Top Seven Biggest Business Mistakes! 

Would like to learn that African 'clicking' language. Not overly optimistic though..

Is it about the Unity debacle and John Riccitello? Hm , no . It's about Yoga pants...and also they are still see through. you just need to chose the right spectrum an polarization...thanks to the omni presence of ccd cameras .

Mandarin and thanks for the stellar product.

There's Noh ( sic ) Japanese Patrick : This is A Total Flummery as There seems to be no Support for the Asian / Pacific Folk ( Not even Strine Australia Ockerism ) ~ which is necessary for Peace Keeping and Drinking Games .. Besides I cycled most of the Countries on Offer and they all Speak English 🤔🫣🤪⚓🔩🦕📎🦇⛩️

​@@TremereTTbuy a Good Camera Fuji X100 for example or a Retro 35mm like Olympus Om 1 Film Camera ...they Click as much as You want and it's a Great Bridge to Other Cultures ,People and their Lifestyle 📎⛩️🔩🌐🦉

The funny thing is they had a strong online presence early on. How they dropped the ball is beyond me. They came out of the gate quick with online shopping and then botched it completely somehow. I don't know if they stopped investing in their online platforms or what? It's mind boggling.

Proof thst anything can be ruined by mismanagement..

Sears and many others. It is mind boggling that catalogue stores couldn’t figure out how to sell online.

YES!! At one point in the early years you could buy a house through Sears. What we would consider the materials for a micro house today. You could order and have delivered to your lot. How they missed the ball with Amazon still baffles me.

Bezos and Amazon management don't get enough credit. They invented a whole new logistic system that would arguably have not been implemented by Sears management.

I can't not come for the quiet jokes. I feel he would be either the best or worst boss ever!

His 'I've learnt never to comment on the appearance of my viewers' at 4.32... then he actually does comments on the appearance of his viewers by adding a photo of a group of smartly dressed men (all wearing exactly the same as him, and possibly actually all him) is deadpan at its driest...

Alphabet and X, we use 😂

@@Rechtauch Don't forget Meta. You know the Facebook owner named after the fad that preceded the current AI fad.

The manegerialization of the world was/is an abject disaster.

As someone who is mainly technical, this is my biggest fear for myself - becoming out of touch with my expertise to the point where evolution in my team is killed 😬

Oh yes! I used to be a technician for a company (originally a division of Kodak but sold). Soon after this division was acquired, its new owner decided to give awards and prizes for the best performing team and the best performing technician over the course of one year. I was as surprised as I was delighted to be named as their best performing technician. I was much less impressed at the total disinterest in anything I had to say about the job itself. This company was struggling financially. It needed to make improvements in order to stay in business, yet its management didn't think that its top performing technician had anything more to contribute than to fix things. I left a few months later. The company went bankrupt about 2 years later.

While I appreciate your frustration LouigiVerona, I also appreciate those in the company who are responsible for directing the use of the time and capital that are available. They must choose what appear to be the most promising among proposals and also evaluate the potential payoff against the risk. These managers are bound to miss a few diamonds in their effort to avoid pieces of glass, inert pebbles and radioactive rocks. Consider that Warren Buffett has had thousands of investment opportunities to consider over his career. He rejected or ignored most of them. There is no doubt that he has missed many of the best opportunities that he ever had. Nevertheless he has managed to do okay.

@@noyopacificfound the manager 😂

Friend, you have some damn interesting experiences. Thanks for sharing!

Bring in the enforcers to make sure the clothes is destroyed - wouldn’t want any poors to be seen wearing it

@@tommykarrick9130 No - the customs people want to verify that they aren't being cheated out of tax money.

I had a similar experience with industrial chicken (murder) "processing". Such an insane scale of waste and destruction in service to the whims of the rich.

​@@Praisethesunsonplease do tell.

Mitutoyo’s illegal export of precision measurement equipment that ended up in Libya, North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan. The biggest player in that market and banned from exporting measurement equipment for years.

I commented it elsewhere but, Philips building TSMC and then promptly selling it off within a few years to break even cause it wasn't profitable

My first thought about this is the classic Nintendo creating their biggest rival in Playstation.

​@@syloui Yeah, that was kind of an oops moment.

@@syloui the number of Philips spin offs that were sold and became very successful on their own is actually quite impressive. Like Kodak and Xerox Philips was great in R&D but not so good in business strategy.

I hate it when the ATM makes me wait, because i know they just want me read the ad.

@@Tony32 your atms have ads wtf

While i agree that engineers are often overlooked when it comes to decision making, this is more a case of psychology and scaling a business. There's a good chance that on a per person basis those portals were more profitable than the original design of Google. Heck, nowadays Google even becomes more of a portal that tries to keep you on the side by extracting and displaying information etc. Unfortunately, providing a good service to costumers is usually not the most profitable path

​@@Tony32 are there actually ads on ATMs where you live? I've also heard of American ATMs charging for withdrawal, we don't have either here

@@tomlxyz I think they're joking, but I have seen ads on ATMs in SE Asia when I've visited - usually around touristy areas though (and I think they're government sanctioned ads for attractions)

The best way to beat your competition is to be your own competition.

Course smartphones beating down everyone with their inbuilt cameras was something most people couldn't have figured out so Kodak was doomed unless ot kept the natural gas division

This is what the well-known Innovators Dilemma book was about. Companies are always worried that innovations will cannibalise their products and so don't do it, and then lose to new competitors. Probably, the book's recommendation is still the best one in that Kodak should have set up a separate Digital Camera subsidiary with its own board, provided some capital, camera and electronics researchers and engineers, and left it alone to sink or swim.

@@SudrianTales Sony is the biggest sensor maker for mobile phone cameras and also make camera modules with lenses and OIS for other manufacturers. Even though their own phone unit is struggling. So if they'd invested in the photo sensor business (which they invented) they could have had 35 years of being a main player in digital cameras, DSLR, mirrorless, and then mobile cameras.

There is this often made quip* about such situation that "if we do not cannibalize on our products, somoene else will" * often attributed to Steve Jobs, but I have no idea if that is correct

4 touchdowns in 1 game!!!!

But at least he married a Wanker

@@pauljimerson8218 Peggy Wanker; Don’t bother to thank her.

That sounds like the plot to a certain 90s movie by MTV Films starring James Van Der Beek and the late Paul Walker

That's really funny to me because 8 years after graduation, I saw a guy from the football team in my hometown still wearing his varsity letter jacket. For some people, life peaked at 17.

Yeah Kodak was never a company that made money selling cameras. They made money selling and developing film. Even if they fully capitalized on the digital camera market immediately, the company would still have a huge retraction in size and fully go under when cell phone cameras destroyed the casual digital camera market.

But just think if the hadn't done that they wouldn't have been able to give shareholders gobs of short-term-decisions money.

Yes, Patrick, you could do a whole show on how the companies that emerged out of Philips took over the world while the mothership deteriorated across all business lines.

But would those companies be successful under the bad management of Phillips that sold them

​@@nlysts that's the million dollar question. Would key personal have stayed under Phillips? How many divisions under Kodak for example, could have been great if they were spun off?

​@@Dan-dg9pi makes you wonder if it was Phillips holding them back

I would count that one as a sabotage. Burning Platform killed not only Symbian but also Maemo/MeeGo and introduced a carnival of Windows Phone versions. Even looking at what was happening to Nokia was just sad. I expected to see at least one example of Osborne effect.

@@siliconandsteelyea looking back Nokia’s implosion was just confusing. They insisted on sticking with resistive touchscreens well past when they should have switched but otherwise had hardware that was better than anything else on the market, at least for the power user set that made up a much higher proportion of actual smartphone buyers back then. And then right as they started getting software figured out, with developers getting on board with Symbian, they decided they couldn’t keep up with google and apple in SW and jumped on the MS bandwagon. I’m guessing the eventual MS buyout was always the plan, but it’s a shame such a great HW maker went down that way. The n95 and n97 were awesome devices and it would have been cool to have another relevant form factor in the smartphone ecosystem.

If Elop was sent to Nokia to destroy its value, he could not do a better job. Just sticking to any of the systems would get them results. Meanwhile, Burning Platform memo was a death sentence to all current products that started death spiral speedrun. Windows Phone was not ready, then its versions were not compatible. You just cannot grow an ecosystem like that. Even just sticking to devices would be better. Nokia 808 - yardstick cameraphone. Nokia N9 - a glimpse of the future that could have been. All lost, like tears in the rain...

​@@siliconandsteel Yeah, sticking to WinPhone was such a one sided business decision that Elop looked like a trojan horse injected by Microsoft.

@@siliconandsteel I thought elop facilited the sale of the Microsoft os using Nokia phones to Microsoft. It was like $3 a share. It was a bad deal for MSFT but good for Nokia. Didn't work, but still provided NOK shareholders with a special dividend and a brief move to the $7-8 range. That was later briefly eclipsed in 2020or 2021 by the redditors sending large mc stocks like Nokia to surge. Didn't last, but blackberry and more recently Sirius had these kinda of p&ds

Agree. Touch screen typing sucks.

Well when apps became a thing that signaled doom because developers did not want to make apps for BlackBerry plus the management was too narrow minded to see what it would become.

That is a well populated hill! You won't die alone. Talk to text is useful, like when driving, despite its inability to be consistent with context. Yet, being able to fire off emails and texts without having to look at the device is a feature I miss. From meetings that never end to communicating in freezing weather, buttons cannot be beat! Also the game Breakout is superior with a trackball!

Oh how much I hated the switch to iphones my company made. The last BB I used was a hybrid. I forgot the name. It had a touchscreen with an underlying keyboard that you would slide out. Loved it.

I knew someone who was a big Blackberry fan. My understanding is yeah, they had better tech than the iPhone. The original iPhone was quite rubbish. BES, was very important for security. Also Blackberry had a much better development framework. But strangely the media loved the iPhone and did all the marketing for Apple.

And they also learn employee by-laws should forbid key executives from riding helicopters near mountains. Wells was an amazing person.

It’s a never-ending convection of “alpha” males. Once they are at the top, they turn over and fall to the bottom

His friend How Money Works describe him as a comedian on one of his videos 🤣

That’s called “British humor”

So what choice of words would be familiar to you back then?

@tolep ​Palpatable faecal extrusions.

It wasn’t for free. Xerox got Apple stock.

No, Xerox wasn’t that stupid, xerox says it’s was their better deal, it was a lot of money in shares.

Not seeing the downside

This reminds me of the SpongeBob’s Ripped Pants song

It's just that Lululemon's most loyal customers don't want to be commented about their bodies.

@@carloa877 I Guess there is a limit to the skin tight clothing?

So long as there's an excess of supply in the proportion of the population that doesn't mind doing yoga in transparent pants, then supply will exceed demand and viewing the spectacle will remain free.

Not to mention that digital cameras have really bad margins.

​@@altaccoutthat's cause they're like printers. You buy the camera and then the accessories and lenses and those lenses and accessories are very profitable.

It can be summed up is Kodak is a film company that made chemicals, while Fujifilm was a chemical company that made film. the Asianometry channel did a great video a couple of months ago on the differences.

I wouldn't say it is managements lack of technical knowledge, but an unwillingness to defer to their on-staff technical experts for advice. If you have an expert, ask for their expert opinion. Many managers get into a pretty toxic mindset that because they are the boss they know best. That they need to be the source for good ideas and they need to have the vision. But that just isn't true and it isn't how things work at top tier tech companies. Managers set product timelines, engineers set technical ones. Managers provide business vision, engineers provide technical vision. Business works best when you use your best resources to tackle a problem.

​@@justhecukehow's that different from lack of technical knowledge? "Management knows best" but they don't know about technology

@@tomlxyz I was saying that it is not the role of management to be technical leaders. They should delegate that sort of thing to actual technical people. Manager knows best is the issue, not the fact that managers do not know everything. That's what their teams are for. Hire experts, then listen to them.

@@justhecuke That might be true, at least sometimes. But there can also be organizational reasons for poor communication between management and those on-staff technical experts, a lack of proper channels for such information. I guess you could call it "systemic unwillingness" or something, not necessarily always a personal unwillingness to listen to those exports.

@@beardmonster8051 I suppose we can always chalk up business failures to systemic issues, but that's a bit boring, no?

If you can find it, the documentary California Typewriter (one of the last standing American typerwriter repair stores located in Oakland) is a beautiful and well-told film. I will add that Tom Hannks has a huge collection of typerwriters. David McCullough wrote all his books on a typerwriter. As did Sam Shepard. Singer John Mayer uses a typerwriter to write songs since his creative stream is not interrupted by the awful squiggly red line under a misspelled word. Bonus is Jeremy Mayer who makes sculpters out of ONLY typperwriter parts.

Yep. Little competition, huge lead in many respects. But... Software developers aren't typical customers. Screw with them at your own peril!!

this is a big mistake only in hindsight... many people did the same but they invested in Enron, Blockbuster or General Electrics

Xerox still made a lot of money on patent licensing of PARC tech (laser printers, Ethernet) + they got a nice chunk of Apple shares.

fwiw, I worked at Xerox PARC decades ago. Xerox‘s GUI was complicated and proof that, just because you have a GUI, didn’t mean it was better.

Dirty 30 as I call it.

Of all the oofs, this is definitely one of them.

I was expecting maybe Osbourne computers and Digital Research would also have made the list.

@@vulpo Is Osbourne computers fair? - Could their marketing failure have been predicted? - The Tech industry learned, and gradually developed the the upgrade cycles that exist today - but at the time, product development announcements did not have the same impact on consumer sales.

@@ralphstube You are probably right that it wasn't foreseeable at the time. The term "Osbourne effect" was only coined after their failure was analyzed. But unfortunately life isn't always fair, especially when it comes to business mistakes. I only mentioned Osbourne because it is so often cited and because the video was about learning from other business's mistakes.

It was actually Spider-Man’s fault Osbourne collapsed.

I think HP bought them then shut them down

HP bought PALM, when it tried to enter the mobile phone market. HP mismanaged it, couldn't figure out what to do with it and sold it at a h hugh loss. HP split into two separate companies. HPI (consumer poducts) and HPE (enterprise products) I'm surprised that either company is still around

Yeah they were interesting. I had a Palm, and then after the 3Com buyout and the founders leaving for Handspring I got one of the first Treos. Really cool for its day, but tech and networks were far too slow to make it reliable as a web-connected device.

They did.

Sure, and then absolutely dropped the ball on inventory management. Every one I checked out looked early-post apocalyptic and picked over. Because they didn’t stock anything properly.

The channel Technology Connections did an incredible 5-episode deep dive into this whole debacle. It's a fascinating treatise on how, just because you can gather some really clever people together in one place and let them create new things, that doesn't mean you are necessarily creating and dominating new markets with all that new tech. Choosing the right areas of research and knowing which development is actually going to be viable and mak a profit, then actually bringing them to market is incredibly difficult and fraught with massive internal politics amongst the scientists themselves, let alone other engineers and management. One of the big reasons they went with the bizarre sounding choice of holograms was that all the scientists in the R&D labs wanted to work with the 'new, cool' tech of holograms. None of them were interested in trying to fit more data onto magnetic tape, or putting videos on vinyl records. That technology was boring and old, because it was already on the market and no-one wanted to refine it or develop it further. I guess it's the difference between building something yourself (where you can take all the credit) and just developing/improving something someone has already done the major work on.

Well said! I use the term 'dog leash'. If you are in business for yourself it's one thing, but the exploitative 'always on call culture' for employees is indeed BS.

Couldn't agree more. I had a pager back in the day and expensed payphones, then an early flip phone. I called them tethers. Other employees thought it was cool. I thought we were being consumed by our company. I tell the new guys if you're not on call at night, put your work phone on a desk in another room of your house and be mentally present with your family.

Which hometown is that? Palo Alto?

@dtemp132 Rochester, NY was the HQ of both Kodak and Xerox at the time of the blunders. Xerox moved their HQ to Connecticut, but the remains of Kodak are still there.

@@scotttritten309 before I read your answer I almost instantly thought of Rochester. 🙂 What is so typical is that both companies are very similar in that they were very strong in R&D but poor in implementing that R&D in successful products. Makes you wonder what is in the water in Rochester.

For IBM you could go with how they refused to make 80386-based PCs because they didn't want to ruin the mini computer market where they sold mini-mainframes for 10x what a PC would cost, leaving the 386-based PC market to Compaq and Toshiba. (And add in PC Jr., PS/2 w/OS 2 and MCA etc.)

Betamax, LaserDisc, Capacitance Electronic Disc(CED), Video High Density (VHD) some of which helped put the companies that developed them under.

It'll be awhile. They're status symbols. So unless a company comes out with something that looks and functions better it might not happen.

@@HH-le1viBlackBerry was a status symbol and it got replaced by Apple, and it did not take long

@@Walter-Montalvo blackberry wasn't a fashion status symbol like Apple is.

Interesting.... hmmm

Calmdown CEO of TSLAQ !

@@manoloariza7605 that's a very fair list - two places are still opened, for the future ideas. :)

Not even close.

Not sure if it is always a case of fear of new technology. Some of the examples in this video are of companies that were market leaders with a product or technology that was subsequently superseded by something that radically changed that market. I don't doubt that it is hard to accept such a radical change from a position of market leadership. Kodak and Blackberry are clear examples of that. And Kodak itself was actually very good in R&D while Blackberry was a company that matured the (early) market for smartphones.