- Joined
- May 4, 2018
they had joint-ventures in my country with few car factories and of course when Daewoo shat itself, these weren't included in GM buyout
also British Leyland: strikes, mismanagement, failed projects, oh my!
Disasters in business history
- Thread starter GHTD
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also British Leyland: strikes, mismanagement, failed projects, oh my!
- Joined
- Jul 1, 2015
Geeze, that was an awful commercial indeed. And it's even worse compared to how macho AF their Korean car commercials were, as how Korean commercials were in the 80s and 90s, like these beauties:
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- Dec 17, 2019
I remember Madtv constantly mocking them in the 2000s. Daewoo was the car Tank had that his brother Kenneth was hiding in
Its actually worse than you think, after Gears 3, the Epic CEO wanted to put him in charge of their upcoming game Fortnite. He instead decided to go do Lawbreakers instead
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- Feb 27, 2015
I remember Daewoos because for a while either some dealerships (or possibly the company itself) was flooding the radio station I listened to with ads calling the cars "WooWoos" and featuring a shrill woman repeatedly exclaiming "I'm googoo for my woowoo!"
Ugh.
Also, this:
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2017
Honestly, I think Fallout 76 was Bethesda pulling a "Springtime for Hitler" ploy so The Elder Scrolls VI would look better by comparison and act as a "Coca-Cola Classic" for the company, which brings me to my next topic...
New Coke is one of the biggest flops in soft drink history and it's quite telling that in an age where Pepsi and Coca-Cola are reviving defunct brands and flavors from the 80's, 90's, and early 2000's as limited time or seasonal flavors, New Coke still hasn't come back.
Even Crystal Pepsi and Pepsi Blue (the closest equivalents for Pepsi) eventually came back as seasonal sodas, although Pepsi Blue was rebranded as Mountain Dew: Liberty Brew. Surge came back as a limited time thing twice and now it's available at Burger King year round.
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- Jul 5, 2017
Pokemon is the bestselling franchise in the entire world, and of all time, but back in the 90s you wouldn't have thought it would be after an episode of the anime gave 700 children seizures.
The series was at the height of its popularity when this utter catastrophe struck when Pikachu (not Porygon, even though the 'mon and its evolutionary-line ended up taking the fall for it) blew up a bunch of missiles that resulted in a bunch of blue, and red lights to flash rapidly on the screen which caused 700 children to have seizures.
It can not be understated how utterly disastrous this was. Just try to imagine if the same thing happened today. Imagine something explicitly made for children accidentally causing them physical harm, and on such a scale. Imagine if Minecraft, or Fortnite did something like this just as they were beginning to to get popular. Imagine how fucking catastrophic it would be to them. Imagine how fucking detrimental it would be to any brand/company/product, etc.
And detrimental it was. To this day, the episode Electric Soldier Porygon is still one of the only documented times a tv show has ever caused actual physical harm to the viewer. The show was pulled immediately from the air for four months, with it and the series as a whole was well on its way to being cancelled, with the franchise as a whole being on track to follow suit, and almost certainly would've been if not for, and I'm not kidding here, fans of the show, and franchise in general gathering in towns and cities all across Japan to sing the Pokemon theme song really loudly and in public.
Yes, really.
This apparently happened so much, and with such autistic passion, that someone in the Japanese government felt moved enough to rescue the show from cancellation, and the franchise was saved.
Again, trying to imagine a brand/company/product/etc. recovering from such a thing today is nearly impossible, but if it ever does happen again, whatever it ends up being better hope it has a fuckton of autists willing to gather en masse, and ree its theme song as loudly as humanly possible.
The series was at the height of its popularity when this utter catastrophe struck when Pikachu (not Porygon, even though the 'mon and its evolutionary-line ended up taking the fall for it) blew up a bunch of missiles that resulted in a bunch of blue, and red lights to flash rapidly on the screen which caused 700 children to have seizures.
It can not be understated how utterly disastrous this was. Just try to imagine if the same thing happened today. Imagine something explicitly made for children accidentally causing them physical harm, and on such a scale. Imagine if Minecraft, or Fortnite did something like this just as they were beginning to to get popular. Imagine how fucking catastrophic it would be to them. Imagine how fucking detrimental it would be to any brand/company/product, etc.
And detrimental it was. To this day, the episode Electric Soldier Porygon is still one of the only documented times a tv show has ever caused actual physical harm to the viewer. The show was pulled immediately from the air for four months, with it and the series as a whole was well on its way to being cancelled, with the franchise as a whole being on track to follow suit, and almost certainly would've been if not for, and I'm not kidding here, fans of the show, and franchise in general gathering in towns and cities all across Japan to sing the Pokemon theme song really loudly and in public.
Yes, really.
This apparently happened so much, and with such autistic passion, that someone in the Japanese government felt moved enough to rescue the show from cancellation, and the franchise was saved.
Again, trying to imagine a brand/company/product/etc. recovering from such a thing today is nearly impossible, but if it ever does happen again, whatever it ends up being better hope it has a fuckton of autists willing to gather en masse, and ree its theme song as loudly as humanly possible.
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- Joined
- Feb 25, 2019
Schlitz beer. Surprised no one has mentioned it. It was at one point the most popular beer in America by volumes. But of course, like all good things that sell, higher ups were trying to see if they could cut costs for more profit, as demand was above supply.
This resulted in the quality of the beer slowly going down, before suddenly becoming so bad (at one point they used silica gel in the beer itself) that, even when quality assessments were put back into place, no one, absolutely no one bought it. As one person put it: "you don't notice a change between A to B, but you'll notice when it goes from B to F." That's how severe the quality dropped. Ironically, they ended up being bought out by Pabst.
This resulted in the quality of the beer slowly going down, before suddenly becoming so bad (at one point they used silica gel in the beer itself) that, even when quality assessments were put back into place, no one, absolutely no one bought it. As one person put it: "you don't notice a change between A to B, but you'll notice when it goes from B to F." That's how severe the quality dropped. Ironically, they ended up being bought out by Pabst.
- Joined
- Jan 20, 2019
Quote:
"New Coke is one of the biggest flops in soft drink history and it's quite telling that in an age where Pepsi and Coca-Cola are reviving defunct brands and flavors from the 80's, 90's, and early 2000's as limited time or seasonal flavors, New Coke still hasn't come back."
Let me give you the skinny on this since I had family working at Coca-Cola, so I know the truth.
New coke designed and created in a pellet like form for packaging, increase life span and ease of storage.
Old coke was created in syrup form using Sugar Cane instead of Corn Syrup like New Coke. This is also the time period they started phasing out glass bottles.
When New Coke Flopped they simply altered the taste format to make it taste close to the original Coke. However it is still not the same product.
Mexican Coke in the glass bottles taste very close to what Original Coke used to taste. And there really is a difference between plastic, metal and glass plastic products.
The Classic Coke of today is nothing but a successful offshoot of New Coke in its production and storage methods.
There is a lot of shit I have lived through and seen with my own eyes as the Corporations/Governments/people are always trying to re-write their history.
But if you look hard enough you can still find the truth.
"New Coke is one of the biggest flops in soft drink history and it's quite telling that in an age where Pepsi and Coca-Cola are reviving defunct brands and flavors from the 80's, 90's, and early 2000's as limited time or seasonal flavors, New Coke still hasn't come back."
Let me give you the skinny on this since I had family working at Coca-Cola, so I know the truth.
New coke designed and created in a pellet like form for packaging, increase life span and ease of storage.
Old coke was created in syrup form using Sugar Cane instead of Corn Syrup like New Coke. This is also the time period they started phasing out glass bottles.
When New Coke Flopped they simply altered the taste format to make it taste close to the original Coke. However it is still not the same product.
Mexican Coke in the glass bottles taste very close to what Original Coke used to taste. And there really is a difference between plastic, metal and glass plastic products.
The Classic Coke of today is nothing but a successful offshoot of New Coke in its production and storage methods.
There is a lot of shit I have lived through and seen with my own eyes as the Corporations/Governments/people are always trying to re-write their history.
But if you look hard enough you can still find the truth.
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2019
I know there's a thread on this, but the non-canonization of the Star Wars Expanded Universe or "Star Wars Legends" was the literal act of killing the golden goose. More fans were way much more familiar to these stories because George Lucas gave the greenlight for other authors and artists to commission work to expand the world of Star Wars, and did so after The Return of the Jedi, which meant these works were kept going for years.
But no, disregard that immediate years on end windfall of cash by fandom enthusiasm and appreciation. Get woke and go broke for Disney, who specialize only in shilling out teenage pop stars for Disney Channel and tween girl concerts and are bitter about anime destroying their potential markets, and in the end have no fucking clue how to not be like Nickelodeon and "be for kids" all the time. You cannot tell me that this act was so that JJ Abrhams and staff "would have more creative freedom". JJ worked on fucking Star Trek, he knows a thing or two about adapting source material to his artistic eye. This move was done because Disney thinks the public are majorly nothing but drooling slobs who will seal clap at anything that's put infront of them and don't have the mental capacity to handle that there's a bunch of lore after both trilogies. Audiences are not that stupid, Disney. Enjoy trying to keep the MCU going for you, because you fucked over Capcom and they are no longer your lifeline anymore.
This was also what lead to the immediate phasing out of light backing tables for iridescent effects in anime by the turn of the millennium. As much as it sucks for those kids that some shitty animator thought it was a great idea to use strobe effects, if you ever wanted to know why anime began to look more drab by the mid-2000s, Electric Soldier Porygon and Pokemon are responsible for this.
Yes, this does count as a disaster in business history, because this shift immediately caused a demand for computer digital effect lighting in droves than a gradual effort, and for an autist like me, removed from anime one of its crowning visual effects and made it visually bland. I am fairly sure that budgeting issues were more common in the 2000s for anime than I think due to this probable scenario.
I know that I'm more emotionally on diatribes on shit I enjoy, but I'm fucking trying.
- Joined
- May 27, 2019
The way how spectacularly Walmart failed in Germany still warms my heart.
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2016
I will give them credit for trying something different at that period from "Narrator monologues over a car swerving around a closed course," or "Country music plays while a pickup truck drives off-road and possibly by a herd of wild horses, while a narrator with a gravely voice tries to fit in as many uses of the words, "TOUGH," "DURABLE," "STRONG," as they can," but this was not the way to do it.
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2017
In the UK they still sell Daewoo designs, badged as Chevrolets of all things. Seeing a Chevy badge on a miserable little Korean shitbox is a jarring thing.
Penn and NYC were pretty much forcibly merged by the government (as a prerequisite for a bailout), which also made them incorporate the massively loss-making New Haven, a railroad that neither NYC or Penn would even wipe their arses with under normal circumstances. Railroad mergers can work, but usually end-to-end, i.e. if you can take one company's trains from A to B and another company's trains from B to C then it makes sense to merge them because you can run one single railroad all the way from A to C and it's much more efficient. But the NYC and Penn were parallel rivals, not end-to-end. They both had a rival route from New York to Chicago and the terms of the merger forced them to keep both lines open. Given that there was barely enough traffic in the age of the automobile and airplane to sustain even one route, let alone two, and they were forced to bear the New Haven's colossal debt and disintegrating track, the resulting financial implosion was inevitable.
As for a company disaster close to my heart, the implosion of Gibson guitars under their useless CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, who took over in about 2000.
Gibsons always carried a huge premium, even above other big names such as Fender, and the company could charge this for two reasons:
1 - A reputation for quality
2 - A string of big-name endorsements from just about every big guitarist in the business
Juszkiewicz set about destroying both those things with abandon. For some mad reason he decided that Gibson needed to become a "lifestyle brand" and sell hi-fis, watches and underpants and other crap, and he cut back on QA in the guitar division to free up funds. Nobody wanted a Gibson watch, and not long after they didn't want Gibson guitars either. Gibsons were coming out of the factory with all sorts of defects - bad wiring, glue leaking out of joins, and worst of all a tendency for the headstock to just fucking snap off because it wasn't built properly. These are $4000 guitars, and they just fucking snap. You wouldn't accept that in a child's beginner guitar, let alone one that costs the same as a good used car.
In order to cut costs further, Gibson started importing wood from ... undocumented sources. They were promptly busted by the feds for using illegal wood from endangered rainforests, then two years later were busted AGAIN for exactly the same thing, a level of stupid that is hard to fathom. The fines did not help their finances.
In the meantime they set about alienating all their endorsees by treating them like garbage, tearing up their contracts and offering less favourable ones, supplying faulty guitars, being impossible to get hold of and generally being massive dicks for no real reason. By 2010 or so, almost every major Gibson endorsee had jumped ship. Metallica went to ESP, Green Day to Fender, along with hundreds of smaller names.
Gibson's rivals saw their chance and pounced. ESP, PRS, MusicMan and others started offering guitars that were just like Gibson's, but better. A 2005 PRS CE-22 is a better guitar than a 2005 Les Paul Standard and costs half as much (and its headstock won't snap either), and sales started to tank. Rather than look at his company's disastrous marketing and QA, Juszkiewicz decided to sue several of Gibson's rivals for copying their designs, and lost.
Juszkiewicz was shown the door in 2018 and Gibson entered Chapter 11. The new CEO announced closure of all the dumb "lifestyle brand" things and an emphasis on QA, but so far from what I've heard their guitars are still shit and the company's future is in doubt.
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- Joined
- Apr 12, 2020
The Gizmondo is pretty interesting. It was supposed to be a handheld game console that competed with not only the DS and PSP, but also the N-Gage of all things. But the system only sold fewer than 25,000 units, and ended up becoming the worst-selling handheld console in history. By February 2006, the company behind it Tiger Telematics (Not to be confused with Tiger Electronics) was forced into bankruptcy after amassing US$300 million debt, and the Gizmondo stopped was discontinued shortly after.
As if that wasn't bad enough, things get weird. The company's director Stefan Eriksson was involved in a Swedish criminal organisation, the "Uppsalamaffian" (the Uppsala mafia). Not only that, but weeks after the console was discontinued, he crashed a Ferrari Enzo into a pole while he was under the influence while driving at 260km/h in California. The impact of the crash was so violent, it actually splitted the car in half. He did survive the crash, but he was later jailed and subsequently deported for the incident as well as other crimes.
Here's some videos about the Gizmondo:
As if that wasn't bad enough, things get weird. The company's director Stefan Eriksson was involved in a Swedish criminal organisation, the "Uppsalamaffian" (the Uppsala mafia). Not only that, but weeks after the console was discontinued, he crashed a Ferrari Enzo into a pole while he was under the influence while driving at 260km/h in California. The impact of the crash was so violent, it actually splitted the car in half. He did survive the crash, but he was later jailed and subsequently deported for the incident as well as other crimes.
Here's some videos about the Gizmondo:
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Moufang Loop
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2019
My favorite one is how Sony managed to lose the famous "format war" of Betamax vs VHS. It's a very long and somewhat complicated story, where Sony essentially made a number of mistakes and miscalculations. Betamax was technically a superior product, however, Sonys arrogance led to them ignoring several qualities that consumers wanted in a video cassette product. . I believe Sonys failure is still studied and taught in business classes to this very day.
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- Joined
- Jan 22, 2018
NASCAR. Back in the '80s and '90s, it was untouchable. Now they are a husk of what they used to be.
It doesn't help that their SJW pandering and the Bubba Wallace fiasco this year made it even worse. Brian France is a fucking idiot.
Dale Jr. weighs in.
Some more shameful details. NASCAR is a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and need to put the STOCK back in Stock Car Racing. In the meantime, Formula Drift keeps growing and growing.
It doesn't help that their SJW pandering and the Bubba Wallace fiasco this year made it even worse. Brian France is a fucking idiot.
Dale Jr. weighs in.
Some more shameful details. NASCAR is a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and need to put the STOCK back in Stock Car Racing. In the meantime, Formula Drift keeps growing and growing.
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Leonard Helplessness
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2018
Arthur Andersen, Enron’s CPA firm, was a lesson in why never to immediately shred all records related to your client when people start looking at you for answers as to how involved you were with hiding your client’s losses. The Big Five became the Big Four after that one.
- Joined
- May 4, 2018
in continental Europe they didn't do that anymore (due to presssure of Krauts Opel which was later sold to Frenchies, so GM doesn't have presence in Europe anymore
)still better than Mehdi Ali of Commodore, who cut back on R&D
CUT BACK ON R&D
IN A FUCKING TECH COMPANY
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- Feb 25, 2019
The funny part was that they had a subsidiary that changed its name drastically from the firm, to the point when shit hit the fan, it was completely unphazed from the scandal.
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2017
Juicero. A machine that had to be connected to the Internet to press proprietary packets of fruit into juice. Problem was, you could simply squeeze the bag and juice would emerge, no high tech required. The things sold for $400.
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2019
Toys R' Us? RadioShack? Gamestop? HHGreg?
Basically every video "Company Man" ever made is on this list
Basically every video "Company Man" ever made is on this list