20 Unbelievable Ways Companies Royally Screwed Themselves

‘Looking at you, Tumblr’
20 Unbelievable Ways Companies Royally Screwed Themselves

When we think of an extremely competent person, it’s not usually your local grocery bagger or youth soccer referee, even though that’s probably the truth. Instead, you imagine a business person wearing an expensive suit, carrying a briefcase full of invaluable secrets, and throwing around words like “merger” and “leverage” and “tie clip.” They’re in charge of billions of dollars, the livelihoods of countless people, and the economic fate of the entire world. They wouldn’t entrust all of that to some dummy… would they?

The truth that we’re finding out more and more every day is that the people at the top of the world’s most recognizable brands are pretty big idiots. They make industry-rocking decisions on a whim, might not have any idea what their business does and their customers like about it, and sometimes care more about looking cool to their rich friends than actually becoming richer. 

That's why user ParadoxWombat284726 asked r/AskReddit, “What has been the best corporate Darwin Award that basically killed the business?”

scare_crowe94 . 23d ago Looking at you Tumblr
SurviveDaddy . 23d ago I don't know what could possibly top Blockbuster declining to buy Netflix.
mattromo o 23d ago Boeing buys/mergers with McDonnell Douglas and now can't properly build a plane any more.
GraemeMakesBeer e 23d ago Maglite - LED technology came along and they didn't want to invest in it. Their market share plummeted
TwoAmps . 23d ago Xerox had a networked laser printer ready for production in 1976 but killed it to focus on the dot matrix printer business.
Richard_J_George . 23d ago Blackberry (RIM) every time. Abandon the market for two years to invent some crappy QT based phone while the dalvik version was created in 12 weeks.
LSUChase83 e 23d ago Quiznos. Forced their own franchisees to buy overpriced products and put themselves out of business
chillywillylove . 23d ago Knight Capital. Their high-frequency trading algorithm went berserk and lost $440M in 45 minutes, bankrupting the company
eclectictaste1 . 23d ago Circuit City backing DivX, the one-time use dvd rental program. From memory, they sank something like 500 million dollars into the development, only to have users rebel and boycott Circuit City.
jjflash78 . 23d ago Schwinn Bikes. Outsourced to contract manufacturer in China/ Tawain. Didnt have a noncompete agreement. The contract manufacturer started making their own bikes.
RogLatimer118 . 23d ago Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, initially laughed off the iPhone and especially at the thought that people would pay >$600 for a phone. A few years later Windows Phone came out (Microsoft's first touch interface), but it was too late and they lost the mobile market.
Common-Ad6470 . 23d ago Ratner's Jewellers in the UK. Had a major market share of high street business countrywide and the owner Ratner made comments at a CEO conference saying how crap his products were and the group almost went bust losing £500 million.
jim_br . 23d ago AOL Time-Warner. The (then) largest online provider acquired a large print, movie and music corporation. Some will say this was the beginning of the dot com bubble bursting, so it was inevitable that it would fail. But it's also the same year that Apple launched the iTunes store and they had to license their music.
inode71 . 23d ago Motorola killed itself by letting Robert Weisshappel continue to run the cellular division long after it was plain that digital was the future. Instead, he said in the mid-90s Forty-three million analog customers can't be wrong and the board turned a deaf ear to his colleagues that were begging for a little bit of money to develop the next gen of phones. Nokia came in and dominated the market and Motorola faded away.
MeesterPepper 23d ago In 2014 Red Lobster sold off most, if not all, of the buildings it owned for a quick way to make that sales quarter look amazing. As part of the sale, they signed a leaseback deal, effectively adding a premium rent expense to 500-something locations. Pandemic happens, customers stay home, commercial rent costs go up, some C-suite guy rams through a marketing stunt that backfired expensively, and buh-bye.
ringo5150 . 23d ago In Australia there was a chain of stores called Godfreys which only sold vacuum cleaners and associated accessories. At their peak they were 60 stores across the country...just selling vacuums. They were offered to be the sole distributor of Dyson products but passed. Went bust a few years later after a very slow and painful retailing death.
AnybodySeeMyKeys 23d ago Sears had the stores, the distribution network, the buying power, the mailing list, and the cash to have become an incredibly powerful hybrid retailer. Same is true when WalMart came along. Had they just adjusted their model and thrown a shit-ton of resources at it, they could have crushed both like a bug. But, dinosaur that they were, they just stared at the WalMart and Amazon comets and did nothing until they were flattened.
duuchu 23d ago Edited 23d ago Toy's R Us thought that e-commerce was just a fad that would pass. They got so many orders on their website that they couldn't get them all out in time. Then they PAID amazon $50 million a year to sell AND a percentage of their sales to use their marketplace, and be their only seller of toys. So when you went on the toys r us site, it would redirect you to their amazon shop. Amazon literally learned their whole business and turned their back on Toys r Us and started selling the same
The_Safe_For_Work . 23d ago Osbourne Computers were selling portable computers and let it slip that the next version was going to be even better. So a lot of potential buyers just decided to wait until the next version was available. Trouble is, without the sales of Version One, they didn't have the funds to bring Version Two to market and they went out fo business. They call that The Osbourne Effect.
ElOsoSabroso 0 23d ago The digg.com redesign is what pushed myself and a bunch of other users to start using Reddit basically overnight.

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