Biggest mistake in coporate history...

[SteamWake]

In 2001, AOL completed its $164bn (£104bn) acquisition of Time Warner, but it soon led to monumental write-downs. However, Time Warner soon realised that the merger was not in its best interests, leading to a loss of $99bn in 2002. A demerger agreement came last year.

I could have told them... AOL sucks

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...ff-Bewkes.html

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by SteamWake

I could have told them... AOL sucks

Well, not entirely. One of their "Free Trial!" disks is still serving as a coaster on my desk and doing a thoroughly fine job of it.

[SteamWake]

Uses for AOL CD's... hundreds of them

http://www.eagle-wing.net/FunStuff/G...AOL-CD01.shtml

[Moeceefus]

They deserve it. Time Warner robs me every month.

[Gerald]

Today's joke!

[August]

I think I know of an even bigger mistake.

Western Union had an opportunity to buy Professor Bells Telephone patent for a mere 100 grand, a patent still widely considered to be the most valuable one ever issued, and refused it!

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and his financial backer, Gardiner G. Hubbard, offered Bell's brand new patent (No. 174,465) to the Telegraph Company - the ancestor of Western Union. The President of the Telegraph Company, Chauncey M. DePew, appointed a committee to investigate the offer. The committee report has often been quoted.

It reads in part:

"The Telephone purports to transmit the speaking voice over telegraph wires. We found that the voice is very weak and indistinct, and grows even weaker when long wires are used between the transmitter and receiver. Technically, we do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles.
"Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their "telephone devices" in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?
"The electricians of our company have developed all the significant improvements in the telegraph art to date, and we see no reason why a group of outsiders, with extravagant and impractical ideas, should be entertained, when they have not the slightest idea of the true problems involved. Mr. G.G. Hubbard's fanciful predictions, while they sound rosy, are based on wild-eyed imagination and lack of understanding of the technical and economic facts of the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious limitations of his device, which is hardly more than a toy... .
"In view of these facts, we feel that Mr. G.G. Hubbard's request for $100,000 of the sale of this patent is utterly unreasonable, since this device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase."

http://www.cybertelecom.org/notes/att.htm

mega DOH!

[Capt. Morgan]

My personal favorite goes to Xerox.

Their Palo Alto Reserch Center invented the graphical user interface, (with the first WYSIWYG word processor), and they invented the mouse.

In 1973, they built themselves a small local network of desktop machines (the Xerox Alto) using these features , setup in what is pretty much the current modern office configuration.

All this back in a time when offices were using a single main-frame connected to a host of dumb-terminals, often teletypes, or at best, text-only video displays.

Having no clue of what to do with the invention of modern computing, Xerox assembled their engineers and gave Steve Jobs a guided tour of the system in 1979 - the first Macintosh computer hit the streets about a year after.

[magic452]

Not on the scale of there two but important to me is this one.

My dad had a friend either a neighbor or someone he worked with at Lockheed. He wanted to open a drive in restaurant and serve double decker hamburgers and asked dad if he would care to be an partner in the business.

Dad's reply was Who would want to sit in a car and eat double decker hamburgers?

The man's name was Bob Wien and the restaurant was called Bobs Big Boy.
A very successful franchise chain of popular drive ins in California.

I missed by that much.

Magic