moondog

1) Gmail new compose
-I don't have enough words to say how much I hate this feature; I'm not a 12 year old girl

2) MS retiring msn
-I was never a big msn fan, but it was better than Skype in many respects
-80% of my contacts did not bother to switch over

3) Nokia
-until about 8 years ago, those guys were kings
-then, along came Symbian
-I still have a few of their old phones, which are awesome, but my N80 seriously sucked to the extent that I will never buy another one of their products until they do something innovative again

4) Apple
-while I applaud them for bringing iPhones and iPads into existence, there are now better products (at the same price points) and comparable products (for a fraction of the price) on the market
-if they fail to innovate, they are no better than Foxcon

5) Motorola
-so much money, but so little imagination... why is a Korean company without gazillions of dollars in US government funding eating them for lunch?

HDQDD

1) LOVE the new gmail, been using it for a year or so. Can't figure out how people can't figure it out...it's about as easy as it gets...

2) MSN sucked. Should have been killed off a long time ago.

3) Nokia, Blackberry...textbook examples of what happens when you fail to measure future markets.

4) Apple makes great products, but they are definitely form over function. IMO the best marketing company in the World, they've gotten people to spend more for less.

5) No argument, motorola (at current rate) is headed towards a fate similar to Kodak. Failure to innovate is not a growth strategy.

moondog

I won't debate with you about the new gmail, and it seems that we agree on the rest on my points, so I want to focus on MSN.

I live in China, which boasts the world's largest internet population. While it's true that Microsoft was rapidly giving up market share to local companies who had a better pulse on consumer needs, they still had a pretty solid installed base. But, the mandatory Skype switch wiped out the lion's share of that out... pigheaded thinking.

OverThereTooMuch

You either have an incredibly short memory, or you're completely wrong on all counts.

So many big disasters to choose from.

CPRich

Apple haters always amuse me. Sure, dropping from the most valuable company in the world to only one of the top 10 is the biggest snafu in your lifetime - if you're one. So much worse than Blackberry, Yahoo, Groupon, etc., etc.

DenverBrian

PDAs - an oddball technology that lasted only 5 years or so, in that weird time before wifi and smartphones.

ISDN - again, an oddball technology that at least got you 128kbps for a few years until DSL came along.

OS/2. IBM gambled that they could do Windows better than Windows. And lost.

WiMax. Could have been ubiquitous by now, but major snafus in deployment and adoption, so it's dying as LTE comes to the fore.

moondog

If you haven't read the "Innovator's Dilemma", I suggest you check it out because there could easily be an entire chapter devoted to Apple if it were written today.

I don't hate Apple by any means, but they failed to understand the fact that the market for $150 phones is a lot bigger than the market for $600 phones. As such, no name companies are now cashing in on the fruits of their labors, and they are unable to compete. I shall also note that Apple hasn't deployed any revolutionary products for ~5 years.

lensman

Are these competitors capturing profits or just market share?

My entry is the U.K. government's 11bn GBP NHS National Programme for IT:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...m-2330906.html

http://www.computerweekly.com/opinio...-for-IT-failed

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2...ject-abandoned

Shows it takes a goverment to really bollocks things up.

But for business, I think there are a lot more examples:
1. IBM PC - gave away the henhouse to Microsoft. On the high end one could say they gave up the entire current market value and distributed dividends of MSFT.
2. CONFIRM reservation system - AMR, Hilton, Marriott and budget pour $125MM into a unified reservation system based on SABRE technology. 3 months before going live, testing reveals that the system has serious performance problems and will require 12-18 months of additional development. Project is canceled. (and my department gets a $2MM mainframe in the fire sale!)
3. A friend of mine talked about the IBM Office Vision project in the late 80's. At the time IBM had poured $1BN into the project and it had yet to produce a product. Lots of global conference calls, though!
4. Is Sprint's purchase of Nextel a tech snafu? If so it could be described as a $35BN snafu. OTOH it was structured as a merger of equals and Sprint shareholders only "paid" a 9% premium to Nextel shareholders so it's less of an instantaneous loss than a decline from the post-merger $72BN combined market cap down to $21BN market cap when acquired by Softbank.
5. Are we going to list companies that ultimately faltered and then failed or were acquired at the end of a slow demise? Data General, DEC, Compaq, NeXT, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Sybase, AOL, Netscape, Myspace...

I have to admit that I'm not particularly interested in rehashing these. What are we trying to discuss or learn here? The worse thing that could happen is another Windows vs Mac bash.

moondog

We can discuss anything we want here. Insofar as learning is concerned, I think we can derive a great deal of insights from past failures in order to make our own endeavors stronger. Please check out The Innovators Dilemma. It is honestly the best business book I've read during the course of the past 15 years.

gfunkdave

I'm not sure I'd consider any of the OP's list a "big tech snafu", much less the biggest.

Craig6z

How 'bout "Y2K"?

nkedel

Hardly a disaster; they lasted a good 10-12 years, and evolved into the modern smartphone (and earlier smartphones were out way earlier than they became mainstream -- I had one in 2003, and it wasn't the first.)

For that matter, they're still around -- just marketed as very small tablets -- and at least one model (the iPod touch) sells very very well. Or you could argue that tablets are just PDAs, writ large.

Now if you look at the history of companies that MADE PDAs, that's a different story:
Palm -- great idea, market leader, but failed to innovate and completely missed the boat on designing smartphones. Got a few more years out of buying their competitor/licensee Handspring. WebOS was too little, too late, and eaten by the morass of HP.

Microsoft -- a much better mobile OS, but which required hardware that was too high-end to be competitive with Palm. Prices only finally came down right as smartphones were coming in around 2005, and unlike Palm, they did (or at least their licensees, especially HTC, did) jump on the smartphone bandwagon at the right time. Lack of software innovation until after iPhone and Android had blazed the trail hurt them badly; Windows Phone 7 was a dud, Windows Phone 8 probably is.

Unlikely. IBM never would have been competitive on their own; with IBM in those days if they'd come out with a closed hardware architecture or fully-proprietary OS, they'd have sold well, but never had clones to force the system to come down in price and to be more innovative.

Instead of IBM/MS-DOS descended systems we'd be using distant descendants of some other open system...

(If you look at Apple today -- at the most competitive they've been since the early 1980s -- they have a thin proprietary veneer over otherwise very much standard systems.)

The paranoia around it, certainly. "Thus the world fails to end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but just another New Years day hangover."

lhrsfo

I think Betamax should enter the list. Vastly superior to VHS but not marketed properly.

DenverBrian

How about AM stereo? Now there was a solution in search of a problem.

glob99

Sony killed Betamax by charging high license fees. With HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray battle Sony used its Entertainment division to block HD-DVD. Sony refused to let any of its movies/TV shows appear on HD-DVD.