It’s easy to remember the good decisions in historylike Apple re-hiring Steve Jobs in 1996.
Bad decisions, on the other hand, can often be forgotten or go totally unnoticed.
In fact, Samsung passed Nokia in 2010 on the back of Android.
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On March 23, 2016,Microsoft unveiled a Twitter chatbot named “Tay.
“Less than 24 hours later,Microsoft took Tay down.
It was an unmitigated disaster.
Tay was intended to improve Microsoft’s understanding of conversational language.
This resulted in tons of screenshots of Tay saying horrible things floating around the internet.
However, trouble was lurking for the company several years before it reached its peak.
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New technology was making physical rentals an outdated concept, and Blockbuster completely whiffed on its chance to evolve.
In September 2000, Blockbuster CEO John Antioco met with Netflix co-founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph.
They thought Blockbuster would be a better fit, but Blockbuster did not return the feelings.
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According to Randolph, the Blockbuster CEO was visibly holding back laughter after hearing the number.
The company did not accept the offer, and the rest is history.
It was supposed to be thinner, quieter, and more responsive than the previous scissor-switch keyboard.
Amazon
However, users immediately had issues with the keyboard, such as sticky, repeating, or unresponsive keys.
The butterfly keyboard was phased out by 2020.
But Apple’s decision had lasting impacts.
HP
It was launched by Google in 2011, aiming to compete with other platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
The decision that may have hurt Google+ the most was the invite-only status at launch.
While it created a lot of hype, it ultimately limited who people could follow when first signing up.
Netflix
If your friends are still somewhere else, are you going to keep using a new platform?
The Amazon Fire Phone waslaunched exclusively on AT&T on July 25, 2014.
The Fire Phone had a few unique features that set it apart from other smartphones.
Know Your Meme
The UI moved to match your head placement.
Amazon stopped making the phone less than a year later, and a sequel never happened.
It was a very predictable outcome for many people in the tech community.
Like many failed products, Quibi aimed to target a younger demographic.
It had big Hollywood names attached to its shows and sold out its first year of advertising inventory.
However, it struggled to gain popularity and user engagement.
It turns out you need more than vertical video to attract young people.
Quibi’s failure was the result of countless bad decisions in the Silicon Valley echo chamber.
Almost everyone on the outside knew Quibi was going to fail.
It wasn’t hard to see.
The company wanted to use WebOS on everything from smartphones to printers.
Sadly, it started off poorly and ended even worse.
Then came the infamous HP TouchPad, which was a massive flop.
The once darling child of the tech community had been relegated to a barely recognizable TV interface.
Would Palm have been successful on its own?
Probably not, but HP sure accelerated its demise.
The move was met with instant outrage by customers.
What angered customers the most was the sneaky price hike that came with the separate services.
Before the split, it was $10 per month for DVDs and streaming.
Just three months after the split was announced,Netflix reversed its decision.
DVD rentals and streaming would remain under the “Netflix” brand.
However, the price hike remained in place$16 per month for both services.
In September 2023, Netflix’s DVD service was ended for good.
Getting a link on the Digg homepage meant massive traffic, so much that it would often crash websites.
It was one of the most popular websites on the internet, but a storm was coming.
On August 25, 2010, Digg v4.0 was released.
While all of these decisions were bad in some capacity, some of them had longer-lasting impacts than others.
The same can be said for Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix.
