What's The Best Coporate "Darwin Award" Story ? 

The Fear Factor controversy still floors me; not just for the fact that someone thought that would make for an epic challenge (they had disgusting challenges before 'drinking donkey splooge' - such as eating pig rectums and boiled bull testicles), but for the fact that the women went through with it. No amount of money is worth degrading oneself like that - just disgusting! Glad that show was cancelled - too bad it wasn't cancelled much sooner.

The Fox/Star Wars story: Cue Yoghurt from Space Balls saying "Moichandising!"

Story 15: Netflix had ended the DVD rentals recently. I think it was last year (2023) when it was ended. Last story: Western Union is still around. But yeah, they should have bought the telephone. AT&T used to mean American Telegraph and Telephone. Western Union started as a telegraph company with a side business in money transfers. Now they are only that side business.

*pulls up a seat* Let me tell ya about a RU-vid channel called WATCHER

The guy with the cattle tags: we have a similar solution in my hobby. I collect model animals, mostly horses. These are... prone to tipping. Someone had the genius idea of snagging those diamond-shaped collapsible wall hanger things for kids' rooms and using them to keep models from toppling over. It's something you'll see at shows, sales, and in personal collections because it's so effective and cheap.

I have some insider knowledge on Kmart- my dad consulted with them on some corporate innovation stuff back in the 2010s- part of the reason their stores in the USA were so run down is that someone super high up, not sure if it was the COO or what, decided that in order to make sure there was as little expenses wasted as possible, he would PERSONALLY have to approve ALL expense requests for things like burned out light bulbs, replacing broken floor tiles, cleaning products, etc. And when you count how many stores there were in operation that makes it a ridiculous idea. But apparently Kmart in Europe is quite nice because they split the company into two separate ones decades ago over a disagreement on weather to sell cigarettes in store by the two owners lol.

I'll give you a reverse Darwin Award, for a company that lived when it should have died: Texas Instruments. They made powerful calculators in the 1970s, but in the 1980s their 99-4A computer lost out to Commodore and others. They looked doomed as a maker of consumer electronics. But in the late 1980s, they got in bed with the nascent "calculators in education" movement. The new idea was that calculators should be encouraged for math students instead of forbidden, because being able to do the calculations by hand wasn't really the point of advanced math. To make a long story short, they won. The movement gained traction with state education boards, who now said you could use a calculator in your math test.... but it absolutely had to be made by Texas Instruments. Even though competitors like Casio made perfectly good calculators. If you wonder why Texas Instruments still has a display in the store, and why calculators cost almost as much as a new cell phone, there's your answer. They basically invented their own captive market.

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THAT MARKET BASKET MADE THE LIST!! 🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾

Sears and Roebuck. Sears insisted on continuing paper catalog sales instead of online sales. They could have been what Amazon now is.

Just thinking of all the piblishers turning away jk rowling, the producers not being interested in StarWars until someone drew the man some good concept art and every tech firm to send the dude running thar invented the sensor black box thingy that basically became the heart and sould of the Nintendo wii (evidently savind nintendo from the verge of death, so thats an anti darwin 😂)

It's like they're playing an RPG with these companies.

Story 2: Yeah that was a huge deal around here considering the area where I live is home to numerous stores in the chain that almost went under. Shelves were barren and people had no choice but to shop elsewhere. Can't imagine what would have happened if they weren't saved at the last minute. Fast forward to today and the company seems to be doing just fine for the most part. We do most of our grocery shopping at Market Basket as they typically have the best prices around.

The Red Lobster idea is particularly funny because they underestimated the American diet of McDonald's and Starbucks. Seafood is a step up.

Kodak's issue for the longest time is they wanted nothing to do with any thing that might impact there then very lucrative film business. Digital photography put a huge dent in said business and by the time Kodak finally got into it it was way too late.

Entertech. In the very late 80's, I'm talking 88-89 possibly 90, there was a spin off company whose parent was LJN, yes THAT LJN, called Entertech that made a line of water guns that were not only modeled after real guns but when you pulled the trigger they made REAL gun shooting noises that the actual gun made. Their slogan? "The look, the feel, the sound, SO REAL." Not long after their release a number of incidents happened. Cops shot at kids playing with them because, get this, they mistook the water guns that look like real guns and make real shooting noises for real guns. Go figure. Also, robbers would use these guns to hold up gas stations and other stores. It got so bad that Congress got together and made a regulation/law stating that non-real guns must have an orange tag of some sort on the barrel. Entertech ended up relaunching the water guns after this mess but with a more colorful look. The relaunch was not nearly as profitable as the original launch and Entertech disbanded the product shortly after the relaunch and also officially closed it's doors.

Story 1 earns me every time I hear it, because it’s not at all accurate. They never ever told anyone involved in digital photography to go fuck off, in fact most of the huge steps in digital photography in the 80’s/90’s were made by Kodak. The problem was that they were not a camera and electronics company. They were a chemical company. Hundreds of different chemicals, solvents, stabilizing agents, dye and couplers, catalysts and other very technical chemicals go into film, photo paper, and the chemicals that develop them. That, along with the extremely specialized nature of how film is made and packaged, is why they failed. They developed the business over 100 years, and had to change in less than 10. They had so much invested into chemical photography that no matter what the Kodak before 2004 was never going to survive. They tried to focus on digital cameras, but the way their business was set up it was destined to fail. They made most of the CCD sensors used in cameras into the early 2000’s, but once CMOS came along that was destined for failure as well. The worst they made was pushing so hard into the consumer printing market, which was already saturated, and they misread the consumer space anyway. People were moving on from printing photos, and so any chance they might have had if that wasn’t the case was gone. However, they aren’t dead by any means. Sure, they don’t make even a fraction of the film they used to, but they are a huge player in materials science and research, industrial printing, they make a ton of inks, paints, and dyes, and they are even in the pharmaceutical field now!

What was the company they were referring to in Story 2? I’m confused.

Netflix stopping DVDs was dumb given that they'd own the market right now.

11:35 sounds exactly like Harris Teeter.

Story 25 Xerox giving away so many thing that made the modern PC and the internet possible has a side story - Steve Jobs was so impressed by the graphical user interface and the mouse he ignored email which was important for Microsoft's boom. Well, something else that was important for Microsoft was the spread sheet but that did not come from PARC.

The takeaway from this video is that if you don't invest in the latest, greatest technology, you will be absolutely screwed. Also, if you _do_ invest in the latest, greatest technology, you will be absolutely screwed.

Probably why Red Lobster only did "all you can eat shrimp" and then only for part of the year. Shrimp is cheap.

You can still get some free (as in beer) software for IBM's mainframe computers from IBM, from before they started to put prices on that. You just have to know what to ask for, they won't tell you. And I don't mean downloading stuff, I mean receiving actual packages with tapes and manuals. Or so I'm told. (These days, you'd use that software in Open Source emulators that run on normal PCs, faster than the mainframe did back when that software was written.)

Whatever the fuck they were thinking with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Actually, Warner Bros, in general has been a disaster, with shelving finished movies to never be seen and the whole Discovery merger being a mess

Very "spiffy" ;)

Sony selling HellDivers 2 to countries without access to the PSN, then demanding them to make an account to continue playing the game

Story 6 yeah, they went and repeated that last year. This time with shrimp. First time it was crab Guess they didn't learn the first time

IBM exists as one of the biggest corporate douches in the Linux world, as they made Red Hat Enterprise Linux's source code unavailable w/o paying

Damn, malden mills today would be doing well being an American company employing American workers

Bud Light. Trying to sell to people who don't like Bud Light, quite intentionally annoying the people who did like it

SyFy does reality TV? All I've ever seen on there is Star Trek reruns and terrible original movies?

No interest in shoot-up video - just distracts from the subject matter.