All-Time Worst Tech Industry Executive Decisions

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This list of "all-time worst tech decisions" is pretty good but it seems like they missed a bunch. I would have had MySpace on the list way before Windows Vista.

Information Technology, 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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It was a minor catastrophe, but Vista was not a blunder at all. It worked and works great. The problem with it was morons installing it on systems that did not have two gigs of ram or more. The only real blunders on MS's part was not realizing how stupid so many of the industry journalists were, and not properly educating the public on how much ram Vista needed and how it used it.

The people that should have known better but didn't, on this forum alone, was enough to spread a great deal of bad will for Vista. Mojave, proved the point rather spectacularly. "We heard it sucked from some moron and we believed it" was Vista's largest problem. That and for some reason Nv waiting months b4 putting out any decent SLI drivers for it.
 
@GORANKAR

I fully agree. The problem with Vista was XP was 5-6 years old and people got used to using old POS hardware. Here comes Vista a much more modern OS and ZOMG! MY 4 YEAR OLD COMPUTER CANT RUN THIS! VISTA IS TRASH!

On top of that was something that was out of MS's hands. 3RD party companies either taking god damned forever to release new drivers (GASP! Drastically new OS requires a new driver system!) or flat out not releasing them at all for hardware that was only 1-2 years old. Or releasing piss poor drivers (Creative anyone?).

TL;DR: Vista's downfall was a combination of XP lasting for so long on top of stupid as hell users.

By the time 7 rolled off the line 3rd parties had their drivers in line (almost exactly the same as Vista's but x64 was becoming mainstream FINALLY). People had also upgraded their shit boxes to something not from the stone age.
 
GORANKAR said:
It was a minor catastrophe, but Vista was not a blunder at all. It worked and works great. The problem with it was morons installing it on systems that did not have two gigs of ram or more. The only real blunders on MS's part was not realizing how stupid so many of the industry journalists were, and not properly educating the public on how much ram Vista needed and how it used it.

The people that should have known better but didn't, on this forum alone, was enough to spread a great deal of bad will for Vista. Mojave, proved the point rather spectacularly. "We heard it sucked from some moron and we believed it" was Vista's largest problem. That and for some reason Nv waiting months b4 putting out any decent SLI drivers for it.
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Vista's launch was an absolute disaster. Neither the OS or the drivers were ready for release. A lot of blame goes to companies like ATI, Nvidia, and Creative (toss Intel somewhere in there as well), but the driver situation at launch made the OS a pain to work with. Add to that massive compatibility issues and other small problems Vista deserved a lot of the shit it got early on. The problem of course is that within a few months a lot had been ironed out and drivers were much better, but people refused to stop believing it was bad.
 
Both windows 7 and xp with 512 ram run faster than vista with 1gb of ram. The ram problem wasn't the only thing wrong with vista. Constant annoying problems i run into are only for vista and a lot of them are random or happen for no reason.

It really doesn't matter if they fixed the problems in later service packs because most computers don't have them installed and for good reason. Getting a service pack to install on vista is like getting the planets to align. On top of that everything is slower in vista... such as booting, installing updates and just launching programs.... i wish vista would just die.
 
Derangel said:
Vista's launch was an absolute disaster. Neither the OS or the drivers were ready for release. A lot of blame goes to companies like ATI, Nvidia, and Creative (toss Intel somewhere in there as well), but the driver situation at launch made the OS a pain to work with. Add to that massive compatibility issues and other small problems Vista deserved a lot of the shit it got early on. The problem of course is that within a few months a lot had been ironed out and drivers were much better, but people refused to stop believing it was bad.
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the sensationalist tech [strike=option]idiot[/s] journalist bitching about RAM useage didn't help, either.

Seriously, it didn't take any amount of brainpower to know what superfetch did, and if you actually needed the RAM, it clears out in a few RAM clock cycles - which nobody would ever notice, even if super hyped up on Ritalin, or whatever. There are (on slow 667MHz RAM) six hundred, sixty seven million effective clock cycles every second. And it will only take 5-20 of them to clear the RAM and report back).
 
Death of the Sears Catalog: 1993.

While the internet may have almost entirely under the NSF "no commercial use" grip when the decision was made (and thus the pointy haired bosses who came up with this can't be faulted on this specifically), just think about what Sears threw away.

They had a full blown, well trusted e-commerce infrastructure in place in 1993. Two years later when anybody with a sock puppet and a plan to maybe someday build such a thing could have billions of dollars thrown at them, Sears had nothing.

Also a small correction. While it looks like about half of those decisions were made at hp, the itanic project was a brilliant "success" for hp as it got intel to pay the huge costs of continuing the PA RISC line (which is 90%+ what itanic really was). I put the success in quotes as screwing over your partners is so far from the hp way of old as to lead to all the disasters to follow.
 
GORANKAR said:
It was a minor catastrophe, but Vista was not a blunder at all. It worked and works great. The problem with it was morons installing it on systems that did not have two gigs of ram or more. The only real blunders on MS's part was not realizing how stupid so many of the industry journalists were, and not properly educating the public on how much ram Vista needed and how it used it.

The people that should have known better but didn't, on this forum alone, was enough to spread a great deal of bad will for Vista. Mojave, proved the point rather spectacularly. "We heard it sucked from some moron and we believed it" was Vista's largest problem. That and for some reason Nv waiting months b4 putting out any decent SLI drivers for it.
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To be fair, Microsoft also took years longer than anticipated to release it, and by the time Microsoft finally said to its IHVs (and ISVs) "hey, guess what, we're really coming out with this!" the various hardware and software manufacturers said "uh huh, that's nice, keep crying wolf."

The result was that drivers were half-baked, too much software required UAC elevation, etc. From the engineers I've talked to that were around during that (I didn't join until the Win7 timeframe), Vista went RTM and the development team immediately went to work fixing issues. Contrast that to our usual practice - as much as is possible is fixed before shipping the OS. After the OS ships, usage metrics are gathered by a separate team that handles future patches based on measured impact.

Fortunately, within a year of shipping, Vista was that promised platform, with its improved driver model, security model, etc. However, as you basically stated, perception is reality to most people, and a first impression can poison all future interactions.
 
Vista was a flop, but try telling that to the early adapters :D
 
How about we add the decision makers at Groupon turning down a 6B offer from Google and the company is now valued at less than 1B if it will even survive :D
 
How about when RAMBUS decided to give up on innovation for the easier business model of patent litigation, a la SCO and NTP?
 
Vista??? Windows 7 is literally Vista with some of the bloat stripped away. It is the same kernel. The only reason it "failed" is because MS didn't market enough. Ironically, Windows 7's marketing campaign was essentially "it is not Vista - it's better!" People are fools.

Plus, it did not actually fail - people still bought new copies and all of the core was rebranded as Windows 7. MS made money either way, just not as fast as they may have liked.
 
I think IBM was under antiturst pressure to outsource the OS. And, that that time, the hardware was the computer, instead of the OS.

Windows Vista was a necessary step to Windows 7. Why do you think Windows 7 didn't get a bad rep for lack of drivers?

SCO's attack of Linux is one of the stupidest legal maneuvers in history, because the company continued their crusade long after the courts themselves were laughing at SCO.

Tech history is full of very stupid and expensive acquisitions. HP's purchase of Palm and Compaq. Remember Excite@Home snapping up all sorts of tiny web services for billions of dollars for things they could have done in house for millions of dollars? Surely you remember the company that once had a market cap of $35 Billion?
 
GORANKAR said:
It was a minor catastrophe, but Vista was not a blunder at all. It worked and works great. The problem with it was morons installing it on systems that did not have two gigs of ram or more. The only real blunders on MS's part was not realizing how stupid so many of the industry journalists were, and not properly educating the public on how much ram Vista needed and how it used it.

The people that should have known better but didn't, on this forum alone, was enough to spread a great deal of bad will for Vista. Mojave, proved the point rather spectacularly. "We heard it sucked from some moron and we believed it" was Vista's largest problem. That and for some reason Nv waiting months b4 putting out any decent SLI drivers for it.
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I don't know which is more sad, someone hanging onto the weak idea that Vista wasn't a turd, or someone trying to convince us that it was.

For the love of God, just let it go.
 
Vista was definitely a blight on Microsoft financially while microsoft does make quite a bit of cash from consumer level sales the real money comes from business licensing or so I'm told and I'm not aware of any industry in which Vista had taken any hold. My own company wouldn't ouch it with a 10ft pole. We had many apps that would not run properly or at all in Vista.

My own personal experience with led to three re-tries. The first was Vista sharing was buggy it's randomly had probably seeing other networked PC's and accepting local write access, it's a known bug I forget the details. The Second time was with a bug with MTP - media transfer protocol. Had all kinds of issues, none of which I experience in Windows 7. The last time I had it installed I'd bought a game I believe Supreme Ruler 2020 though the wiki says it's now compatible. At that point I'd had Vista installed for 3-6 months observing literally no value to it over XP and blew it out permanently. I actually haven't run into any issues with Windows 7 really. I still don't like UAC but I put up with it.
 
I was hoping to see this abomination make the list:

800px-Pippinfront.jpg
 
GORANKAR said:
It was a minor catastrophe, but Vista was not a blunder at all. It worked and works great. The problem with it was morons installing it on systems that did not have two gigs of ram or more.
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Indeed, you're right. Vista and 7 have officially the same official system requirements, but by the time 7 came out, the hardware industry had solidly moved on to at least two gigs of RAM, and CPUs were a lot faster (Moore's Law). This gave users a much more positive first impression of 7's performance, which in reality was only slightly polished over Vista.

The only real blunders on MS's part was not realizing how stupid so many of the industry journalists were, and not properly educating the public on how much ram Vista needed and how it used it.
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There were some blunders, like the sale of "Vista-capable" XP computers which weren't strong enough to run Vista well (Insanely, only 512MB RAM was needed for this designation). Microsoft should have recommended 2GB, and continued to push XP for anything less.

That and for some reason Nv waiting months b4 putting out any decent SLI drivers for it.
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Meaning, NV had a polished driver read win Win7 came out.
 
Mickey21 said:
Microsoft just needed more Windows Vista Launch Parties!! That would have fixed it. Seemed to work great for Windows 7.

/end sarcasm
Man those "launch parties" ideas were just so lame...

LOL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
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So lame that it landed me a full retail copy of Windows 7 Ultimate for free, before it was even available in any store :p. Hell MS even sent me a free copy of Vista for free too from that stupid game site they have, still running it on my G/F's computer just fine.

But I gotta agree with TheWeazmeister the worst blunder was Grouponturning down the offer from Google, now they arent worth shit.
 
Damn no edit.

I know you was being sarcastic Mickey, I just like the fact that MS loves to give their OS away for free :).
 
ICOM said:
I don't know which is more sad, someone hanging onto the weak idea that Vista wasn't a turd, or someone trying to convince us that it was.

For the love of God, just let it go.
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Vista was nice, not as polished like 7, atleast it shutdown when I told it to without waiting for a program to end, it just killed the process unlike Win7 which ask 2 fucking times because it can't force kill unless I do it myself, THAT NEEDS TO BE FIXED.

Would still be using Vista if I didn't have to replace my laptop.
 
I have a mix of Win7 and Vista at home. Honestly I can't see the difference. If there is supposed to be a glaring difference and I'm missing it, then point it out to me because so far all my trouble shooting always ends up in the same places doing the exact same procedures.
 
Hind sight is always 20/20. They may seem like monumentally stupid decisions now but you cant compare today to the environment of the emergence of PC's.

Articles like this are stupid when they include a decision from 30 years ago.
 
BoogerBomb said:
Hind sight is always 20/20. They may seem like monumentally stupid decisions now but you cant compare today to the environment of the emergence of PC's.

Articles like this are stupid when they include a decision from 30 years ago.
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I should have worded that as you cant rate the decision today with the knowledge we have today. Eliminate everything in your brain from the decision on, then consider it. I am referring mostly to the IBM and MS stuff they listed.

Thats like saying that anyone who didnt invest in Google on day one are fucking morons. With the knowledge today, yes I would agree but at the time not a lot of people would have thought two kids would rocket to the behemoth they are today.
 
GORANKAR said:
It was a minor catastrophe, but Vista was not a blunder at all. It worked and works great. The problem with it was morons installing it on systems that did not have two gigs of ram or more. The only real blunders on MS's part was not realizing how stupid so many of the industry journalists were, and not properly educating the public on how much ram Vista needed and how it used it.

The people that should have known better but didn't, on this forum alone, was enough to spread a great deal of bad will for Vista. Mojave, proved the point rather spectacularly. "We heard it sucked from some moron and we believed it" was Vista's largest problem. That and for some reason Nv waiting months b4 putting out any decent SLI drivers for it.
Click to expand...

I don't agree. Vista's biggest problem was that they released it before it was ready. SP1 was an improvement, but still didn't fix all the problems. My office bought several new laptops with Vista 32 bit and 2GB ram, and we had alot of problems. The systems where noticably slower than XP on the same system, and had numerous hangs and other problems. Even upgrading to 4GB ram didn't help much. Several of the Laptops where eventually switched to XP, and ran much better. These same laptops have since been upgraded to Windows 7 64 bit and passed down to other users. Windows 7 was a huge improvement in both stability and performance over Vista on these laptops. I don't know if it's due to Windows 7 or switching to 64 bit, but I'm glad I don't have to deal with Vista any more.
 
Wumpus said:
Death of the Sears Catalog: 1993.

While the internet may have almost entirely under the NSF "no commercial use" grip when the decision was made (and thus the pointy haired bosses who came up with this can't be faulted on this specifically), just think about what Sears threw away.

They had a full blown, well trusted e-commerce infrastructure in place in 1993. Two years later when anybody with a sock puppet and a plan to maybe someday build such a thing could have billions of dollars thrown at them, Sears had nothing.
.....
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Yup, Sears missed the boat by a few years. JcPenney, who had a catalog/phone/B&M solution was one of the top e-tailers at the beginning of the e-revolution. They somehow managed to squander that lead as Amazon and others took the lead. They finally killed off the catalog part, but the internet part and B&M part are still going.
 
03grandam said:
Damn no edit.

I know you was being sarcastic Mickey, I just like the fact that MS loves to give their OS away for free :).
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Not only OSes if you are student on IT faculty you have nearly unlimited access to majority of their catalogue apart from Office - but for office I'm running their 3 licenses 50 euro MS Office Home 2007 on my desktop, notebook and netbook :D
 
Stone Cold said:
I think IBM was under antiturst pressure to outsource the OS. And, that that time, the hardware was the computer, instead of the OS.

Windows Vista was a necessary step to Windows 7. Why do you think Windows 7 didn't get a bad rep for lack of drivers?

SCO's attack of Linux is one of the stupidest legal maneuvers in history, because the company continued their crusade long after the courts themselves were laughing at SCO.

Tech history is full of very stupid and expensive acquisitions. HP's purchase of Palm and Compaq. Remember Excite@Home snapping up all sorts of tiny web services for billions of dollars for things they could have done in house for millions of dollars? Surely you remember the company that once had a market cap of $35 Billion?
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HP could of really changed things if they had followed through with webOS integration. Having my tablet, phone, and pc all being linked seamlessly would be awesome. They didn't even need an os for pc's just a program capable of connecting, displaying, and sharing information. Anyone who thinks or says webOS isn't a powerful, easy to use, and very nice looking platform is retarded.
 
Vista got mostly negative reviews
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That is an outright lie. Vista generally received mixed to positive reviews. CNet gave it 3.5/5, Trusted Reviews gave it 9/10, PCMag 3.5/5, PC Advisor gave it 4/5, while the "User Rating" at their site is currently at 1.5/5, which is quite telling.

Most people were bashing Vista because their friend "who knows a lot about computers" was bashing it, and because Apple told them it's cool to bash Vista. I'm not saying Vista was perfect, it certainly had a number of issues.. but the biggest failure was in the marketing.

Vista SP1 and SP2 improved performance and stability almost to the same level as Windows 7. So when Win 7 came out, the changes were minor and mostly cosmetic. For someone that went from Vista RTM, then back to WinXP, and then to Windows 7, it must have seemed like the improvements were huge, however.
 
That list is lame, most of those 'catastrophes' have help shaped the computer world of today. The real one is, anybody stupid enough to do business with AOL, not only Time Warner, but there recent dumbass decision to buy Huffpo.
 
JimmiG said:
That is an outright lie. Vista generally received mixed to positive reviews. CNet gave it 3.5/5, Trusted Reviews gave it 9/10, PCMag 3.5/5, PC Advisor gave it 4/5, while the "User Rating" at their site is currently at 1.5/5, which is quite telling.
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How do you accuse someone saying Vista received mostly negative reviews of lying and then go on to quote as evidence abysmal user reviews of 1.5/5 and C- scores from two professional review sites?

They call it "Very Good" but 3.5/5 is a failing grade in all other contexts I'm aware of. For a comparison, CNet labels 3/5 as "Good." Would you score Windows Millennium "Good"? Cnet does...now *that's* telling.
 
I was shocked to see Vista and not ME, basically because Vista was the building block of Win 7 and ME...well, it managed to kill off a complete OS line.
 
BBA said:
I was shocked to see Vista and not ME, basically because Vista was the building block of Win 7 and ME...well, it managed to kill off a complete OS line.
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ME didn't kill off the 9x Windows line it was always meant to be the end of it.
 
Derangel said:
ME didn't kill off the 9x Windows line it was always meant to be the end of it.
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but wouldn't you rather the end of the 9x line be something more like the last bite of a tootsie pop instead of a single square of toilet paper in a taco bell restroom?
 
I would've expected to see 3DFX's Greg Ballard or Atari's Jack Tramiel, both of whose business practices and poor management ran those companies into the ground.
 
nutzo said:
I don't agree. Vista's biggest problem was that they released it before it was ready. SP1 was an improvement, but still didn't fix all the problems. My office bought several new laptops with Vista 32 bit and 2GB ram, and we had alot of problems. The systems where noticably slower than XP on the same system, and had numerous hangs and other problems. Even upgrading to 4GB ram didn't help much. Several of the Laptops where eventually switched to XP, and ran much better. These same laptops have since been upgraded to Windows 7 64 bit and passed down to other users. Windows 7 was a huge improvement in both stability and performance over Vista on these laptops. I don't know if it's due to Windows 7 or switching to 64 bit, but I'm glad I don't have to deal with Vista any more.
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I have to agree with this. Most of the bugs I've seen and other people experienced were resolved too little to late.

The Sp1 includes quite a bit

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749061(WS.10).aspx

I mean look at shit like this

945533


When you try to shut down a Windows Vista-based computer on which a Bluetooth device is installed, the computer stops responding


Hotfix


Drivers


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945533
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I think a lot of people that claim Vista ran smoothly from the get go were minimal requirement users or are wearing nostalgia goggles. Vista was little the beta for the new kernal. Hardware compatibility was utter shit as well.
 
I think they're wrong on the itanium and on Vista being mismanaged.
Itanium still has some capabilities that x86 can't compete with.
And Vista introduced a far better interface than XP.
They aren't good decisions but they're not total losses either.

Where is Apple allowing Microsoft to work on Windows?
Where is the Dreamcast, Virtual-boy, or the Saturn?
 
Vista was more trouble-free than Windows 7 for me. I had one installation for the entire life of the OS and I don't think I ever had an issue that wasn't easily solvable within minutes.

I tend to agree about MySpace being taken over by NewsCorp. The groundwork was there for a long run...and they they tried to make everything topsy turvy and monetize every detail.
 
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