Looking for the top ten stupidest business decisions

[The Backlash Cometh]

I've got one to start with:

1) Outsourcing telemarketing support jobs overseas that deal with sensitive and private customer information. Picture this: You turn on your computer and try to get on-line using your server. It asks for your password, but for some reason, your password doesn't work. So, you call customer support (an outsourced call) and the person on the other side, after intitial troubleshooting, concludes they can only solve the problem if you let them get remote access to your computer. Yeah, right.

[Canuckistanian]

1. Texas Rangers traded Sammy Sosa to Chicago

The name of the idiot who did that escapes me at the moment.

[dysfunctional press]

40. but chicago traded lou brock to st. louis.

and as business decisions go, *'s overall stint with the rangers was a VERY lucrative one for him.

[Odin2005]

53. Does his middle initial happen to be W?

:evilgrin:

[Bucky]

60. Ken Olbermann calls that one of Bush's smart decisions

The Rangers did perform better the following year, however. Let's pretend for a second that Bush had anything to do with the thinking in that trade.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

2. Adding rBST growth hormones to cows

to produce more milk when there is a continuing surplus of milk already. Absolute insanity imo.

[northzax]

3. so if they were in, say, Iowa

you would grant them remote access?

needless to say, number one has to be Steve Jobs refusing to license Apple's Mac OS in the mid-80's. Apple could have been Microsoft. and instead of being worth a measly 1.5 billion, Jobs could be sitting on $55 billion. oops.

[Debi]

6. What? You don't trust Iowans with your computer? n/t

[northzax]

9. Hawkeyes or Cyclones?

it makes a difference.

heck, I barely trust Iowans to run the family farm outside Fort Dodge, and they're my cousins!

[Debi]

17. Hawkeyes (If they promise to fire Steve Alford REAL SOON!)

Never been a Cy fan, but now that they have Mac I may have to like em a bit.

But really.....UNI Panthers!! I live in Cedar Falls. And you can trust me with your computer ;) (and your SSN and DOB would help as well :7)

[northzax]

29. well in that case

I'll just PM you my bank info for safekeeping. :)

[SharonAnn]

42. Hey Debi! I'm from Waterloo! Aren't you proud of Bruce Braley?

[Debi]

62. Proud and thrilled!!!!

He not only became the first Democrat in 16 years to represent Black Hawk County (and longer for other areas in Iowa's 1st District) he has already served us proudly!!! He is going to be a great great member of the U.S. Congress!!! :hi:

[The Backlash Cometh]

13. R-E-G-U-L-A-T-I-O-N

I'd know I'd have an American company by the short hairs if I can prove they breached privacy laws. Also, there's that cultural upbringing. I think Americans may be far more protective of their privacy.

[GaYellowDawg]

4. New Coke

That was pretty stupid.

[greenbriar]

11. agree with that one

I was a solid coke drinker that now only drinks pepsi

and the "classic" coke is not the same

[GoneOffShore]

22. You know why your Coke tastes differently now, don't you?

It's not sweetened with sugar. It's HFCS. Try Mexican coke or buy Kosher Coke around Passover. They use cane sugar.

[The Backlash Cometh]

47. WTF is HFCS? And don't tell me to GOOGLE.

eh, please?

[Graybeard]

58. High Fructose Corn Syrup...

...a lot cheaper than sugar.

[The Backlash Cometh]

59. Thank you.

[The Backlash Cometh]

14. I like your peach.

[cemaphonic]

45. No, it was a short-term fiasco...

But the massive publicity and hype over the switch let the reformulated 'Classic Coke' recapture the market share it had been losing to Pepsi and then some.

It did temporarily crash the economy of Madagascar though.

[gravity]

66. It turned out to be a good decision in the end though

As stupid as it was, it made Coke better off in the end with the release of Coke Classic

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

75. Absolutely. Monumental Failure. They Better Not EVER Fuck With My Coke Again! LOL

[Hand]

76. Dang! Ya beat me to it! nt

[Prophet 451]

5. Ratners

The president or CEO (my memory is hazy) of Ratners (British jewelery chain-store) describing his own product as "crap" on live TV has to be in there somewhere. Stock and sales nosedived. The company managed to just avoid bankruptcy and now hangs on selling cheap costume jewelery.

[BlooInBloo]

7. IBM licsensing MSDOS. Duh.

[dysfunctional press]

41. what about the knuckle head that sold DOS to Gates & Co. for $50K..?

seems like a bit of a blunder in itself, as well.

[lpbk2713]

8. The Dubai Ports deal.

Well of course it was a stupid business decision. It was a product of the greedy BushCo brain trust. And I'm not so sure that it ended up as we were led to believe.

[papau]

18. Followed by today's note that Halliburtin is moving world headquarters to Dubai n/t

n/t

[niyad]

10. m & m deciding NOT to be part of the movie "ET" (and kudos to reese's)

[The Backlash Cometh]

15. Major fumble.

I wonder if anybody got fired for that one?

[Warpy]

12. Outsourcing medical records functions to

a country that has no medical confidentiality laws on the books.

There have already been a couple of cases of extortion, quietly hushed up after barely being reported. My guess is that they're all being hushed up now.

Outsourcing jobs in the financial industry--including IRS jobs--to a country with no financial confidentiality laws on the books. There have already been cases of extortion reported.

[The Backlash Cometh]

16. You went right to the source of the problem.

I think we should sue these companies whenever their overseas offices abuse our private records.

[MLFerrell]

19. I'd go with giving an idiot free reign of an oil company...

Not to mention a baseball team and a country... Sigh.

[papau]

20. asking for innovation cost savings from health ins co's rather than using single payer univ health n

n/t

[MarianJack]

21. ABC Taking a Pass...

...on "The Cosby Show"!

[90-percent]

23. more

Xerox "invented" the pc graphical user interface. They had no idea what they creaated, but Steve Jobs went on a Xerox tour and saw it.

And copied the concepts leading to MAC and APPLE and Gate's largely stolen (concept-wise) WINDOWS.

Jobs not licencing MAC was a biggie. I think that was a result of that typical corporate exec he lured from Pepsi in the mid 80's?

Henry Ford III getting rid of Lee Iacocca?

Frank Zappa not producing Bob Dylan when he had the chance?

Brian Epstein's original merchandising of the Beatles?

Anybody that's ever hired GWB FOR ANYTHING, EVER.

-85% jimmy

[90-percent]

24. ABC

ABC cancelling the tv show "Police Squad", not because of ratings, but because some exec "thought the viewer had to pay too much attention"

SHEESH, that one burned me!

Joel Hodgson leaving Mystery Science Theatre 3000 to be a propmeister for Paula Poundstone?

-85% Jimmy

[krispos42]

25. My Big Fat Greek Life

That was, what, one episode before being cancelled?

[The Backlash Cometh]

26. Never even heard of it.

[krispos42]

31. After "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"

Was such a hit, they hired the entire cast of the movie (except for the husband) and put them in a TV series picking up as they get back from their honeymoon.

According to Wikipedia, it ran 7 episodes. I watched the first one and called it quits. I wasn't even aware there were six more made!

[Jonathan50]

27. Dick Cheney as CEO of Halliburton buying DII industries

http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/about_hal/asbestos.html

Halliburton subsidiaries DII Industries, LLC (formerly known as Dresser Industries) and Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2003 for the purpose of minimizing asbestos liability. Halliburton purchased DII Industries in 1998 under the direction of former CEO Dick Cheney. The acquisition meant that Halliburton inherited 300,000 asbestos claims filed against DII, who had for years manufactured construction products which contained the harmful substance. Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root also had manufactured products containing asbestos and has been fighting asbestos lawsuits since 1976. Asbestos causes scarring of the lung tissue (asbestosis), cancer of the pleural lining (mesothelioma) and lung cancer. Victims allege the companies knew of the health risks of asbestos long before they took it off the market.

[no_hypocrisy]

28. CBS News firing Dan Rather and replacing him with Katie Couric.

Honorable Mention: NBC and "Hello, Larry"

[lpbk2713]

44. That whole chain of events is hilarious.

CBS bailed out on Rather. Rather said that's the last straw and left. Bob

Schieffer filled in for Rather in the interim while CBS wooed Couric away from NBC

with a huge contract. And now the hilarious part is Couric's ratings are lower

than Schieffer's ever were. They fired Couric's producer as a scapegoat as if

that would have made any difference. It's still the same no-talent clown in front

of the camera.

[OhioChick]

30. Outsourcing, hands down.

It'll eventually turn around and bite corporations (and unfortunately consumers) in the ass.

[krispos42]

32. General Motors teaming up with I think Renault

I guess GM wanted to team up with them to bring small-car diesel technology to the US. Well, GM sunk over a billion dollars into the exchange, and at the end of the agreement, decided to cut their losses and run. But they had to buy out of their agreement with another 2 billion bucks.

the details are fuzzy, but this happened last year. Two BILLION in cash!

[Initech]

33. Digital Millenium Copyright Act should be A #1!

I mean honestly, lobbying to get a bill passed that would allow a business (and one business only) to arrest its customers if they don't pony up more dough for royalty fees? Completely fucking ridiculous.

[Jacobin]

34. Time Warner buying AOHell

It utterly destroyed all the pensions of Time Warner employees, made Steve Case a multi billionaire and made the former president of Time Warner the laughing stock of the century.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

51. I thought it was the other way 'round ...

AOL bought Time Warner.

Now I'm confused.

[Jacobin]

57. It could be

In either event it was a disaster for Time Warner employees and a boon for Case

[WinkyDink]

35. Daimler-Benz buying Chrysler.

[skids]

36. Office consolidations/centralizations

It's a catastrophic domino effect when offices are consolidated to metro areas. Here's how to ruin your business:

Take your branch offices renting in cheap properties in "the sticks" and buy one big office in a major metro area.
Claim it will save you in total rental costs, then expand the office when you could have expanded the branches.

Completely drop the ball on implementing teleconferencing/telework, or worse, spend a bunch to implement it but do it poorly and abandon it later.

Squander your employees' good will, and lose your best employees, but claim that they will be replaced by the more lively metro job market.

Pay a lot more for wages in the more competitive metro job market, and tons of moving bonuses and such to keep what few critical employees you can.

Lose the employees a few years later to an even better offer you just can't compete with.

Pay more in health care from sicker employees, due to urban crowding and more expensive urban doctors/clinics.

Lose productivity due to urban crowding's effect on employee commutes.


...and execs sell this move to BoD's without having to so much as break a sweat.

[walldude]

37. Sony chooses Betamax over VHS

While at the time it looked like the smart move, beta had better quality and better audio, but in letting VHS go to JVC and the like, Sony lost billions. I'm dying to see who comes out on top of the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wars...

[mikeytherat]

55. Sony's making the same mistake again, so bet on HD-DVD (if you must)

One of Sony's big decisions was to not have "adult entertainment" released on Beta. JVC said, "Bring on the porn," and that pretty much fueled the home-video market. Once again, Sony has decided that they won't be doing high-def porn on Blu Ray, and HD-DVD says, "Bring on the porn." On that basis alone, HD-DVD should win the format war. Of course, Blu-Ray's stumble out of the gate with Samsung's Blu-Ray player producing sub-par video is not going to help Blu-Ray.

Personally, I have had it with format wars (like DVD-Audio vs. SACD), and will laugh my ass off when both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are supplanted by broadband-delivered HD-on-demand.

mikey_the_rat

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

38. That motion picture company picking on Clayton Moore

They wouldn't let the 70 year old guy wear the lone ranger mask in public appearances, citing propietary rights and claiming they didn't want audiences mixing moore up with the new big-buget Lone Ranger they were about to release

The public got pissed, the movie tanked and became one of the biggest boz office flops of all time and the studio went out of business.

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

39. NAFTA and GATT

if people don't have jobs that pay enough to but the products you're outsourcing from dictatorships, they can't give your company money

[Neshanic]

43. Xerox showing the Gates gang the lab.

[The Backlash Cometh]

48. Say what you will about Xerox.

They had the right idea. Sharing ideas and research information for everyone's benefit. I can't remember the name of that lab? Park something. But, the point is, they dared to believe in a world where we could do more by sharing research information, than by being tightfisted about trademark secrets. Who knew that ruthless business practices and chaos capitalism would be their demise? And now where are we today in regards to technology and research? Certainly not on the cutting edge. Nobody wants to take a chance opening their labs to anyone.

We're all hurting for the way that turned out. That wasn't just Xerox's loss.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

50. PARC - Palo Altos Research Center, nt

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

52. The name of the research center was Xerox PARC.

Which, iirc, stands for Palo Alto Research Center.

[GreenZoneLT]

46. Apple's pricing scheme for the original Macintosh

Macs cost twice as much as technically inferior IBM PCs, so that Apple could have 25-percent profit margins. Market share? Schmarket share.

[Catchawave]

49. Moving the Brooklyn Dodgers to L.A.

...and tearing down Steeplechase Park at Coney Island.

It's a childhood memory thing, but those two "business" decisions broke my heart.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

54. Here's a few.

Enron - the entire chain of events leading up to its bankruptcy filing. Could probably bundle WorldCom and others under this heading.

The S&L scandal, for much the same reasons as the above.

Stupid dot-com business plans. Think pets.com trying to make money on shipping heavy, low-margin items like dog food.

PG&E's flagrant waste following CA's energy market deregulation, resulting in its declaring bankruptcy.

The Renault/AMC deal, resulting in such classic automobiles as the Alliance and causing AMC to sell off AM General, which was probably the only thing keeping them afloat.

[The Backlash Cometh]

56. Don't you get the impression that behind these "get rich quick"

events, that someone was using it to transfer loads of money, knowing that the pyramid would dry up at some point, but no one would get suspicious because everyone was affected by it?

[Touchdown]

61. Cabbage Patch Kids.

Coleco had a hit with them, and deliberately shorted the stocks of the dolls to stores to drive up demand. They were exposed for it and the backlash bit them in the ass. That year, they only had the Colecovision video game deck making them money. The ADAM computer put them under for good a year later.

[mainegreen]

63. Russia selling Alaska.

Turned out to be a rather dumb decision for Russia.

[gravity]

65. Native Americans selling Manhattan

was probably worst though.

[JackRiddler]

70. By this logic, any conquered people made a "bad business decision" nt

[gravity]

71. Well it technically was never conquered

"The lushly forested isle of Manhattan was first "discovered" (by Europeans) in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazano (a Florentine noble sailing for the French king), as he gazed from the salty deck of his vessel La Dauphine. The following year, Esteban Gomez, a Portuguese sailor employed by Spain, sailed into New York Harbor in search of gold. Explorer Henry Hudson came next, claiming the island for the Dutch West India Company. It was "as beautiful a land as one can hope to tread on," rhapsodized Hudson, an Englishman in employ of the Dutch. Seventeen years later, company director Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan from local Native American tribes for trinkets that contemporary historians value at $600, but which popular history records as $24. Either way, it was quite a bargain."

http://www.offbeatnewyork.com/nyc-history.html

[JackRiddler]

72. Well it was technically never bought

It's probable that the tribe of Manhattan had no idea that the Dutch were "buying" their land. Also, that the Dutch pretty much understood that, and pretended to "buy" it anyway.

My two questions: How the hell does anyone put a dollar price on the trinkets? Do we even have

And here's a play on the same theme:
http://911truth.org/osamas/history.html#1609

Sept. 11, 1609
"Henry Hudson discovers Manhattan island."
???
Does the choice of Sept. 11 for the attack on the World Trade Center signify that the lost descendants of the Manhattan tribe have returned to reclaim their island? Unfortunately for this most romantic of all impossibilities, trusty Encyclopedia Britannica dates Hudson's sighting of Manhattan to Sept. 3, 1609. Anyway, the first European conquistador to spot the later New York harbor was actually Giovanni da Verrazanno, in 1524.

But let's not have that get in the way of a story! The year of Hudson's voyage is correct, and he explored the river later named for him as far north as Albany. So let us fantasize that his crew made a landfall on Manhattan and claimed it on behalf of their Dutch paymasters on Sept. 11, 1609. That way, Sept. 11 becomes the day on which New York City was born. In 1624, the Dutch dispatched a garrison and a governor for the territory, Peter Minuit. To the local Mohegan Indians, Minuit gave a pile of trinkets (which future historians valued at 24 U.S. dollars, for some unfathomable reason). Lacking a concept of land ownership, the tribe of Manhattan did not realize that the crazy European thus turned their island of streams and gentle hills into his real estate. The Dutch began building New Amsterdam, in the area south of Wall Street, and property values have never been the same. The Mohegans disappeared from the area, done in by European diseases and guns. The English renamed the colony New York, after seizing it in 1664. About 336 years later, terrorists started knocking the city down.

But where is the Indian connection to the miniature Apocalypse in Manhattan? For that, we must travel almost to the other side of the continent, to the territory of the Hopi.

http://911truth.org/osamas/history.html#1609

[gravity]

64. Companies in the dotcom bubble

They had so much capital at the time, they could have bought all their competition away.

Also American Car companies for failing to innovate their cars for cost reasons during the 70's, 80's and 90's, allowing japan to take over much of the industry.

[JackRiddler]

67. Henry Ford Surrenders Licensing Rights to Model-T Transmission

Historians will argue forever about what motivated Henry Ford to grant an obscure upstart the exclusive rights to produce and market the steering and transmission for the Model-T as a separate unit. His folly is usually attributed to an enchantment with the sheer power of internal combustion, which had only recently been unleashed. Engineers were enthralled by their ability to double maximum horsepower every 18 months, and tended to denigrate parts not involved in burning fuel as mere scrap metal. Car bodies were begrudgingly understood as a necessary evil, insofar as the end-users required somewhere to sit while the powerful, highly sophisticated engine performed the real work. But the car's "operating system" was derided as an appendage. It was therefore left to the retailers or end-users to install these components.

Almost no one anticipated that interfaces would soon come to be seen as the most essential parts of the car. The temporary licensing monopoly on the production of Model-T compatible drive-trains, freely granted by Ford, turned into an unprecedented bonanza for MetalloGear, a Seattle-based mechanics garage. MG was able to capture the lion's share of industry profits, outgrow the Ford Motor Company, and establish for several decades a hegemony over the entire culture of driving. Other automotive systems were swept aside by the MG juggernaut, and only the high-end complete cars produced by DeLorean were able to maintain a tenth of the market, mainly as the objects of cult adoration.

This really happened!

[mainegreen]

69. That sounds interesting. Any links? MetalloGear returned no results on google.

[JackRiddler]

74. Thanks. You made my day! nt

[Joe Chi Minh]

68. The agent who turned away the Beatles.

[geniph]

73. Boeing's merger with McDonnell Douglas

Boeing was actually starting to become a half-decent company until that.