Ten of the Stupidest Tech Company Blunders

Every so often, up pops a “top ten” article that takes a look at the biggest mistakes made in the tech industry, and too often, most include the exact same ten. A recent article posted at PC World, though, brings forth some major mistakes that I forgot all about, or didn’t hear about at all. Some even make me cringe at thinking about such lost opportunities.

Did you know, for example, that Yahoo! aimed to purchase Facebook in 2006? This was at a time when Facebook had 8 million users and a modest value compared to today. Yahoo! offered $1B, but due to issues that arose, they ended up losing out on the deal. Today, Facebook has 250 million users, and is valued at around $10B. Just imagine if Yahoo! did go through with the purchase… they sure wouldn’t be struggling as they are today.

Then there is OpenText, the Google before Google. It began in the earliest days of the Internet as a search engine, and the company claimed that all 5 million documents available on the web at the time were indexed with it. That’s great, except execs at the company decided to take an alternate direction with their business, totally underestimating how important web searches were to become. Google came out a few years later, and are now worth billions, and billions and…

More mentions include how Microsoft “saved” Apple, by pretty much donating $150 million, Napster’s demise and what could have happened if the music industry actually made proper decisions and a lot more. There’s much here not mentioned, but really, that would end up becoming a top 100 article, wouldn’t it?

In the early 1990s the Compuserve Information Service had “an unbelievable set of advantages that most companies would kill for: a committed customer base, incredible data about those customers’ usage patterns, a difficult-to-replicate storehouse of knowledge, and little competition,” says Kip Gregory, a management consultant and author of Winning Clients in a Wired World. “What it lacked was probably … the will to invest in converting those advantages into a sustainable lead.”