Worst Company Disasters! | Top 6 Blunders

You are watching ColdFusion TV. Hello. Welcome to another ColdFusion video. In previous ColdFusion videos, we have often seen the success stories of some of the largest and most influential companies. But what about the other side? What about errors? missed opportunities and total

disasters

that, in turn, led some companies to ruin. Well, you're in luck today, because here are six of those stories. Let's get right into it. Number six: Kodak had the first digital camera in 1977. Every time technology changes the landscape of an industry, there are some companies that adapt and thrive, and others that continue doing the same old thing until it's too late.

For Kodak, which was left behind by the advent of the digital camera, the situation was a little different. In fact, Kodak patented the first digital camera in 1977. It used a magnetic cassette to store images of about 100 kilobytes. However, in the years that followed, Kodak made so much money from film that they let the new technology gather in the dust, not realizing its potential. The

company

continued to focus on traditional film cameras. It was even clear that the market was moving towards digital. When Kodak finally entered the digital market, they were selling cameras at a loss and still couldn't make up enough sales to catch up with their competitors, who had seen the potential of digital cameras from the beginning.

Kodak currently loses more than two hundred million dollars a year. The lesson learned: in the business world, you always have to be attentive to the market and respond to future trends. If not, it cost you everything. Number five: Excite could have bought Google for less than a million dollars. The year is 1999 and Excite was the number two search engine, behind Yahoo. Google was nobody back then. The new kid on the block. It was in this context, back in 1999, that Larry Page offered to sell Google to Excite for $750,000, according to Excite CEO at the time, George Bell.

The $750,000 deal was 1% of Excite's value, so financing was not an issue. The problem arose when Larry insisted that if the sale went ahead, Excite had to replace all of its search technology with Google's. Excite's George thought this was too much and declined the offer. Excite was eventually bought by Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) in 2004. At the time, Ask had less than 2% share of the search market. Google, currently known as Alphabet, processes one billion search results every day. They currently have around $147 billion in assets, which is more than 196,000 times what Excite would have paid for them. Oh.

Number four: Blockbuster Video rejects the opportunity to buy Netflix. From the mid 80's to the late 90's when VHS was king. The problem back then was that VHS tapes cost over $97 per movie. For this reason, video rental stores, like Blockbuster, came to fill that void. They were the perfect solution and became a regular part of the weekend plans of hundreds of millions of people around the world. Over time, online video streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and even Putlocker destroyed the old video rental business model. Ironically, in 2000, Netflix proposed that it would handle Blockbuster's online component and Blockbuster could host Netflix as an in-store component, thus eliminating the need to mail DVDs, which was Netflix's business model at the time. .

According to an interview with the former CEO of Netflix, Barry McCarthy Blockbuster simply laughed Netflix out of his office. But that is not the end of his story. In 2007, Blockbuster was on the right track. They had an Internet movie component, which was taking Netflix by storm. Netflix was struggling and its top management wanted to sell the

company

to a blockbuster to save face. Blockbuster's growth was very strong at the time, so they rejected the offer. In a strange twist that same year, there was a board dispute over Blockbuster, which led to a CEO change. The new CEO was James Keyes (formerly of Seven-Eleven).

He came in with the wrong mindset and thought Blockbuster should be a retail business instead of an entertainment one. Because of this, he didn't see the value of an online component. A big mistake. In eighteen months, Blockbuster's new CEO had lost 85% of the company's value. And within three years, Blockbuster declared bankruptcy. Blockbuster failed and Netflix prospered. Since then, Netflix is ​​behind original shows like House of Cards, BoJack Horseman, and Daredevil. With 83 million subscriptions worldwide, Netflix has altered the way many watch entertainment. Number three: A math mistake in grade school cost NASA $125 million. Before the arrival of Google, were you ever frustrated with conversions from feet to meters?

Inches to centimeters? Was it difficult for you? Well, you're in good company. It turns out that a similar mathematical problem hindered some of the greatest minds in the Western world. In 1999, a Mars orbiter that Lockheed-Martin designed for NASA was lost in space due to a simple mathematical error, where Lockheed engineers used imperial measurements while NASA employees used metric measurements. The misalignment caused the thrusters to not receive information vital to navigation, causing the $125 million spacecraft to malfunction. The probe was lost forever while attempting to enter orbit around Mars after a 286-day journey. There were numerous occasions where errors should have been caught, but were not.

Number two: Nokia absolutely refuses to use Android. Nokia. One of the most iconic brands of the 20th century and even until the first decade of the 21st century. The company had around 51% market share in the mobile phone industry at its peak in 2007. But now, they are a shell of their former self. A fond, but distant, memory for many. The beginning of the company's fall from grace can be traced to a moment in 2010, when Nokia CEO Anssi Vanjoki was snobbish at the idea of ​​using Google's Android software. He see, at that time, Nokia had its own operating system called Symbian.

After the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Nokia's software development team realized there was a threat. Then they split into two. One team tried to revamp Symbian and the other created a completely new operating system called MeeGo. The problem was that the two teams were fighting for the resources of Nokia's top executives. Basically, there was an internal struggle within the company. It was so bad that every time Nokia dealt with external stakeholders, like chip makers, for example, there were so many disputes within the company that it took the better part of a year to make a decision on something.

In the world of technology, that's too long. Competitive innovation waits for no one. The logical solution, in retrospect of course, was Android. Nokia could have used the open software platform, combined with its internal hardware, to quickly make up for lost time and at minimal cost. Instead, Nokia's CEO at the time decided to skip Android, calling it a short-term solution, comparing the move to, Quote: "Wetting your pants in winter to stay warm." Nokia continued to work on its own software efforts, investing $5 billion a year in research and development to fix the problem, but to no avail. Over time, iPhone and Android phones dominated the market until Nokia's mobile division was left in the dust.

Not long after this, in 2013, Microsoft rescued the brand from the Nokia division. Microsoft also failed to keep the once-legendary company afloat, wasting $8 billion before killing off the Nokia mobile brand. Moral of the story: Move with innovation and don't let your pride cloud your judgment. But wait a second, there's a twist here. Nokia, the Finnish company, is said to be making a comeback in 2016, after signing an exclusive deal with HMD Global. HMD Global is a new company, also based in Finland. The agreement will see the creation of Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets over the next 10 years. So, I'll see how this plays out.

Number one: Xerox, yes, the printer company delivers one of the greatest inventions in the history of computing to Apple. Imagine having one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century in your hands and giving it away because you don't understand what you have in your hands. Xerox did just that with the Xerox Alto. The Xerox Alto was an experimental computer from 1973, created at the Xerox Research Center. El Alto was way ahead of his time. It was the first modern desktop PC as we know it today. It had a mouse, windows, file managers and could copy and paste, delete and move files.

It had icons, menus, graphics, and even a local area network that connected all the computers. The idea was to imitate an office desk, but on a screen. A paperless office of the future. Absolutely revolutionary for 1973. What the Xerox Alto was demonstrating was the first graphical user interface, or GUI, on a desktop computer. For those of you unfamiliar with this era of computer technology, here's what a typical computer from the late 1970s looked and worked. Before GUIs, doing absolutely anything on a computer required typing. commands on lines of text. If you misspelled something, it was a shame.

The computer would simply throw an error, saying it didn't understand. Pointing and clicking on a graphical object was a strange idea. Thousands of Xerox Altos were built at the Research Center, but they were never sold. It is only widely used in Xerox offices and in some universities. Xerox's top management didn't understand what they had, managers simply couldn't see the vision of what the computer of the future will be. But a man named Steve Jobs did know what the future of the computer could be. And Xerox delivered it directly to them. Here's how it happened: Xerox at the time needed a way to make its experimental technologies, like the Alto, cheaper.

They saw Apple release their Apple II at an affordable price. So, in 1979, Steve Jobs was invited to his research institute to see if they could help reduce the cost of production. The deal saw Xerox gain one million shares of Apple. In exchange for Steve Jobs getting inside information on everything interesting and revolutionary that was happening at the PARC Center. No one actually consulted with the guys at the research center, but Apple's business development team signed the deal anyway. The following is from Larry Lester, a scientist at the Xerox Research Center and an eyewitness to when Steve Jobs was handed everything.

Lester: So during that demonstration... uh, Steve again got very excited, walking around the room and occasionally looking at the screen. He basically just watched and then reacted, took it all in and tried to process it. And one point, he said you still don't show us everything. And the meeting stopped and there were some phone calls and okay, we'll show you more. But Jobs was there saying, "What's going on here? You're sitting on a gold mine!" "Why aren't you doing something with this technology?" "You could change the world!" And there were his friends, who were trying to, you know, arrange a negotiation of some kind.

We are trying to calm him down. Don't be so excited. But it was, it made it very clear to him that we were never going to do anything with this. Oh, the irony was that when they left, we had still shown them like 1% of what PARC was doing. But enough was enough, he got really excited and decided they were going to reorient LISA to be something like what they saw in terms of GUI, they fell in love with the mouse and that changed everything. And 7 months later, he was working at Apple. Jobs: And, within ten minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this one day.

They were basically photocopiers and had no idea what a computer could do. And so they have just kicked off the biggest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. The computer graphics approach appealed to the human mind because commands were now replaced by movements and objects. So, it felt natural. Writing lines of text was now a thing of the past. Alto's ideas would greatly influence Apple LISA, whose technology reached the Macintosh, which influenced Microsoft Windows. Both were the eventual ancestors of the way our phones work today. And the sad thing is that Xerox is never mentioned for any of this.

Anyway, that's the end of the video. There were six big mistakes made by some of the major companies. I hope you liked it, please like if so, please subscribe if you are new to this channel, and this video took a lot of work so I would appreciate it if you would share this video with someone whoI'd like. interested. Also, as another point, if you want to suggest videos, I have opened the space on my Patreon. So if you are Patreon, you can participate and suggest what the next video will be. Thanks again guys. This has been Dagogo, you have been watching ColdFusion and we will see you soon in the next video.

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