Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
Summary: IT, software and computer companies are certainly not without their share of poor executive decisions and mismanagement. While dozens of notable examples could have made our list, these were by far the top top 10 worst in the history of the technology industry, causing many billions of dollars of lost revenue or resulted in the downfall of entire companies.
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Mention the name "Windows Vista" in most circles, you'll probably get a mixture of reactions. Groans, snickers, and utter disgust.
Windows XP wasn’t supposed to last as long as it did. As soon as XP shipped in 2001, work got under way for the next version, code-named “Longhorn.” The feature list got bigger and more ambitious as time went on, and Longhorn was shown off with great fanfare at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in 2003.
Those plans were tossed aside completely in August 2004, with what later became infamous as the “Longhorn reset.” In September 2005, Windows boss Jim Allchin publicly acknowledged the do-over, acknowledging that Longhorn had been “crashing into the ground.”
The design goals of what was eventually named Windows Vista were admirable: improve Windows' security model, introduce widespread 64-bit technology into the desktop OS, improve networking performance, refine the user interface, and better integrate search capabilities. Unfortunately, the unwieldy and disorganized project took more than five years to deliver unsatisfactory results.
Windows Vista was released to manufacturing in November 2006, with a consumer debut in January 2007. Vista got mostly negative reviews, thanks to significantly higher resource requirements, incompatibilities with some popular hardware and software programs, and a controversial security feature called User Account Control (UAC) that was derided as overly intrusive. Service Packs would later resolve many of Vista's issues, but its reputation as a slow, buggy failure was sealed.
Eventually, the technologies that were created for Windows Vista were refined and re-engineered. Vista’s successor, Windows 7, was released a little less than three years after Vista's introduction to much better reviews.
Nobody knows how much the Vista debacle really cost Microsoft, but it damaged the company's reputation and almost certainly amounted to billions of dollars of stalled upgrades and a significant exodus of users to Apple’s Mac platform.
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Talkback
So, what goes down as the all time worst?
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
It gets worse than that...
George is now a venture capitalist with General Catalyst and still talks about his tenure at Excite@Home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Financing_and_initial_public_offering
http://www.generalcatalyst.com/team/george-bell
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
Xerox's decision to sideline it's PC development then allowing Apple and Microsoft to basically walk in and take whatever they wanted from it at a minimal cost.
The rest is history.
'Allowing' was different, though: Apple paid with its shares, and Microsoft
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
I knew a lady who worked at Xerox. She almost wept when talking about the stuff tha the research division came up with, but the suits basically gave away for peanuts reasoning that there was no market for it.
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
PC was IBM's own personal computer line and it lost it to PC-clone manufacturers who it had licensed PC BIOS and because it did not buy PC-DOS from Microsoft but just licensed and allowed Microsoft to license it to PC-compatible personal computer manufacturers (later made PC-clone personal computers).
Even today Xerox Star GUI is awesome. They had everything correctly then and if Xerox would have continued and pursued that, they would have own the world and today we would have much better tech industry and better personal computers at home and work instead what Microsoft and Apple has come up even today (OS X 1.6, iOS 5, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Phone).
Thanks to IBM who invented the PC at 1981 as without it, we would have now incompatible personal computers (if not counting what Xerox was doing).
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
Maybe it was the best decision for us - users. Ideas are not worth much without implementation.
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
Xerox's workstations were still being produced (and pricey - $12k) a few years after the Mac's intro.
Microsoft's decision to make Ballmer CEO
Microsoft 1995: Toyota
Microsoft 2011: Kodak
HollywoodDog
HollywoodDog 1995: John Travolta
HollywoodDog 2011: Gilbert Godfried.
Oh, that's not tech related. Wow, just like you. ;)
HA!
When they make the movie of my life, I was rather hoping for Richard Gere, not Gilbert Godfried.
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
Didn't Richard Gere get a hampster shoved up his butt?
hmm... nice ambition
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
Read the book "The Billions Nobody Wanted" which is about the copier industry and then contrast it to what Xerox did with all the brilliant ideas that came out of PARC.
Obviously as hot button of mine as an ex-Xeroid!
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
RE: Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions
if xerox PARC is unforgiving we won't have a vibrant tech industry. luckily they forego greed for the benefit of the US of A, kudos to them and many thanks.