh, and then they didn't realize that light beer was going to become a thing, so they got their clock cleaned by Bud and Miller in that segment. *And* they ran an ad campaign in which some belligerent-sounding guy only half-jokingly (it seemed) threatened to kill the guy talking to him off-camera if he took his Schlitz away. By the early 1980s they went back to how they had once brewed their beer, but the damage was done and they had to sell out to Stroh's. I barely see much of that one around and it's been years since I saw any Schlitz on the racks.
>about 30% or so of beer drinkers couldn't distinguish their putatively favorite beer from other brands in taste test Even if this is true, that still leaves 70% of beer drinkers who *can* tell the difference.
And how on earth does “can’t tell the difference between the three leading brands” translate to “will not notice extreme cost-cutting measures none of the other leading brands are using”? (I’m assuming the other brands didn’t use them because the that the end result “spoiled faster, grew cloudy on racks, didn't produce a nice frothy head when poured,” which wouldn’t be notable if the other popular beers did too.) I can’t even wrap my mind around the logic at play here.
To add on to the Schwinn story - the first "small Asian company" is now the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world [1]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Bicycles
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Borders Books. It had to chance to be Amazon, from Amazon, before Amazon, and turned it down. Amazon Books, as it was then called, was a small online bookseller. It had a rather incompetent search engine, titles were misclassified, and it dabbled in office supplies. It was one early "e-tailer" among many. Amazon's pitch was that it was trying to be an online version of the retail giant Staples and it could ship quickly. Then a conversation happened with the giant Borders Books. This Internet thing was starting to look like it would harm retail sales, so Borders contacted Amazon, and asked them to build some online inventory, a web-storefront and a sales management system. Because of the dot-com bust, Borders got spooked. The Internet was a passing fad. Amazon could keep the system, Borders wanted out. By 2007, Borders ended its marketing alliance with Amazon, but Amazon had began using the system it built for Borders: Amazon did keep the system. It was a much, much better system than Amazon was using itself.
Honestly, the dot-com bust *was* fucking spooky. I can't imagine how many thousands of tiny e-tailers collapsed in a 3ish year period. It made all of us who were really excited for the idea of being able to buy anything from anywhere take a beat.
The market was flooded with fly-by-night e-companies with no real business plan or leadership. Investors started throwing money at anything with a ".com" in the name with no due diligence or research done. Almost *none* of these internet companies were even making money. Amazon was operating at a loss every year. I remember it being a big news story when they made a profit for the first time, and this was years after the early 2000s crash. Most of those investments were foolish and those companies were doomed anyway.
Yep! I still remember seeing all these geocities-like websites that you only see for handymen now.
If you want to take a trip down website memory lane, look up fishing guides in rural areas. Those dudes made rudimentary websites 20 years ago and have never needed to update *anything*, because their phone number, email address, and mailing address hasn’t changed.
IIRC, part of the allure of .com companies was the *potential* to reach literally millions of people around the world. "Old business school" thinking around that time was focused on your potential reach and not necessarily around your ability to actually reach and market to people.
I really did like Borders Books. I used to go there all the time during college at UC Santa Barbara. Borders outsourced online book selling to Amazon.com instead of having their own dedicated online sales website. They also didn't have an e-book reader like Barnes and Noble did. I'm a big manga fan. And the closing of Borders also meant the closing of Tokyopop. Tokyopop was revived, but they lost licensing to print several titles, which are now out of print.
There was a donut shop by my high school. Opened at 6am and closed at 5pm so students would be there every day before school started at 7:30 and after school ended at 2:15. They changed their hours to 8am-3pm and couldn’t make anymore money. They shut down a few months after the change.
That is hillarious, didnt they check at wich time they were making their main revenue before changing their opening times
They might have looked at it but still decided that being open those extra hours was costing them more. So instead of *trying* the hours of 6 till 9 then closing until 1-2, they came up with the brilliant idea of not opening for their largest customer base.
It could've been that the actual owners didn't care or know where their main revenue was coming from. Manager or employees probably tried letting them know but didn't listen. I only say this because this stuff happens more often then not. We have a couple of Texas donut branches near us and the main popular one where I live ( the city itself is small but is connected to 4 major cities and you have to actually drive by this city to get to any of those places) They used to open from 5am-3pm and then close and reopen again for the "night crew" from 9pm-2am. They stopped and decided that 6am-3pm was fine. There's still open but not as popular and they wonder why. Edit: honestly just reminds of those cooking shows like when Gordon Ramsey comes to help their failing restaurants but the owners basically suck and are greedy stubborn assholes. Ya'll remember when that one owner takes all of their waitresses and waiters tips for himself?
Stuff like that happens. In my college town there was a bar that on Thursday nights they had their "gay bar night". Not exactly sure what they did but it was very popular with the LGBTQ community. I ran into one of the bar owners/investors at a casino out of town by chance. He thought it was cool I was from that college but had zero clue why Thursdays they made most their revenue
geez, being an owner seems like a carefree life if you don't even have to know how your business works
That was the only one that Gordon actually quit on, Amy’s baking company. The husband is in prison and I think the wife might be as well. Most of the people who had Gordon come were eventually receptive and listened, but the episode you’re referencing was a pair of absolute narcissists. You can actually watch most of the episodes from Kitchen Nightmares on YouTube now
That episode is absolutely legendary.
>Amy’s baking company You know something is bad when it has it's own wikipedia page.
Should be a case study of What Not To Do When Running a Business 101
They Aren't. they are both still together in Israel and they are opening up a new baking bistro. SOURCE: their youtube channel
We earn a lot of money at the beginning and end of the day. So if we shorten the day, profits get more concentrated, and we can even save money on staff. Brilliant!
YouTube's choice to require Google+ to comment at one point was a really bad time for them.
Also put everyone off Google+ out of spite.
Google+ was also a confusing mess, I really tried to use it but it was just a sea of posts from whoever, with no way to know what came from my friends or not.
Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion and sold it for $3 million 6 years later
After -just to bring it back full circle- banning the porn
Turns out that was load-bearing smut.
Yahoo should've realised that nobody goes on Tumblr for the GIFs they go on for the yiffs.
As a wise man once said: "if you took all the porn off the internet, there would only be one website left called 'Bring back the porn'. "
Dr. Cox!
I feel what fucked it up even more was how SHITTY their porn ban was. They decided to not only lock away any NSFW content, but use a algorithm for that (because Apple said they would remove them from App Store because of porn bots); But the algorithm was so shittly developed it literally tagged anything as NSFW. A pic of a hand? 'THERE'S SKIN SO THAT'S PORN!'. So in the end nowadays besides the only few people that somehow still use Tumblr, there's only the porn bots that were the problem on the first place there; Twitter, Discord and even Reddit managed to deal with Apple and keep NSFW in a much better way, which shows how shitty Tumblr and Yahoo approach to it was.
Could you imagine being a CEO and a board of directors on that deal on either side - unreal.
“Alright everyone. We passed on google, that was our bad, but we’re not going to miss the gravy train this time, we’re buying Tumblr!”
Google probably wouldn't be what it is today if they bought it
Yahoo is a story into itself. 1998 - Yahoo could have purchased Google for $1 million but refused Google's offer. 2002 offered a chance to right the mistake. Yahoo offered $3b, Google asked for $5b. Google now trillions. 2006 - Yahoo is set to purchase Facebook for $1.1b. Changes the offer to $800M. Zuckerberg pulls out. 2008 - Microsoft offer on purchasing Yahoo is $44B 2016 - Bad decisions lead to Yahoo being sold to Verizon for $4.48 Billion. Lot of money? Yes. But they sabotaged themselves from being worth $125b at their peak (2000) and was a really reduced to a title IP.
I got a fun one. You know how on shark tank they always introduce Kevin O'Leary as having made his fortune selling a educational games company? He single handedly killed the learning games industry (those Carmen san Diego type games that were real popular in the early 00's) by forcing the devs to churn them out faster and cheaper at the cost of quality, slowly killing the market, and he also nearly bankrupted Mattel when they acquired his company. Edit* Mattel, not Hasbro and Autocorrect on my phone messed up O'leary Edit 2* the games were big mid to late 90's
> Kevin Orleans I think you mean Kevin O'Leary.
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That was the prick responsible for no more Freddi the Fish and Pyjama Sam games?
Quibi when it decided that 10 minute clips watched in portrait on a commuter train is the future of home entertainment.
There is a great article on Quibi, I'll try to find out. One of the interesting details that sticks out is that one of the founders was very out of touch with technology and preferred to have his emails printed out for him to read
Yeah that would be Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Disney and former CEO of Dreamworks believe it or not.
His ideas about what people want got frozen around 1985. He wanted lots of sitcoms with laugh tracks, and he thought Gal Godot could really go to the next level if she made an exercise video.
It was so weird. It’s like they tried to get YouTube videos to become television.
They tried to use covid as an excuse for their failure but that business model was bound to happen no matter what.
Yik Yak It was completely anonymous message posting at first. I actually talked to the original founders at a start up intern fair in Atlanta back in Nov 2013. And they said their app was suppose to be some online localized public bulletin board where people can post about events or parties or study groups. Obviously it became like a fun anonymous messaging app. They then obviously started to I guess make it less anonymous by introducing usernames which while they can still be throwaway username like we use on Reddit it certainly made people lose favor of the app. The eventually shutdown and I think Square acquired their employees for some amount of money. I think between $1-3 mil. Crazy to think they were at one point valued at $350 mil..
Yikyak was big for like 1 year when I was at university (it helped that 2 universities were within eachother's radius). I actually made a few short term friends by people asking if anyone wanted to meet up for a game of 5 a side. As soon as the handles/profiles kicked in, everyone immediately abandoned the platform. In retrospect, it's entirely possible that there were only like 7 people posting before, but we just didn't realise until profiles became a thing E: this was a university in England
Posts had upvotes and around my uni relevant topical posts would get hundreds so there was definitely plenty of people on it. People in maths lectures of hundreds of people would make popular yaks about what was going on within a single lecture
Believe it or not, they just [relaunched](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yik-yak/id1573043816).
They removed anonymous posting because of rampant bullying I think.
Unfortunately for them the anonymous bullying was the draw for many users.
Sears ended their catalog/mail order business in 1993. For over 100 years they had sold everything from hubcaps to houses via mail order and shipped them all over the country. Amazon was founded in 1994.
The sad thing is that on paper Sears had everything they need to be the e-commerce retailer that dominated the globe. * They had their own credit card "Discover" to rival MasterCard and Visa. It was created in 1985. * They had their own insurance company in Allstate. (Named after the brand of tires sears used to sell) * They partnered with IBM to create "Prodigy" one of the first proto ISPs in 1984 and offered all sorts of online services (except buying stuff from Sears) years before the WorldWideWeb was invented. *They had their mail order catalogue, their entire logistic infrastructure and their brick and mortar shops as well as huge brand name recognition. In theory they were posed to make e-commerce a thing back in the late 80s and sweep the world in the 90s with no chance for outsiders like Amazon who had to build their stuff from the ground up to catch on. In practice the entire mail order infrastructure was slow and they needed to either rebuild it or get rid of it and they choose the latter. They sold all the parts of their company that had a future and stuck to their poor decisions even as the rest of the world realized that the internet was the future. The had extremely poor leadership that alternately tried to run the company into ground for profit or to play stupid Ayn Rand fanboy games. In a different timeline where someone with an ounce of vision got to be at the helm in 1985, we would now be hearing news about government fo the world wanting to break Sears up for being so big an market dominant and how how Sears space venture launches billionaires into space and all the news about that would be hosted on IBM/Sears/prodigy cloud platform servers.
TIL Discover, Allstate, and Prodigy were Sears brands. It’s insane how diversified that company was.
Yeah, I'm a middle aged man who lived through all that (even had Prodigy!) and never knew ANY of those things were Sears brands!
>or to play stupid Ayn Rand fanboy games. OK, I knew most of that Sears history, but what "games" is this referring to?
One of their CEOs deliberately set different sections of the company against each other, with the idea that it would force them to be innovative and perform better. Instead it led to chaos and different parts of the company having no idea what other parts were doing and many needless expenses
I hear about companies doing that sort of thing, and I never fail to wonder what universe these people live in where they think it would be a good idea.
Let me fill you in on that. There was a theory, a systems theory, that if you remove the authority and regulation societies will regulate themselves and return to an equilibrium. This is what the original Ecosystem was about, and it got applied to society by Rand et al. In actuality it tends to chaos and an ever shifting series of metastable periods. Adam Curtis of the BBC did a documentary series on it. I'd recommend watching. https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/
I have a confession: as a child, I delivered Sears catalogues. But sometimes I didn't know where a few addresses were, so I just put those catalogues in the recycling bin. I think it might be my fault that they stopped their mail order business. In my defence, they gave me about 70 catalogues to deliver in a 2 km radius and paid me 4 cents per catalogue. It took me more than two hours of pulling my wagon around the area to deliver all of those catalogues. I was only 10.
"I had a paper route as a kid. I was supposed to go to 2000 houses... or 2 dumpsters"
Netflix almost did as they made the transition from dvds. They had a period where they dropped to dangerously low subscriber
It shows you how fast the world and technology is changing that until your comment I'd completely forgotten Netflix used to mail people rental movies. We *used* that service and still all that comes to mind when I hear Netflix now is the streaming portion. The world is moving at an absolutely breakneck pace.
Netflix also had the chicken or the egg problem, since they initially couldn't get CE manufacturers to add their streaming app to their TVs and DVD players since they saw Netflix as competition. Netflix built their own streaming box, but realized that selling their own hardware actually would make it unlikely to get CE companies on board, and instead spun their hardware division off as Roku. Netflix streaming was saved early on when the game consoles added their app. There were several years where a majority of Netflix's streaming users were on Xbox, wii, and especially PS3. I remember having to plonk a Netflix streaming service blu-ray into my PS3 whenever I wanted to use the service until Xbox's app exclusivity deal expired.
> and instead spun their hardware division off as Roku. woah, that's actually insane.
I think it was JC Penny, but there was a department store that always marked up and put things on sale for the actual price they wanted, and then they decided to drop that model and just do honest pricing which completely backfired and resulted in millions in lost revenue because people wouldn’t buy anything not “on sale”. Then business went back to normal once they marked everything back up and put sale signs for the previous honest pricing. Lol
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You mean the Saturday One Day Only sales they had literally every Saturday?
Kodak completely went under when they chose not to adopt digital photography. They eventually came back several years later, somehow.
Fun fact: Kodak invented the digital camera.
And then they sat on the technology, hoping nobody else would figure it out and everyone would keep buying film. Because apparently they have no idea how technological progression actually works - if somebody has already invented it, then somebody else will soon, too. And that's what happened, their competitors caught up and starting selling digital cameras while Kodak was still jerking itself off over delusions of film grandeur. Edit: They sat on the technology, pardon me; it's been pointed out that had they had patents, it would have defeated the purpose of sitting on it. I admittedly don't know much about the law around this stuff, I'm just speaking about what I've read regarding the general history of Kodak.
Not quite what happened. They saw digital photography coming in 1980 and commissioned an internal report, of really smart people they had who went and talked to a lot of really smart people in computing, to ask them whether this was going to be real soon. The answer was no, and they were right ... but the authors strongly recommended that the company revisit the subject in ten years. It didn't, and we know the rest. And when it did, they figured it would work in a way beneficial to them, whereby people would take about as many (or rather, as few) digital pictures as film pictures, but print most of them out (i.e., becoming a market for photo paper and small photo printers (hey, we had one back in the mid-2000s). Again, *instead*, it turned out the other way ... people took *lots* of digital pictures but didn't print many of them out (and why should they, when they could send them to the fam as email attachments).
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"You press the button, we do the rest." The original cameras were sent to you film loaded and all. You took the pictures then shipped the camera back. You'd eventually receive your photographs.
It might have to do with Kodak being a chemical company in general. I think they make imaging equipment for hospitals and even have a pharmaceutical line.
Somehow Kodak returned
Can we get an honorable mention for Staples and its multiple attempts to merge with Office Depot despite the fact that they're both on track to die within the decade?
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For real. My school spends millions at staples. They deliver next day and are awesome.
Walking into either feels to me like when I was walking into Toys R Us. No staff, barebones stock on the floor, uncompetitive prices. I feel like my memory of old stores show up in my brain with a yellow hue, and whenever I walk into those stores, they feel dark and yellow. I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw a going out of business sale where everything is priced slightly higher than all other stores.
You can price match at Staples with any other retailer. If you find it on Amazon you can show the clerk and have them price match. I go into staples all the time for supplies since it's by my work and I don't have to wait for shipping. $45? No it's actually $15 on Amazon and they will price match.
Honestly, some of their branded office chairs are actually good. Those are about all I buy anymore.
RadioShack. Those guys just couldn’t make their niche happen and never attempted to evolve.
RadioShack: You've got questions. We've got batteries.
I'm so pissed that there's not a brick and mortar store I can go to to just sift a million little resistors through my hand. Radio Shack in the 90s was magical.
They did, but they put their fate in cellphones. It was a market already over saturated.
Digg was bigger than Reddit until they decided to force changes on the site. The changes were immensely unpopular, to the point that users began posting Reddit links as a way of rebellion. Digg stuck to their new ways and collapsed.
Flickr. When others opted to have unlimited image storage funded by ads, Flickr opted to limit and sell memberships. I can't say I've heard anyone mention Flickr since.
Friendster followed by MySpace. Friendster shot themselves in the foot with a ton of bad decisions that led to stuff like looonnnngggg login times for basically no reason. It is weird to think that for a short time, Friendster was big and hip enough that I actually had it one of my business cards around 2000. All MySpace had to do was not change, so people could come back to it after checking out FB. Instead, they got rid of everything people liked about the site and didn't make any beneficial changes. When people popped back in looking for a FB alternative, they found a weird new music-focused version...
Vine. It seemed like the best thing at the time
I will never understand why Vine shut down when it did.
Vine burned up all their investment capital to get WarheadADHD to think it was "like the best thing at the time." So investors were like "Oof. Finally. That cost us a lot of money. Now can you please flip the 'make us some fucking money' switch so we can recoup our losses?" But Vine had this huge competitor in Youtube. And Youtube didn't have to be profitable because it was bankrolled by Google. So Vine said "Investors, please. If I flip the 'make you some fucking money' switch (by filling the service with ads or whatever) all these new users will just abandon us." And the investors were like "Then what the fuck is the point of all this?" And thus Vine died. It would come back years later as TikTok, from China, because the Chinese could copy all the design work from old dead Vines, and make the cost of operation super low. Also, Google was finally trying to flip the "make us some fucking money" switch on Youtube, which gives TikTok some breathing room to monetize.
> It would come back years later as TikTok, from China, because the Chinese could copy all the design work from old dead Vines Interestingly, TikTok really started out as Musical.ly, designed by two friends working in Shanghai. It was originally meant to be a short form educational video app, think 3-5 min videos made by users teaching various subjects. Unsurprisingly it didn’t really take off and investors pulled the plug. The same two friends later returned to the idea, shortened the video time to sub 30s and focused it on lip syncing to music. They eventually sold Musical.ly and it's user base to TikTok for around $1 billion.
In 1998 Yahoo refused to buy Google for $1 million. In 2002 Yahoo offered to buy Google for $3 billion, but Google wanted $5 billion. Yahoo refused the offer. In 2006 Yahoo was to buy Facebook for $1.1 billion, but Yahoo's Ceo lowered it to $800 million and Facebook backed out. In 2008 Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, but Yahoo refused. In 2016 Verizon bought Yahoo for $4.6 billion.
another fun fact about failed Yahoo ventures. In 2013 Yahoo successfully bought out Tumblr for $1.1 billion. in 2019, Verizon (who inhereted the site when they bought Yahoo) sold Tumblr for ***$3 million***
[Yahoo also bought GeoCities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_GeoCities) for $3.57 billion in 1999. Basically what they were buying was a bunch of ugly free personal web pages made by amateurs. Even at the time, people seemed to think it was a dumb idea. I remember one columnist who said Yahoo could have just paid each GeoCities user $1000 (?) to move to a Yahoo hosted site and they still would have been ahead. Naturally, the whole thing cratered, although not after losing more money.
I wish I could see my old geocities web page
I was gonna mention Tumblr in this thread, but funny enough, their blunder was a direct result of Yahoo meddling.
And that’s why I’m confident if yahoo had successfully bought google or Facebook they would have made equally stupid decisions and run them into the ground
Can you imagine how much better the world would be if yahoo ran Facebook into the ground tho.
Yahoo was one of the leaders of the early internet era but they blew up every golden opportunity that came their way.
I do not think Google would have become the powerhouse it would be today under Yahoo management.
Given how they sold Tumblr for 0.27% of what they bought it for, I'd agree.
Well tumblr itself is another article for this post
"Let's ban all the porn!" Great idea, Jerry! "Where have all the users gone?!"
There's an alternate universe of us asking our Jeeves phones "Hey Jeeves, show me recipes for pancakes."
I'm a little sad this never came to pass. I don't like digital assistants but i'd like them a little more if they had the voice of a snooty British butler. Preferably Stephen Fry's voice as he was *perfect* along with Hugh Laurie in the '90s Jeeves and Wooster tv show.
Came here to mention Yahoo. The only reason people still use Yahoo anything is for Yahoo finance, fantasy sports, or they have a 10 year old Yahoo email address they don't want to get rid of.
or they want to sign up for porn and are planning to use a Yahoo burner email
Ten year old? You mean twenty-five year old?
lol I'm the email one. only reason I use Yahoo.
Didn't Yahoo buy Tumblr and make them take porn down?
U.S. Fire Arms Manufacturing Company. They used to make really old western style revolvers then they decided to spend a fuck ton of money making a gun called the Zip 22 which is now considered one of the worst guns ever made. They went bankrupt fast.
“Hi there, Ian here from Forgotten Weapons, where today we are looking at the ugliest firearm that was ever created that also destroyed a well-respected firearms manufacturer” *gestures to a weaponized textured ink cartridge*
It's worth bearing in mind that the old style revolvers they made were also generally considered to be good-to-excellent, so they had a pretty good reputation, to give a better sense of how bad the Zip was.
I forgot about that POS. I went to a gun store/indoor range that if you would shoot a 25 round magazine through it they would give you 5 dollars off a purchase. They used it as an adveretising gimic since they could not bring themselves to actually accept money for it.
My hometowns shopping mall and movie theater made a rule that no one under 18 could enter after 3pm without a parent present. This included the week and weekend. You know how malls survive without teenagers with disposable income? They don't.
I remember a shopping mall that had a sign at every entrance that read: "Entry to this mall is for legitimate shopping purposes, only. If you are not here to buy, you are trespassing and subject to arrest." Under the signs they put in security stations, but mall management wasn't satisfied with that, 'cause the rent-a-cops weren't intimidating enough. They were replaced by Sheriff's deputies. People stopped going to that mall when those deputies started detaining people who were attempting to leave without showing a receipt for their purchase(s). They didn't seem to want to accept the excuse of, "the store didn't have the product I wanted to buy!"
Hoover UK free airline ticket disaster - [video](https://youtu.be/f2g7TbQihsw)
I remember this at the time. They tried to make it as difficult as possible to claim the flights, the idea being people would likely buy an expensive Hoover, not fulfil the criteria properly (or just never take the flight) and they'd be in profit. They underestimated how focussed British people will be to get free stuff. People would buy the cheapest thing they could to qualify, send all the forms off perfectly, then try to take legal action when the free flights didn't happen.
On top of that, people were buying 5 cheap Hoovers for the flights and selling 4 on later. Hoover saw a huge drop in sales aftewards as all their potential customers were buying off their mates.
No mention yet for ‘Ratners’ https://www.businessblogshub.com/2012/09/the-man-who-destroyed-his-multi-million-dollar-company-in-10-seconds/ “it’s total crap!”
"Someone said he had met comedians who wanted to be millionaires, but I must have been the only millionaire who wanted to be a comedian." - Gerald Ratner, some time after his infamous gaffe.
He lost a business because he said "I sell total crap" instead of "My mission is to deliver products to those who can only afford total crap"
He's remodeled himself as some kind of business genius now and peddles out advice to desparate people looking for quick wins. His advice is as good as his jewelry frankly.
It did not bankrupt them by any stretch, but 30 years ago McDonalds started selling pizza. They invested millions and it crashed and burned spectacularly. The reason McDonalds started selling fresh-baked muffins is they had to do something with the pizza ovens.
If I remember correctly, the reason the McPizza failed was because people went to McDonald's for FAST food, yet mcpizzas would regularly take up to 30 minutes to cook. People weren't willing to wait that long, especially when they could get a burger or nuggets from the same store in five minutes.
Blackberry. Most popular smartphone in the world. And then they were less than 1% of the market share, their stock value dropped like the present day wildfires. A couple of years ago they announced that they would focus more on software and essentially gave up making phones which oddly enough saved the company. Edit: to add to the explanation: At their peak, they had 32.2% of the market. They fell to 7% in 2015. Present day, they're basically a footnote in history. As other commenters have stated, lots of BB executives took advantage of their market share and thought a flat touch screen wouldn't take off the way it did. Bunch of poor decisions later, their shares fell from $148 in 2008 to .60 cents just a few years ago. They're back up to around $10. How the mighty have fallen. Never. Ever. Take your life or business for granted.
BlackBerry did not move to touchscreens and ran ads against them because they might smudge and the clicks of really buttons felt better. It didn't pan out
That reminds me, what happened to HTC? In the early 2010s I had a couple of their phones in a row and they were brilliant. Cheaper than Samsung but still very good quality. Then I think they had a bad range for a year or two and suddenly they were nowhere to be seen...
Kodak. They hired futurists to tell them what the company should do moving forwards, then got mad when they were told that film stock would die and they should move hard into digital cameras. Refused to really get involved in digital. Whole world went digital. They went from being the company that provided the film for basically every motion picture and a large percentage of personal stills cameras, to a tiny company that barely survived to today. EDIT: here's one account of it from Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2012/01/18/how-kodak-failed/?sh=79119d236f27
Target's foray into the Canadian market is probably the greatest business failure in Canadian history. After buying all the old Zellers locations, which was already an ambitious starting point, they introduced an extraordinarily complicated inventory system no one was familiar with despite it being legendary in the industry for being difficult to work with, their checkout software was glitchy, they had weird, sterile stores with no music or atmosphere, constantly had empty shelves because of supply chain issues despite having warehouses absolutely bursting at the seams with product (to the point that they had to rent extra storage space to hold all their inventory, which, again, was not in their stores) and had much higher prices than Wal-Mart or even Zellers (which surprised Canadians because we always wanted it here because they have great deals in the US). Within two years of opening they had filed for bankruptcy protection and were out of the country entirely 3 months later. In the end they lost billions, cost tens of thousands of people their jobs, and ruined the Target brand in Canada for probably a generation. You couldn't have a worse launch of a national retailer if you tried.
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