Disasters in business history

[TurdFondler]

Sorcerer is a ripoff and/or homage to a 1953 movie of the same premise, The Wages of Fear. I should probably watch both, I've been meaning to for years.

 

[L50LasPak]

Sorcerer is a ripoff and/or homage to a 1953 movie of the same premise, The Wages of Fear. I should probably watch both, I've been meaning to for years.

Its basically another adaptation of the book, kind of like how John Carpenter's The Thing went back to Who Goes There?. Wages of Fear 1953 is a classic, but Sorcerer really ups the ante. Both movies are great in their own right. Sorcerer's camerawork, cinematography and pacing are all perfection, and the movie is just plain moody and a feast for the senses. No wonder too, its directed by William Friedkin, the guy who did The Exorcist and The French Connection.

 

[Pizdec]

enraging SEGA, who promptly tore up the contract with 3DFX and went with NEC for better and worse (side note, EA cited the NEC GPU as being one of the major reasons they didnt want to make games for the dreamcast. OOPS).

The funny part about that, is how that lead to Sega forming 2K sports as a franchise as a result of EA not partnering with Sega.

Speaking of Sega though, at one point during the add-on craze for the Genesis, the reasoning behind making the 32X, an add on that could handle 32 bit processing (thus, 3D games), was to compete with Atari's Jaguar per the request of the Japanese CEO of Sega, while The Saturn was still in development.

let that sink in.

 

[LazarusOwenhart]

The funny part about that, is how that lead to Sega forming 2K sports as a franchise as a result of EA not partnering with Sega.

Speaking of Sega though, at one point during the add-on craze for the Genesis, the reasoning behind making the 32X, an add on that could handle 32 bit processing (thus, 3D games), was to compete with Atari's Jaguar per the request of the Japanese CEO of Sega, while The Saturn was still in development.

let that sink in.

I love my 32X. It's such an odd chunk of hardware but it's absolutely the best way to play Virtua Racing and also the only way to play the very under-rated Knuckles Chaotix. I often wonder what would have happened if the Nintendo/Sony deal went through and Sony never entered to console market. It's likely that Microsoft, not encouraged by Sony's success would never have produced the Xbox. Damn I miss Sega as a hardware developer.

 

[CWCchange]

Yahoo! was retarded enough to pass on Microsoft's offer to acquire it in 2008, and then got fucked by vulture capitalist Daniel Loeb, who installed Marissa Mayer, a surprisingly attractive but extremely incompetent woman, to deliberately tear the company apart in the name of feminism while he fed on the scraps. Oh and did I mention during Mayer's tenure, Yahoo! bought Tumblr, had a huge data breach, the shittiest rebranding, and had to offload its lucrative stakes in Alibaba and Japanese joint venture with SoftBank?

 

[Wilhelm Bittrich]

Its basically another adaptation of the book, kind of like how John Carpenter's The Thing went back to Who Goes There?. Wages of Fear 1953 is a classic, but Sorcerer really ups the ante. Both movies are great in their own right. Sorcerer's camerawork, cinematography and pacing are all perfection, and the movie is just plain moody and a feast for the senses. No wonder too, its directed by William Friedkin, the guy who did The Exorcist and The French Connection.

Abolutely agree, both movies are well worth a watch. If someone hasn't watched them I highly recommend doing so. The same goes for the French Connection an absolute classic and, IMHO, Gene Hackman at its best.

Some say it was the biggest failure in Automobile history. Today the cars are highly sought after by collectors and at least IMHO, a memorial of the 1950's US cars.
If you have ever seen an Oldmsobile Super 88 or a Ford Fairlane 500 you'll know what I mean.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you The Edsel:

 

[Picklechu]

Micheal Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate was such a financial bomb that it single-handed killed United Artists. Making only $3.5 million out of it $44 million budget, the production was plagued with Cimino’s perfectionism that lead to the film going four times over its budget. For instance, when a street Cimino had built for the film was six feet too narrow, instead of taking the recommended and cheaper option of tearing down one side of the street and moving it back six feet, Cimino ordered both sides be torn down and moved back three feet, because it would look nicer. Or how Cimino had an irrigation system built under the battlefield so it would remain a bright green during filming. Or how Cimino halted filming for several hours so a cloud he liked would pass into view.

Over 220 hours of film were shot, later cut down to a 5 hour runtime, then had to be cut down again to 3 hours and 40 minutes causing it to miss its Christmas 1979 premiere date and executives to contemplate firing him. After its one week run in November 1980 and another recut and re-release in April 1981 the film was both a financial and critical failure. Cimino’s career was ruined, United Artists was merged with MGM a few years later, and along with other flops like Sorcerer and Cruising led to a decline in director-driven films as a whole.

It also helped to fuck over Transamerica (which owned United Artists at the time) as a conglomerate. Before that point, they were in all kinds of sectors. Now, they're owned by Aegon and basically just sell insurance (partially through their most well-known subsidiary, World Financial Group, which is one of the worst MLMs).

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.

I honestly didn't realize that that Liberty Brew crap was Pepsi Blue. I guess my taste buds have changed since I was 11-ish, since I remember it being way better.

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:

I had forgotten about all of that, but I remember reading about it somewhere (EGM maybe?) when I was a kid. Didn't they also try only selling it in mall kiosks or something like that?

Back on topic, Nokia.

Back in the early '00s, they were absolutely huge, too big to fail. Now they're gone.

View attachment 1668319

I still have this old N900 stored in my nightstand, love it to death.

They just won a contract from NASA to build a 4G network on the moon.

 

[mindlessobserver]

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.

The only thing the Jew Juicer was good for was to be the most Hebraic method of Jewing shekels from mouth breathing goys. Once you realized the only thing it was meant to cold press was latnum bars the business model made more sense. The mistake in the plan was that it was as subtle as someone named "goldstein" saying "as a white person..."

 

[murdered meat bag]

I am old enough to remember the Hardees take over of Roy Roger's. A cautionary tale in brand acquisition that has lessons for any business looking to expand. The quick tl;dr is that Hardees wanted to expand into the North and saw acquiring Roy Roger's as the best way to do it. The plan was to, in theory, integrate roy Rogers into the hardees brand. Convert all the Roy Rogers stores into Hardees, and then Profit.

Instead however the established customer base of Roy Roger's saw Hardees as a hostile interloper taking away their precious store. The integration of the Hardees menu and rebranding all the stores drove the established fan base away, leaving hardees holding an huge debt from the aquisition and a permanently damaged Roy Roger's brand (that they sold off for a song) and their own brand irreparably damaged in the market they had tried to expand into. They are still trying to recover from it to this day.

It's honestly comparable to Disneys acquisition of Lucasfilm, and other misguided brand purchases by companies thet have no idea what to do with their aquisition.

was this after the atikins diet thickburger faze? I remember the food being terrible after that.

Philips in the Netherlands. It used to be on the cutting edge of technology, standing at the cradle of things like VCR, CD, DVD and Blu Ray. And then in the 90ies it just stagnated.
Nothing was done to become a leader in electrical appliances once more and they started to sell off divisions.

The company still exists but as a shadow of its former self. Compared to one of their former divisions; NXP semiconductors, which is one of the largest (I think top 5) chip designers and manufacturers in the world.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

I am old enough to remember the Hardees take over of Roy Roger's. A cautionary tale in brand acquisition that has lessons for any business looking to expand. The quick tl;dr is that Hardees wanted to expand into the North and saw acquiring Roy Roger's as the best way to do it. The plan was to, in theory, integrate roy Rogers into the hardees brand. Convert all the Roy Rogers stores into Hardees, and then Profit.

Instead however the established customer base of Roy Roger's saw Hardees as a hostile interloper taking away their precious store. The integration of the Hardees menu and rebranding all the stores drove the established fan base away, leaving hardees holding an huge debt from the aquisition and a permanently damaged Roy Roger's brand (that they sold off for a song) and their own brand irreparably damaged in the market they had tried to expand into. They are still trying to recover from it to this day.

It's honestly comparable to Disneys acquisition of Lucasfilm, and other misguided brand purchases by companies thet have no idea what to do with their aquisition.

The strangeness of Hardees to those used to Carl's Jr still boggles the mind, it's like a discount dime-store version of Carl's Jr but not as good somehow.

ing' hardees.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

If we're speaking about car industries, then the crash of the USA and UK cars is a pretty huge disaster. James May had an episode about it in one of his shows:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3oe1yo

tl;dw The Americans didn't care for efficency and got fucked hard when gas prices increased and people went over for Japanese cars that don't guzzle fuel. The Brits were modern Brits and had a commitee design shitty cars nobody want.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

The strangeness of Hardees to those used to Carl's Jr still boggles the mind, it's like a discount dime-store version of Carl's Jr but not as good somehow.

ing' hardees.

The strangeness of Carl's Jr. to those used to Hardee's still boggles the mind, it's like a discount dime-store version of Hardee's but not as good somehow.

 

[Cedric_Eff]

When Continental Airlines got buttfucked by the French, their own accidents and quality control, leading to their merger with United Airlines.

 

[Pencilvester]

Some French companies wrote "known-price contracts" where the client had the right to buy securities at the it's price 8 days prior, with the insurance company making up the difference. This was already a bad idea when stocks prices came in the newspaper, but now policy-holders who vigorously exercise their rights (by, for example, borrowing money to invest in the known-price account) threaten to bankrupt whoever's on the hook for the policy. Aviva (a UK company that bought the French company that wrote that policy) is in a long-running legal battle with policy holders.

Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s handling of Seagram is one of the biggest unforced errors in biggest history. Thanks to shrewd deal-making by Edgar Bronfman Sr., Seagram possessed a 25% stake in DuPont, which yielded $300 million in dividends a year. Bronfman Jr., entranced by the glamour of the entertainment industry, sells the stake back to DuPont for $9 billion to buy record labels and movie studios. After his Hollywood purchases underperform Bronfman Jr. starts looking for a partner and falls under the spell of Jean-Marie Messier, the "visionary" boss of Vivendi. Seagram and Vivendi agree to an all-stock merger, gambling that Vivendi's future was so bright that it was worth losing control of the family business to become a part of it. Instead, Vivendi collapsed under the debt accrued by Messier. Meanwhile DuPont was doing great, so had Bronfman Jr. gone surfing everyday instead of working the family business would be in much better shape.

 

[Big Bad Wart]

Was watching these videos on the German company that should have had 2 billion dollars in the bank but it turned out it didn't have it.

 

[Fuck Y'all]

Some French companies wrote "known-price contracts" where the client had the right to buy securities at the it's price 8 days prior, with the insurance company making up the difference. This was already a bad idea when stocks prices came in the newspaper, but now policy-holders who vigorously exercise their rights (by, for example, borrowing money to invest in the known-price account) threaten to bankrupt whoever's on the hook for the policy. Aviva (a UK company that bought the French company that wrote that policy) is in a long-running legal battle with policy holders.

Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s handling of Seagram is one of the biggest unforced errors in biggest history. Thanks to shrewd deal-making by Edgar Bronfman Sr., Seagram possessed a 25% stake in DuPont, which yielded $300 million in dividends a year. Bronfman Jr., entranced by the glamour of the entertainment industry, sells the stake back to DuPont for $9 billion to buy record labels and movie studios. After his Hollywood purchases underperform Bronfman Jr. starts looking for a partner and falls under the spell of Jean-Marie Messier, the "visionary" boss of Vivendi. Seagram and Vivendi agree to an all-stock merger, gambling that Vivendi's future was so bright that it was worth losing control of the family business to become a part of it. Instead, Vivendi collapsed under the debt accrued by Messier. Meanwhile DuPont was doing great, so had Bronfman Jr. gone surfing everyday instead of working the family business would be in much better shape.

>Bronfman

it's some Claire NVIXM Bronfman relative?

 

[2021Murder]

>Bronfman

it's some Claire NVIXM Bronfman relative?

Her brother. Isnt it weird how jews are all involved in shady shit

 

[ToroidalBoat]

No mention of "New Coke" yet?

Some say it was a plot to make "Classic Coke" sell more.

 

[Stoneheart]

many of the comments you'll see is that many purists they trash-talked the bike, calling it a "Porsche with an HD badge", and all kinds of shit.

How is a Porsche with a HD badge trash-talking?

One of the great disasters in business history, The BMW 507.

It looks so great. you could see it at the BMW headquarter for some time. Its a timeless classic worth a couple of millions now.

 

[The best and greatest]

The Intel "Meltdown" vulnerability comes to mind.

Here's how it went:

• Intel engineers purposefully neglect/exclude/turn off? CPU function that performs a check necessary for security.
• This is done with increased performance in mind. AMD and (most) other manufacturers were not effected because they did not disable this feature.
• REALLY FUCKING BAD vulnerability. Can potentially be exploited via Javascript or any program really, and let's an attacker read any of your computers memory it wants. No easy way to detect it attacking your computer.
• The vulnerability potentially exists on pretty much every Intel CPU going back to 1995. Definitely exists on CPUs within the last decade that feature speculative and OOT execution.
• Intel's "fix" consists of a shitty kernel patch that disgusted Linus Torvalds himself and tanked performance significantly on ALL Intel CPUs.
• Around the time of this happening, the Intel CEO resigned from the company.
• This resignation was after a long period of the CEO maintaining the minimum number of shares necessary to hold the position.

This vulnerability hit everyone. Imagine the main product your company is responsible for all of a sudden becoming defective and potentially malicious for everyone that uses it. This vulnerability was particularly concerning to datacenters and the NSA domestically, who were hit the hardest by it.

This is an ongoing problem?