Ten Of The Dumbest Choices In Tech History

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Warning, this list is the saddest thing you will read all day. The only good thing about this list? At least you are not on it.

Wouldn't it be great to have a crystal ball? Some way to see into the future and learn if you just made a genius decision or a regrettable mistake? The folks on this list sure could have used that. The tech industry is littered with stories of people making choices that would cost them hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
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Wonder why Steven Sinofsky is missing from that list... he made a huge mistake.
 
I would have sworn 'removing the Start button from Windows 8' would have made it on the list. :D
 
I would of read it had noscript not blocked it and the other 200 associated websites that go along with it.

I couldnt be arsed trying to figure out which one to allow that would show me the webpage whilst keeping the others blocked.
 
Everthing on this list is about recent tech history. How did they not include the Compaq/Digital merger?!
 
I suppose the outcomes of these decisions would be pretty hard to predict when they were made, but I would definitely be kicking myself if I was of these guys XD.
 
They aren't dumb choices. Thats like saying you made a dumb choice when you picked losing lottery numbers. Based on the information they had at the time, they made the choices they thought were right.
 
Apple, Apple, Apple, Facebook, Facebook, Blackberry, Google, Google..... This guy really put a lot of time into that article.
 
hands down winner:

Speaking of shareholders: back when Apple was in its early days, Bushnell turned down an offer from Jobs to invest $50,000 in the fledgling company, an amount that would have given him a one-third ownership stake. Even after Apple's recent stock-price plummet, that investment would now be worth about $138.5bn; that's an ROI of about 280 million per cent.
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/30/nolan_bushnell_remembers_steve_jobs/
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
I would of read it had noscript not blocked it and the other 200 associated websites that go along with it.

I couldnt be arsed trying to figure out which one to allow that would show me the webpage whilst keeping the others blocked.
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Same here; I didn't end up bothering to read the article at all because they want all kinds of scripts to be enabled just to read a basic story.
 
All that GDC bullshit has my brain messed up. I initially read that as "Ten of the Dumbest Chicks In Tech History"
 
I click the link, first thing I see is an advertisement for Office 365. I think yeah, nice product placement.
 
I'm not sure I would put HP's decision on the list. I doubt HP would properly market the Apple, and it would just go the way of "another PC", certainly all the stuff which actually made Apple what it is today (iPod, iPhone, iPad) would not have come out of HP.
 
Monkey God said:
They aren't dumb choices. Thats like saying you made a dumb choice when you picked losing lottery numbers. Based on the information they had at the time, they made the choices they thought were right.
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Heck.. These decisions weren't even really tech related... They're all venture capital decisions that people regretted... Rather than being tech screwup.
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
I would of read it had noscript not blocked it and the other 200 associated websites that go along with it.

I couldnt be arsed trying to figure out which one to allow that would show me the webpage whilst keeping the others blocked.
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Same. I figured someone would list them here but no luck.
 
Santa said:
Ho.. ho.. ho! Why isn't the mother of all "regrettable tech mistakes" not listed.. Gary Kildall's failure to get CP/M as the main operating system most people would buy with the original IBM PC. If this would have happened, then perhaps Gary, not Bill Gates, would have become one of the richest men in the world. Merry Christmas!
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There's so many stories about what actually happened that it probably didn't happen as simply as Bill Gates originally said. In the end the market decided. People went with MS-DOS because it was $40 and CP/M was $240.
 
This whole thing is pretty stupid because its almost all a bunch of BS about people who had a stab at apple, but they completely ignore the fact that some of those companies to this day sell way more than apple and may have completely trashed their business when apple crashed in the 90s. I mean really, HP the largest PC maker in the world? lol if they had gone apple they might be bankrupt today.

Bushnell was also a bad example given that apple crashed to almost nothing in between when he could have owned them he certainly would have had many chances to lose it all or cash out before apple regained its position with the iPod. Then the next example they give is another apple guy who did what bushness probably would have done too, cash out early.
 
I think these all pale compared to Xerox allowing everyone to take what it originally developed and turn it into countless billion dollar companies.

Had Xerox leadership had enough foresight to support their PARC division they could have been THE name in personal computing and who knows if Apple or Microsoft would even exist today.
 
Stephen Elop needs to be on that list. He has almost destroyed Nokia. Taken them from being number one in smartphones to being a minor player.
 
DarkStar_WNY said:
I think these all pale compared to Xerox allowing everyone to take what it originally developed and turn it into countless billion dollar companies.

Had Xerox leadership had enough foresight to support their PARC division they could have been THE name in personal computing and who knows if Apple or Microsoft would even exist today.
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Xerox actually shipped commercial workstations with the GUI, years before the first Macintosh or Lisa shipped. Despite having features like local ethernet, the problem is that they were very expensive ($75k for a basic system and $16k per additional workstation) and the GUI wasn't as intuitive or useful as what followed with the Lisa and the Mac.

Here are some interesting videos on the Star: http://youtu.be/Cn4vC80Pv6Q

Here's an essay from an engineer who worked at both Xerox and Apple: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.p...&topic=Software Design&sortOrder=Sort by Date

The things Apple added like drag and drop file and folder manipulation, drop down menus, contextual menus, clipboard behavior, self-repairing windows, are still in desktop UIs today.

The Star video is fascinating btw. Amazing technology but the GUI is so fundamentally different from what we use now. Its like an alternate reality version of what might have been.
 
rudy said:
This whole thing is pretty stupid because its almost all a bunch of BS about people who had a stab at apple, but they completely ignore the fact that some of those companies to this day sell way more than apple and may have completely trashed their business when apple crashed in the 90s. I mean really, HP the largest PC maker in the world? lol if they had gone apple they might be bankrupt today.
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HP releasing something as important as the Apple II back in the late 70s would have meant a completely different PC landscape today. Who knows what the result of IBM vs HP would have been, what it would have meant for people who started off making Apple software like Bill Gates, etc etc. Would HP have been less dominant, more dominant, who knows?
 
Well I think we do know, history has shown time and time again that various fields move through very predictable patterns as they go from infant niche products to mature main stream products. Every company that tried to control the entire PC landscape failed to do it. It was only the more open hardware platforms that would succeed. But on the opposite side at the very early times it was usually the closed hardware and software companies that made the early surges. Apple, IBM, neither was ever going to hold on because their business model did not allow them to expand past a certain point. If HP had replaced apple they would have screwed up just the same. Its not really a screw up even, its a fundamental problem with the business model. It leaves way to many customers unhappy and way to many people without a device.


Now history repeats itself, total control companies like black berry, apple, palm have early success, but soon they are eaten away and destroyed by android. While apple has not yet met its demise it will. But the others are pretty much done.

So I am saying HP would have been less dominant, to this day their software on the consumer side sucks, always has always will, they never would have been able to hold on. MS saved HP.
 
tec805 said:
I click the link, first thing I see is an advertisement for Office 365. I think yeah, nice product placement.
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It's called personalized ads. You must have done something to express interest. Just like I get ads for Fitbit, Livestrong fitness equipment, and 23andme.
 
I wonder how many of those VC people made good decisions at other times? It's easy to say "wow, they dropped the ball on THAT one", but hindsight it 20/20. If someone had come peddling the idea of facebook to me, i'd have laughed my ass off and told them to take a hike. Same with a lot of these other startups. They are big now, sure, but an idea is only part of the equation. Lot's of companies with excellent products tanked, because people didn't buy them for whatever reason. And lot's of companies that make crap are still in business. There really is no predicting what will succeed and what won't.
 
rudy said:
Well I think we do know, history has shown time and time again that various fields move through very predictable patterns as they go from infant niche products to mature main stream products. Every company that tried to control the entire PC landscape failed to do it. It was only the more open hardware platforms that would succeed. But on the opposite side at the very early times it was usually the closed hardware and software companies that made the early surges. Apple, IBM, neither was ever going to hold on because their business model did not allow them to expand past a certain point. If HP had replaced apple they would have screwed up just the same. Its not really a screw up even, its a fundamental problem with the business model. It leaves way to many customers unhappy and way to many people without a device.

Now history repeats itself, total control companies like black berry, apple, palm have early success, but soon they are eaten away and destroyed by android. While apple has not yet met its demise it will. But the others are pretty much done.

So I am saying HP would have been less dominant, to this day their software on the consumer side sucks, always has always will, they never would have been able to hold on. MS saved HP.
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We'll see what happens in the long run. Closed ecosystems such as smartphones, consoles, e-readers, and services like Steam are wildly successful right now.

Being "open" has little advantage as long as it doesn't give a better customer experience. Open ecosystems like Android (which really isn't open given the amount of control that carriers and hardware manufacturers exert over it) hasn't really been a success except in low end hardware. Best selling high end Android devices like the GS3 still sells only a fraction of what the iPhone does, and it accounts for less than a quarter of Samsung's smartphone sales. The extreme differences in mobile traffic, app downloads, mobile ad revenue, and developer profits attests to this. Even Google makes more than twice as much revenue serving ads on iOS, and it is because of the distribution of hardware being sold.

Price, not quality, is what drives Android right now, and it is at the expense of good applications and hardware. Open ecosystems are meaningful when it gives a better experience for customers, and that won't change until it catches up in hardware and software. That could certainly change over time, we'll see, but right now customers are being better served by closed ecosystems, whether it is by Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Valve.
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
I would of read it had noscript not blocked it and the other 200 associated websites that go along with it.

I couldnt be arsed trying to figure out which one to allow that would show me the webpage whilst keeping the others blocked.
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LOL yeah that site ended up on their own list of dumbest tech choices! :D
 
Ualdayan said:
It's called personalized ads. You must have done something to express interest. Just like I get ads for Fitbit, Livestrong fitness equipment, and 23andme.
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I get no ads at all. I must be doing something right!
 
MostComfortable said:
We'll see what happens in the long run. Closed ecosystems such as smartphones, consoles, e-readers, and services like Steam are wildly successful right now.

Being "open" has little advantage as long as it doesn't give a better customer experience. Open ecosystems like Android (which really isn't open given the amount of control that carriers and hardware manufacturers exert over it) hasn't really been a success except in low end hardware. Best selling high end Android devices like the GS3 still sells only a fraction of what the iPhone does, and it accounts for less than a quarter of Samsung's smartphone sales. The extreme differences in mobile traffic, app downloads, mobile ad revenue, and developer profits attests to this. Even Google makes more than twice as much revenue serving ads on iOS, and it is because of the distribution of hardware being sold.

Price, not quality, is what drives Android right now, and it is at the expense of good applications and hardware. Open ecosystems are meaningful when it gives a better experience for customers, and that won't change until it catches up in hardware and software. That could certainly change over time, we'll see, but right now customers are being better served by closed ecosystems, whether it is by Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Valve.
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Notice I said open hardware, the point is in order to dominate a market you need to provide products to all the people , android isn't crushing everyone because its cheaper, there are android phones that cost way more than apple, it is crushing everyone because its producing everything, low end devices, high end devices, niche devices, its meeting everyone's needs by allowing hardware makers to focus on making hardware while google focuses on the OS. Where as any one company with a closed system cant do that. Apple didn't see large phones coming and they missed the boat, maybe because the company they copy archos didn't have one for them to copy lol. But look at other products like say cars, can any one car company dominate the market with 90% of all sales? Nope they cant because they cant fill all those niches and maintain the same brand image. That is why its so popular for them to make multiple brands.
 
This reminds of an an financial editorial I read like something like 15 years ago. The write was talking about missed opportunities and one of the examples he provided was, as I call, if someone had invested $1000 when MS first went public and not touched it the investment would have been worth something like 12 million dollars when the article was written in the mid to late 90's.
 
rudy said:
Notice I said open hardware, the point is in order to dominate a market you need to provide products to all the people , android isn't crushing everyone because its cheaper, there are android phones that cost way more than apple, it is crushing everyone because its producing everything, low end devices, high end devices, niche devices, its meeting everyone's needs by allowing hardware makers to focus on making hardware while google focuses on the OS. Where as any one company with a closed system cant do that. Apple didn't see large phones coming and they missed the boat, maybe because the company they copy archos didn't have one for them to copy lol. But look at other products like say cars, can any one car company dominate the market with 90% of all sales? Nope they cant because they cant fill all those niches and maintain the same brand image. That is why its so popular for them to make multiple brands.
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The thing is that Android phones that cost as much as or more than Apple's is a niche. High end Android devices sell a small fraction of what the iPhone does. The popular GS3 and GN2 are only a quarter of Samsung's own smartphone sales.

It could change in the future, but right now Android's marketshare is mostly on the back of cheap lower end devices. Owning the low end space doesn't concern me, having good hardware and the best applications does. As long as Android is fragmented and is mainly used in low end devices that developers make no money from, it will remain a niche in higher end devices.
 
Most of that list can be pretty much be boiled down to investors missing out on Google, Apple, and Facebook from the very beginning.

The last 2 with Yahoo and Groupon CEOs turning down the would-be buyers also came to mind as I was reading the list. I never heard of Viddy, the so-called Instagram for videos.
 
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