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what is the most stupid move that a company made british businessman gerald ratner was the ceo of powerful jewelry company ratners in 1991 he gave a speech to a business forum in which he explained how his company was able to sell its products at such a low price his words were because it's total crap the remarks were televised and widely publicized overnight ratner's lost about you acute 500 million of its company value was forced to rebrand it's now called signet and ratner was made to resign such a blunder has now entered the english lexicon as doing a rapness pepsi had a contest in the 1980s where the bottle caps had letters on the underside and if you spelled your own last name you won of course the vowels were very rare but they forgot about vietnamese people named ng along with similar eastern european names oops in the late 90s pepsi had a game in canada called pepsi pop culture in which you would have to form words with the letters under the cap well one time i bought a pepsi and looked under the cap and it said jackpot so i ran home to use the telephone hand trembling and called up the hotline and asked them and they said oh that french forex i don't remember what word and i foolishly never pursued it but the word jackpot didn't correspond with anything on the little paper legend they gave out i wonder what i would have actually won blockbuster basically telling netflix to go fck itself hindsight is 20 stroke 20. netflix wasn't anything special at the time and heck blockbuster basically tried to launch the same thing it was a stupid move based on what netflix became not stupid based on what netflix was tumblr taking away porn nsfw content if you create a site where people can be themselves why would you block that holy [ __ ] i just read tumblr was sold for 3m last year by wordpress that's like pocket change for such a brand name it was bought by yahoo41 1b in 2013. it's like yahoo's mission is to waste money in opportunists they wanted to make it advertise a safe and friendly space i remember when the crackdown started these remarks and comments about some representative of tumblr made rounds also there was lots of cp making rounds on tumblr you could accidentally come across the stuff like i did few times and reporting it was extremely difficult there was also mentions about this stuff and secret tags of pedophiles starting to show up in media which i assume was part of the reasons for a crackdown tumblr still has lots of fetish content that doesn't involve nudity but seriously a chance was missed to make a pawn blower similar platform that was lgbtq fetish and fx positive porn friendly the beauty of tumblr was that it was easy to access for content creators and the audience there was a weight loss product called aids when the aids disease emerged they decided not to change the name of the product so as not to compromise its identity who would have thought that people no longer wanted to buy aids despite all the success that aids has in losing weight edit aids i was a teen when the aids epidemic first hit when they first mentioned aids is deadly in the news i thought that they were talking about the dark pills aids so once upon a time there was this kid who grew up on a farm and developed an interest in mechanics from having worked on tractors for his whole life when he was an adult he got a job working for enzo ferrari well enzo didn't actually think very highly of him this was a problem because enzo was a cheap bastard so especially when it came to the clutches on the cars he built so this guy who worked for enzo kept blowing up the clutches on his own ferrari figured out why this kept happening and how to fix it did so and presented his own design to enzo enzo's response was effectively comma you'll never understand how to build a ferrari because you can't even drive one that guy who grew up on a farm decided to prove his abilities to enzo and by extension to the world his name was faraxio lamborghini i don't understand why you keep saying lamborghini worked for enzo ferrari he did not he owned his own tractor company he was rich from owning his tractor company lamborghini trattori which still exists and bought lots of fast cars that's where he found issues with the clutch and the ferrari 250 gt and he brought that up to ferrari who dismissed him because he dared compare his tractor knowledge to the requirements of sports cars the gist of the story is the same but it's not some guy sticking it to his boss they were two rich company owners who love sports cars and who developed beef between each other lamborghini was never really successful as a business ow compared to ferrari which have run successful road car and racing businesses to this day lambo kept going bankrupt time and again and may well have disappeared if the germans had and eventually acquired the company although they did make some iconic cars in their day such as the miura and countach steve balmer didn't take the smartphone seriously laughed at the first iphone and microsoft has basically become an enterprise services company because of it a hugely successful one but that was a huge miss and it cost him his job oh he chose to retire no he was gently shown the door similarly blackberry they should have switched to android early on instead they insisted on keeping their own orthonos while apps developers stopped bothering to waste time writing apps for them because the apple and android markets were so much bigger i worked for a sprint next l dealer in the 2000s we actually had a couple phones with a microsoft os think of your windows desktop with the start button in the lower left now imagine that in a flip phone with a tiny screen it was a pain to use just a ridiculous design we sold very few microsoft did the complete redesign with their windows 7 phones released in 2010 it was a good design and a good product but iphones and androids had been around for three and two years respectively and the windows 7 phones were left in the dust similarly i remember all these teenage girls abandoning their blackberries when the iphones and androids became available similar story is dell michael dell didn't think smartphones were a good idea then he saw how prevalent they were becoming del then released a windows 7 phone someone else manufactured it and dell put their logo on it it was absolute junk and the only carrier dell could get to sell it was t-mobile after sales completely flopped the phone was discontinued and no longer sold rumor is that dell had ordered almost seven figures worth of the phones in anticipation of big sales all of the discontinued inventory went into the shredder and was recycled dell took a big tax right off and pretended like it never happened british vacuum manufacturer hoover ran a promotion in the 90s to try and sell off old stock buy a cheap vacuum get return flights to the us they tried to make it difficult to claim the free flights with some pretty dirty tactics designed to reduce the likelihood of a successful claim on the promotion it did not end well with the company completely misunderstanding of how far a british person will go to get something for essentially nothing sears hiring eddie lambert as their ceo very long story but the short is that he used sears holdings as his own personal hedge fund having no desire to actually keep sears kmart profitable and knowingly and willingly allowed these companies long established american institutions to completely go under it's important to remember that this came on the heels of come see the softer side of sears where sears started ignoring the core customers and competency hardware tools lawnmowers etc comma in order to focus on being a more traditional department store clothes bedding etc dart the result was losing their base because their core business suffered and them not really increasing the other side of the business because going clothes shopping at sears never became cool add into that the internet cutting heavily into their other bread and butter mail order shopping which is weird considering all they were probably the best position to take advantage of it sue yeah they pretty much fk themselves completely on every level circa 1910 sears was amazon people used to mail order houses from sears sears could have been amazon again but alas they had no vision for what the internet was or could be rupert murdoch's news corporation bought myspace for 580 million dollars in 2005. saw its value rise to over 12 billion dollars as it became the biggest social media platform by 2008 but then didn't adapt the company to the changing social media landscape that came to be dominated by facebook and twitter and wound up selling it to online ad network specific media for 35 million dollars in 2011 a loss of over 500 million dollars or 11 plus billion if you count the company value at it highest point close bracket and on the other side of that story myspace tom made an absolute killing with that sale early on and travelled the world becoming an excellent photographer who would never have to worry about money ever again kodak owned digital photography but couldn't break the addiction to film revenue to pursue it i worked with a senior executive who was forced into retirement because he wouldn't shut up about digital being the future i was going to share this story but decided to read through the comments to see if somebody else did first i remember there was a time you couldn't buy a digital camera that did not have a kodak sensor in it period that was very early on though i was working for them when they decided to double down on film i saw the writing on the wall and left the osborne one was the first portable computer they announced the osborne 2 before they'd made a profit on the osborne one people stopped buying the osborne one in anticipation of the osborne 2 as a result of this there never was an osborne 2. the official economic term for announcing a product too early and killing sales and therefore profits is called the osborne effect because of this now that's how to munson like a pro i have often wondered if this is really true or a convenient excuse for some deeper form of incompetence that killed sales people know there are always new products waiting next year's model car were a good example at the time back in like 2009 dig.com was the go to link aggregation website on the internet but they revamped their site using a new algorithm that focused on following power users instead of just following topics and the users hated it i'm assuming it also made it much easier to inject sneaky ad content into the feed so everyone migrated to diggs small arrival reddit which was mostly tech focused at the time read it exploded after that and i don't think anyone uses dig anymore all because afk with their algorithm hardy's in australia got caught using dog food in their meat patties back in the 1970s and were forced to close all restaurants and exit the country as a result after about four years working for a company i went to my boss around april last year with about a 10 minute discussion about the things i had helped improve while maintaining an absolutely excellent track record on goals and asked for them to consider an immediate 15 raise i was told no it wasn't in the budget but they could look at it next year that june i interviewed with a competitor and got the job with a 40 raise and a signing bonus when i told the first company they wanted to discuss ways to keep me on i said no that was your chance when i went to you you just didn't know it at the time funny how the budget suddenly had room to make a competing offer then if they'd done as i asked they welder kept me plus welder saved money so that's the dumbest thing i saw them do around 2008 2009 while the economy was tanking hp decided to cut the salaries of all its employees by 15 makes sense right nope the government contracting business was booming in the washington dc area and was one of their few profitable divisions they lost 40 of their cleared employees before they sent a vp from california to figure out what was going on they still haven't recovered from that debacle colgate the toothpaste and toothbrush company tried making tv banners in the 80s i saw colgate dog toys at dollar general a few years ago they were pretty decent quality mucinex making a fashion line who asked for it who at meucenics decided that was what they should do getting rid of vanilla coke wait in the us they got rid of it years ago here in canada aside from a couple summer promotions and i'd get my in-laws to bring me back a couple cases every time they went to the states i love that stuff so much better than regular coke nokia not adopting android as their main os the lumia was a great phone just didn't have all the apps cadbury is being sold to craft none of that chocolate tastes the same and i haven't willingly had it since if i can choose even store own brand over cadburys i will completely destroyed a good british favorite damn near everything in the grocery store is in a constant never-ending cycle of one make a smaller two change the packaging to hide one three use cheaper ingredients and hope people don't notice 4. raise the price 5. start again at 1. disney opening their parks during a pandemic you can play with mickey and company but there's the slightest chance you won't be coming home when ibm decided to get into pcs they didn't really take it seriously they always thought that mainframes were always going to rule the day so they rushed to get the chips and the os in deals with intel and microsoft contrary to deals with previous suppliers ibm did not demand exclusivity from intel and ms this let intel and ms sell their ip to whomever they chose ibm could have owned personal computing but instead the ibm clones outperformed ibm pcs and ibm is a shadow of their former clout in computing all you can eat crab at red lobster had the ceo never seen americans attempt to eat all they could if i recall correctly it wasn't the idea that was bad it was the execution there weren't enough restrictions people stayed for hours and all would only get crab and not eat sides they essentially were just like fee crab and thought that was good enough schlitz beer decided to cheap out on their product which caused it to have weird slug-like growths in the can they soon folded because no one would drink their product again that's what happens when you start caring about the bottom line more than the quality of the product kodak losing all their market share because they refused to digitize i worked for a company owned by polaroid about the same time mid late 90s if my memory is even remotely correct the senior sales people refused to lose commissions on film sales tank the company there is this brazilian meat processing company for a boy the company decided to make this series of commercials for television and this increased sales before nobody cared about the brand of meat they bought since the name of the meat brand never appeared anywhere they were usually packaged by the supermarket itself or it was packaged directly by the butcher now everyone started to buy the meat that had the fryboy brand until a few months later there was a scandal of adulteration of meats including placing cardboard on the sausage friboy was one of them thanks to that now everyone knows that all the meat that had the fryboy seal could be adulterated my mom used to be a manager at a hyatt in charlotte nc one day a high-ranking executive stopped by for a beating about their rebranding their new catchphrase which the company had already poured millions into was something like here to help from sun up to sundown my mom who was nowhere near as high ranking as the executive stood up and said should it be sundown to sun up since people visit us to spend the night dart according to her the room fell silent and the executive looked kind of dumbfounded my mom is a pretty honest and humble woman so i totally believe her blackberry taking way too long to respond to ios and android it initially refused to use android and released its new os way too late it released its own new os in 2013 and while it was admittedly rather good it was released in a smartphone market that was really dominated by android and ios at the time it was always going to be a hard sell especially given the lack of apps it had at the time if blackberry seriously wanted to regain its market share back they should have released blackberry 10 like two stroke three years prior but by 2013 it should have just resorted to android maybe then it could have potentially saved them blizzard wanted to make the next diablo a mobile game what's even worse is that those guys on the stage were total idiots they announced it like it was the next big thing it's not that nobody wanted a diablo game for mobile but they announced it as though it would be diablo 4. the core diablo crowd had no interest in it but it would have gone over okay if they did like bethesda and at least teased a proper console game before announcing a mobile spin-off when disney decided it was a good idea to film their scenes in xinjiang and casted asian kristen stewart who supports hong kong police brutality and then charge their viewers 30 bucks for it 30 bucks on top of having to pay for a disney plus subscription i really hope they don't do that same shitty when pixar drops soul when pepsi tried to get on the blm protests and put out an out of touch advert the backlash was brutal this is the problem with companies trying to get political high stakes indeed fck up the message be seen in sincere or the wind blows the other way and a whole lot of people are gonna get fired i have been at two companies who did well until they bit off more than could chew growing faster than the organization can handle or taking over another company but underestimating the problems of integration in both instances they went belly up and was sold i'm just realizing how so many things i want to watch on hulu are now under the premium subscription if it only costed another four or five dollars that would have been fine but i think 10 extra dollars is too much i think we're going to see some major shifts in the streaming market over the next few years it seems like every major company has its own streaming service and that's not sustainable people are willing to pay for one or two services but not a half dozen figs a scrub brand making an advertisement that made fun of females as well as practicing due physicians bayer buying monsanto for a insane price only to inherit double that much in liabilities from roundup not to mention spending decades scaring europeans about gmos when they are harmless only to have them ban monsanto's gmos worst business move in history the second would be time warner's merger with aol they got all pumped up but didn't do their due diligence and paid the price 100 billion dollars of stock owner value wiped off the board new coke once they brought back classic coca-cola they made the switch from sugar to high fructose corn syrup if they made the switch without a buffer people would have hated it but by having newer coke b the middle man people were more accepting nintendo trying to screw over sony the playstation was going to be an add-on for the super nintendo nintendo felt sony wanted too big of a cuff so without telling sony they suddenly switched to work with panasonic on a cd thing instead sony figured they had most of the hardware already and finished the console nintendo tried to screw over panasonic who they had a contract with and that's why there are zelda games on te3do they worked with phillips not panasonic those three terrible zelda games and one mediocre mario game are on the cdi not the three do m m's blew it when they said no to product placement of their m m's and steven spielberg's et so he went with reese's pieces the movie was a blockbuster and catapulted sales of reese's pieces sony pictures animation is an oddball when it comes to animated movie companies on one hand they made the best animated movie i've ever seen and probably ever will see spider-verse as well as the comedic animated classic hotel transylvania on the contrary they've also made complete dumpster fires that should not even be called animated i e all of the smurf movies except for the third one that was okay close bracket one more note never ever ever watch the energy movie netflix tried to roll out a dvd-only delivery service quickster they quickly backpedaled and shut it down of people shamed them wells fargo saying there isn't a big enough pool of talented intelligent black applicants to choose from also the quickster twitter account was already taken by some wannabe gangster whose tweets were hilariously bad maybe whoever came up with the new brand name should have done some google searches to see if the name was already being used before coming to a final decision xerox's research center park developed many of the link pins of the personal computer i am still not quite sure how they managed to not become the dominant player here's a graphical user interface you can navigate with this mouse we don't really see these as any more than a novelty so feel free to take the idea and do as you wish with it microsoft and apple double quote black and decker went from okay quality tools to garbage gimmick tools youtube and the whole copper thing why the fck is youtube kids there if you're gonna censor everything on the main website so it's child friendly what the fck susan washed jekyll bro how i might be a bit rusty on some of the facts but i think pepsi did this thing where if you bought pepsi you earned points which could be exchanged for prizes if you got a ridiculous number of points they said they would give you a plane as a reward well someone actually bought enough pepsis to get the jet he actually had investors behind him and everything the logic was that it would be cheaper to buy a shitty ton of pepsi than it would to buy a jet when they got enough points and pepsi obviously didn't hand over the jet they took pepsi to court the court basically ruled that the investors needed to learn to take a joke but what a nightmare general motors basically every decision ever canada helped bail their asses out in 2008 and 11 years later they decided to pull tons of manufacturing out of canada i hope that company implodes and chokes on the ashes mitsubishi trying to break out of its tiny market share in the us decided to offer credits to low and no score customers they developed a brilliant ad campaign targeting young people songs by dirty vegas accompanied youth dancing and zipping around urban areas and new mitsubishi's within a year mitsubishi dealer's lots were teaming with repossessed cars turns out that people who have never made payments don't necessarily have the discipline to do so for a short time mitsubishi became the largest used car dealer in america i work at a small cafe in a small town that my mom owns and she absolutely resents the idea of having decaf coffee i personally live the idea and all other employees but she thinks that if you want coffee you shouldn't me a [ __ ] in her words free build a bad day i didn't go but they basically ended it early and i bet it made a lot of kids cry i guess you came here after watching that iphone is now coming without a charger brick and there's talk about making it wireless charging only without a port damn it i like charging my phone with a cable so i can read in bed i don't want to have to set it on my nightstand without access mike jeffries abercrombie and fitch's exia saying he only wants an and beautiful people wearing his clothes the brand didn't even produce xxl women's clothing at the time because they didn't want overweight women representing the brand the ironic thing is the guy isn't even conventionally attractive himself he looks like a gay trump his remarks ruined ac and fitch which actually was very popular before time winner and aol merging both companies were really iffy about merging at all did it anyways and the dot-com bubble had burst which made things difficult they didn't last long the grocery store i used to work out hired the bitchiest department manager for the cashiers and they can't hang onto a cashier for more than two years anyone that ever gave ea rights to make games on their rights they ruin everything they touch with drowning them in microtransactions loot boxes and pay to win mechanics that aren't fun i could almost list off the company i work for they grew by leaps and bounds in every area except i t this came back to bite them as a major outage happened and they lost two 1b in prospective sales and 350 meters in actual money lost after that the cfo and cio was replaced and our company has significantly more i.t personal now when apple removed the headphone jack or when it removed the earpods or when it removed the adapter all the time it made it to where you have to buy a special adapter for 30 extra dollars volkswagen and mercedes not caring that much about expanding their it sector the outcome could have been prevented easily they acted super dumb bank of america buying countrywide early on in the housing banking crash countrywide already bleeding from its mortgage practices and under investigation by the federal government davis stepped down shortly thereafter i think someone might have said this but this is an ongoing mistake it's what i'd like to call the minecraft conundrum minecraft is a really popular game it is also very old the problem with it is the newer updates are a hit and miss and don't cater to the die hard fans anymore they're taking away what makes minecraft minecraft it's deceptive simplicity sure it looks simplistic but as you play and learn all of these techniques it gets more and more complex yet fun as it doesn't tire you out as much mojang is trying to water down that deceptiveness also there are barely any animals in one eight there used to be tons of sheep cows and pigs but you'll see the occasional herd and that's it they have been whittling down the appearance of my favorite biome the tiger in the world gen when it was a pretty common bun tigers and other wooded biomes besides the oak forest are not as big as mountains plains and the oak forest minecraft is becoming a mess and i don't like it it's my home i met a bunch of people here first interstate bank and ca laid off five zero zero zero teller statewide so they could afford to put their logo on top of the tallest building in los angeles the lines got so long that customers left the bank and drives allowing wells fargo to take them over target trying to break into the canadian market they bought a beloved canadian brand zellers and rebranded those stores into target and built a bunch of new stores the prices weren't any cheaper than other stores and people really liked zellers the stores were so mismanaged there would be empty aisle in the stores target was out canada within a year circuit city stopping the sales of appliances they made many other mistakes but those sales can bring in a lot of profit it was their tipping point at the time their direct competition best buy coma was busy diving in head first growing their appliance selection commodore essentially killed the brilliant amiga computer they had no idea how to market its multimedia capabilities and they defended the r d so their ceo could fly around in a private jet the amiga was miles ahead of pcs and apple at the time for graphics sound and multitasking os i always wonder what the landscape would be like these days if commodore had not watched the amiga pbs going to amazon prime video for their go to streaming service specifically i'm talking the realm of their kids shows when you bring up streaming services in a conversation or ask what's the first streaming service that pops into your head comma i guarantee you that apv wouldn't be your first choice cartoon network has hbo max nickelodeon has cbs all access disney channel has disney plus and pbs kids has nothing they pull their shows from netflix and hulu to put them on a streaming service that some people know for bad animated kids movies and amazon and what kids shows you do get don't even have all of the episodes sure they're not going anywhere in the realm of cable tv but more and more of the demographic is getting their content online the least they could do is try and start up their own streaming service funded by donations perhaps five dollars a month just like with apv and kids and adults alike can enjoy their favorite pbs shows it may sound difficult but i believe pbs can pull it off they just don't want to sears holding company merging with k-mart imagine jack and rose trying to stay afloat on that floating piece of furniture and you'll see what i mean indirectly related is how jeans in the uk became fairly unfashionable during the late 90s and subsequently sales declined because of television presenter jeremy clarkson so a bunch of denim companies suffered not because of their own decisions but the decisions of one bombastic petrol head looking silly in their products [Music] the airline mergers in the usa have generally been complete disasters and have allowed better run companies like southwest to get a foothold apparently when united and continental merged they had different fire and pilot contracts along with different fleets and hubs on top of each other for a very long time and you could tell the staff was very unhappy it's just like they decide to merge and worry about the staff and maintenance later on american and u.s airways and alaska and virgin both seem to be going equally shitty the delta northwest one seems to have worked but i heard that north west was a [ __ ] show before delta came in colleges com killed itself before the calm bubble burst how instead of investing in their product they spent several million dollars on a giant blimp it had their branding woven into the fabric of the balloon and stamped into every seat so when the company started floundering they couldn't resell the damn thing either cornflakes were made to keep young christian boys from jerking off kodak was actually one of the first camera companies to develop a digital camera however they didn't really think it would take off and they were worried it would kill their film business which was a huge part of their revenue so they abandon digital the other big camera companies like canon and nikon however fully embrace digital and before you knew it digital surpassed film and kodak was way too far behind to catch up what was once the biggest camera company in the world is now basically gone because of that dumb decision the playstation's name was originally gonna be nintendo playstation sony proposed the idea of making video games on cd they agreed at first but backed down they then proposed it to sega and they turned down the proposal in the end sony released it under its name nobody is talking about sega how is that even possible i am convinced certain factions in sega wanted out of the hardware business and purposely sabotaged it there are just too many bad decisions and fck ups to ascribe to incompetence they released the saturn in north america without any sports games ffs the company a health care company i just quit from kept cutting mileage pay and benefits all while establishing stricter rules poor communication using blame games and offering little to no support they've cycled through so many people the co-workers are all different in less than six months they don't care about keeping workers which is unfortunate because you'd think healthcare would want to keep the good [Music] ones [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Id: xUeEgEhtsEA

Length: 36min 51sec (2211 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020