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motorclit · 5 years

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I miss the wild west days of the internet because you had this amalgam of websites that embraced creativity. Of course, I wasn’t very computer-savvy back in the day, and relied on a good friend to help me navigate technology, as my family was too poor and my parents too ignorant to teach me properly.

I was 10 in 1999, and that’s when we finally got a computer; we had AOL dial-up, and anytime the blue screen of death occurred, I was blamed. I was also yelled at for “wanting to use the internet too much” while my dad used the computer for solitaire most of the time, and mom ate up the television, radio, and internet during a Cleveland Indians game because she was obsessed back then and wanted to talk with other fans because my dad wasn’t a sports fan, my brother was way too young, and I hated sports with a passion (and still kinda do). But whenever I was allowed on the internet, I was allowed no more than 15 to 30 minutes. On dial-up speed, that’s not enough time to do jack shit.

I didn’t get my own computer with internet connection until I was like... 16. And that was back in 2005. I had my own dial-up connection separate from my parents’. That’s when my parents bitched me out for spending too much time in my room on the computer. By this time, we were already living on the farm in the middle of nowhere, and my parents largely ignored me unless they wanted to shove politics down my throat or interrogate me why I’m sucking in school. I wanted to check out Newgrounds and eBaum’s World and the new website YouTube. I wanted to talk to friends from around the world that I’ve made online from chatting on message boards and fandom-based chat rooms. There were several different instant messengers that had various features that interested different people, too.

Said friend I mentioned earlier invited me over to her house almost every weekend so we could surf the web together on her computer. We had a blast laughing our asses off at things like “End of Ze World” and TourettesGuy. The reason being is that we didn’t drive (I had anxiety, and I’m not sure about why my friend didn’t get her license yet, though I’d imagine it’s a similar reason), and this area is a cultural wasteland with nothing to do; no comic book stores, no arcades bigger than somebody’s closet (we now have both of those in this area), and no money to really go out and do anything worth-doing. My parents also never let me bike ride anywhere by myself when we lived in Smithfield except weeks before we moved to the farm because they thought I was old enough and I went to the post office and got the mail for them.

And now the internet isn’t quite as exciting to me anymore. I would like to believe it’s because I’ve over-used it in my life, but that’s not true at all. I craved going somewhere and doing something because all I had growing up were cartoons and movies be they on TV or rented from Blockbuster (RIP childhood) and whatever toys other family members got us for xmas. Facebook is trying to be literally everything. Twitter (along with FB) have fucked up algorithms for who knows what reasons to where I can’t properly keep up with everyone I follow. YouTube is full of legal hoops to jump through when you’re just trying to create entertaining content (can’t say bad words because advertisers don’t wanna be associated with bad words despite their CEO’s being involved in some shitty scandals far worse than the word “fuck”). Reddit is the new message board of message boards for any and all things, and while the format is nice, the people that run the website have been known to allow fashy subreddits that openly advocate murder and genocide to thrive while some leftist subreddits have been shut down. DeviantART used to be a site worth being on and became a cesspool of... ick. Just... ick. Like, it was a pretty ideal site to have your portfolio on, and still kind of is as far as having a nice way of organizing shit, but man... Searching the tags and seeing disturbing shit involving your favorite things... I thought that’s what rule34′s website was for.

Hell, tumblr used to actually be good once upon a time... And I still pop in every once in a while but...

Everything’s about money, now. Everything’s about monopolizing. Everything’s about trying to be the top thing of all things until it’s the only thing on the internet. Facebook is the Disney of the internet where it’s trying to consume and absorb everything. I really miss the variety of different websites. There isn’t much of that anymore. Capitalism is ruining one of the extremely few escapes I have as someone stuck in rural fucking Ohio in the middle of goddamn nowhere miles away from anywhere really worth going to.

Yes, I still hang out with the few friends that are left in this area that weren’t lucky enough to make it out of Ohio through college (and staying out... that was the hard part), and we do have a blast together. But we can’t always afford the time to hang out more than once a week because two of us out of the group work, my husband being one of them and because he’s part-time, he’s not guaranteed a set schedule for us to regularly plan shit for. The other is the only one in our group that drives (a friend in the group that does not drive is because his mom is a controlling bitch who has his shit stashed in a safe and he’s still figuring out how to break into it, but he can’t sue her because she can manipulate shit into getting him into trouble for social security fraud... and she takes the majority of his social security away because her name is still on the papers.. it’s a big fucking mess and all he needs to do is find a way into that safe to get his personal shit out). We are fucked in this area with an internet that is going downhill in terms of quality. We get by with D&D, Cards Against Humanity, Liar’s Dice, and hanging out wherever we can afford that week.

Back to the internet, there are ways of making websites, but sometimes it can cost money. A decentralized website is perhaps the best kind. There’s Raddle (a leftist “reddit” which was made when r/anarchism thought they were gonna get axed from the site) and Mastodon (a decentralized Twitter-like platform I don’t frequent and haven’t had the chance to figure out how to use just yet). I’d love a decentralized art site, but I have no knowledge on website-building, and don’t have the capability to focus enough to learn.

Fuck money. Fuck capitalism. Fuck companies fucking with my magical internet land. Fucking bastards.

#no I didn't make a read more link #because #that's why

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findandselect-blog · 7 years

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Top 10 Worst Business Blunders | Bad Business Decisions Of All Time has been published on Find and Select Business Reviews

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Top 10 Worst Business Blunders | Bad Business Decisions Of All Time

It's a fact of life that people make mistakes.

Even me, and I'm awesome.

However, whenever we're facing a big screwup or dealing withthe repercussions of another's error, it's easy to forget that mistakes are a part oflife.

Fortunately, for most people, our greatest mistakes on the job are minuscule comparedto some of the biggest blunders in business history.

SO HERE ARE 10 OF THE WORST BUSINESSBLUNDERS of all time.

So without furthur let's begin.

10.

The AOL-Time Warner Merger It's hard to imagine now, but AOL was oncethe biggest name on the Internet, the Google of its day.

In the age of dial-up Internetconnections ,AOL was the portal through which most Americans went online, with as many as35 million subscribers at its peak in 2002.

AOL was a Wall Street darling, flush withinvestor cash and looking for a prestige purchase.

AOL Inc.

CEO Steve Case met Time Warner CEOGerald Levin in 1999 and the two men immediately began daydreaming about a merger between thebiggest names in old and new media.

After months of private talks, the corporate marriagewas announced on Jan.

10, 2000, to the ecstatic media coverage.

At $350 billion, it was thelargest merger in the history of the business world.

But even after gaining Federal Trade Commissionapproval, the deal had its skeptics.

AOL was the majority shareholder, and for the financialsto add up, AOL would have to continue making bundles of money in advertising revenue.

Beforethe ink was even dry on the deal, the dot-com bubble had burst, Internet stocks plummeted,and the bottom fell out of the online advertising market.

Their leadership fought with one another.

Within two years, $99 billion dollars had been lost.

To make matters worse, increasedavailability of high-speed Internet access cut deeply into AOL's dial-up revenue.

Unfortunately, by the time the companies divorced 9 years later, their collective value hadshrunk from $300 billion to $40 billion.

The merger proved poisonous for both companiesand downright deadly for investors.

In 2009, Time Warner spun AOL off as its own company.

Today, the AOL-Time Warner marriage is the standard business school case study for theworst merger ever.

Kodak Sits on DigitalFor over 100 years, Kodak was synonymous with photographs.

Founded in 1880, the New York-basedcompany commanded 90 percent of the film market , 85 percent of the camera market, and itemployed over 60,000 people by the late 1970s.

In 1974, during Kodak's corporate dominance,one of its engineers, Steve Sasson, started fiddling with a gadget called a charge-coupleddevice, or CCD.

In time, he figured out how to use the CCD to translate light into thedigital language of 1s and 0s.

A year later, he successfully built the world's first digitalcamera, a clunky box that could produce a 100,000-pixel image, the equivalent of 0.

01megapixels.

Kodak instantly recognized the potential ofthe device to revolutionize photography and invested billions in its development and fileda patent for the digital camera in 1977.

However, Kodak made so much money on film, it didn'tintroduce the technology at the time to the public.

Kodak continued its focus on traditionalfilm cameras even when it was clear the market was moving to digital.

Kodak's executives didnot foresee the eventual decline of film.

Only when film's popularity began to wanein the mid-1990s in favor of digital photography did the company push into the digital market.

But competitors such as Fuji and Sony entered the market faster and Kodak was never ableto fully capitalize on the product it actually invented.

By 2001, the company was in second-placeto Sony in the digital camera market, but it lost $60 on every camera sold.

By 2010,it ranked sixth in the digital camera space, which itself began to dwindle with the adventof smartphones and tablets.

By 2011, the stock had dropped to 65 cents per share, and thecompany filed for bankruptcy in December of that year.

kodak now concentrates mostly onprinter cartridges and film for motion pictures.

Blockbuster Rejects Netflix for $50 MillionIf you came of age in the 1980s, you spent way too many Friday nights at your local Blockbusterbrowsing the "new release" shelves or raiding the return bin for the hottest titles.

Atthe top of its game, Blockbuster ran 9,904 stores worldwide with revenue topping $5.

9billion a year.

The secret to Blockbuster's early successwas using computers to make sure that every store was stocked with the most popular movies.

But once Blockbuster nailed its winning formula ,it failed to adapt to the changing tastesof American consumers.

In the late 1990s, an Internet upstart namedNetflix began offering a DVD-by-mail service.

The subscription service exploded in popularity,and Netflix executives flew down to Texas in 2000 to make an offer to Blockbuster CEOJohn Antioco.

For $50 million, Netflix would join forces with Blockbuster and help it launchits own online and DVD-by-mail service.

Antioco laughed Netflix out of the office, seeingit as a niche player.

As of May 2017, Netflix is valued at morethan $30 billion and Blockbuster ,which filed for bankruptcy in 2010 , closed its last retailstores and canceled its copycat DVD-by-mail service in 2013.

Western Union Hangs Up on the Telephone Today we know Western Union as a fast wayto send money around the world, but the company first gained its fortunes in the 19th centurywith its telegram service.

Before telephones, a Western Union telegram, transmitted by telegraphsusing Morse code, was the fastest way to send a message across cities, states and even countries.

When Alexander Graham Bell patented the firsttelephone in 1876, he wanted to cash in on his revolutionary invention by selling itto communications king Western Union.

Bell asked for $100,000, a fortune at the time,and the company didn't bite.

Western Union execs couldn't envision a world in which peoplewould ditch the handy telegram for expensive, grainy sounding telephones that didn't workover long distances.

When Bell's telephone caught fire with thepublic, Western Union hired rival inventors, including Thomas Edison, to design a betterversion.

Bell sued Western Union for patent infringement and won, forcing the telegramgiant to ditch its designs on the telephone.

Bell Telephone went on to rule American telecommunicationsfor a century.

Excite Passes on Google for $750,000Physicists argue that time travel is impossible, but if you want to be transported instantlyback to 1999, simply visit excite.

Com.

This is what the Internet used to look like.

Withoutan accurate search engine like Google, Web portals like AOL and Excite categorized theearly Internet by subject and posted the day's news and weather.

Incredibly, this is exactlywhat Excite is still doing.

Imagine, then, how different life would befor Excite , and for all of us, if Excite had bought Google back in 1999 for the priceof $750,000.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first offered to sell theirsearch technology to Excite for $1 million, but dropped the price further when Exciteshowed no interest.

To Excite's credit, Google was just an unprovenbundle of algorithms back in 1999, not the world-dominating technology goliath it istoday.

Excite was eventually bought by Ask.

Com, which has a less than 2 percent share of thesearch market.

Google has more than 60 percent of the U.

search market share and much largershare worldwide.

Rupert Murdoch Buys and Nearly Kills MySpaceBefore Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even YouTube, there was MySpace.

MySpace was thefirst social network to go mainstream back in 2004, signing up 1 million users just onemonth after its launch.

Everybody from rock stars to bored teenagers created MySpace profilepages and started "friending" each other like crazy.

By 2005, MySpace was the fifth most-viewedInternet domain in America.

And then Rupert Murdoch came along.

The NewsCorp billionaire bought MySpace's parent company in 2005 for $580 million.

According to MySpaceco-founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe, Murdoch squandered the social network's incrediblepopularity by trying to make MySpace profitable too quickly.

Murdoch promised huge revenuesto Wall Street and crowded the site with ads that eventually alienated users, who flockedto ad-free Facebook.

MySpace traffic peaked in 2008 with 75.

9 millionunique visitors, but the site couldn't fight the onslaught of Facebook.

Murdoch sold MySpacein 2011 for a piddling $35 million, and admitted via Twitter that "we screwed up in every waypossible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons"4.

Edwin Drake fails to patent his oil drill Extracting large quantities of oil from reserveswas a seemingly impossible task in 1858, but Drake wasn't afraid to work to make it a happen.

Stationed in Titusville, Pennsylvania, he spent a year looking for a solution withoutresults.

After employing a local blacksmith, he built a derrick of pine wood, surroundedthe drill with a pipe to keep water out, and drilled for weeks until he finally procuredthe black gold.

Unfortunately, Drake was later fired by his company and he lost all of hismoney on Wall Street.

Almost immediately, other entrepreneurs began using his methodto extract oil in the surrounding areas of Titusville.

His failure to patent his inventionresulted in the loss of millions, though the state of Pennsylvania and oil barons eventuallypaid him to express their gratitude.

To thank him for his efforts, the state granted hima stipend of $1,500 , which was paid annually until his death in 1880.

Nokia refusing to use Android Nokia was a pioneer in the smartphone market,literally introducing consumers to the smartphone with its initial Symbian Series in 2002.

Forthe next five years, Symbian phones had little trouble maintaining a leadership positionin the smartphone pack.

‪ But in 2007, Apple introduced its iPhone.

With its full touchscreenand app-based operating system, the iPhone changed the very definition of what a smartphoneshould be.

The software development team at nokia realizedthat there was a threat so they split into two teams.

one team tried to revamp symbianand the other team created an entirely new operating system named meego.

The problem wasthat the two teams were battling for resources from Nokia, as a result there was an internalstruggle within the company.

it was so bad that whenever nokia was dealing with outsidestakeholders it took almost a year to come to a decision.

As the years passed, the Symbianplatform aged, and that age really showed when compared to iOS.

During this time thesearch engine giant Google came up with its new OS for mobile phones named Android andthis proved to be the last nail in the coffin.

Android revolutionized the mobile phone marketand Google in association with many mobile phone manufacturers came up with low budgetsmart phones and nokia wasn’t prepared to counteract this.

Nokia CEO at the time decidedto skip on Android calling it a short-term solution saying that it is like"pissing inyour pants in the winter to keep warm".

Nokia kept on working on their own softwarethrowing five billion dollars a year of RND but of no use.

As time went on, the iphoneand android handset dominated the market.

After several delays, Nokia opted for the Windowsmobile OS, subsequently making it their primary platform.

Nokia released several Lumia smartphones,until it was acquired by Microsoft and from there on, it went downhill for nokia.

However,there is a twist,nokia is going to be returning in 2017 with an android os after signing anagreement with hmd global.

Yahoo's failure to forsee the futureIn 2000 ,Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $125 billion.

But Over the next 16 years, itsteadily tumbled, mostly due to inaction, missed opportunities and bad decisions.

Thecompany was so, so, so close to basically owning our entire online life.

In some bizarrouniverse, Yahoo is the search engine, photo storage, and social network you use everyday.

But in this very real world, it isn’t much of anything.

Back in 1998, two individuals, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who were unknown to the technologycompany offered to sell their little startup to yahoo for $1 million so they can resumetheir studies at Stanford.

Yahoo rejected them because they wanted theirusers to spend more time on Yahoo directories, where they would be exposed to banner ads.

Better search , like the kind Google was offering , would quickly route users awayfrom Yahoo.

In the early 2000's google steadily grew.

Realising it's mistake, In 2002, Yahoo's CEO at the time, Terry Semel, engaged in negotiationsto acquire Google, which lasted several months.

The outcome of the negotiation was Semel balkingat Google's price tag of $5 billion.

And the problems don’t stop there.

The signswere all there in 2006 – Facebook was going to be around for a while, and keep evolving.

FB had survived, despite turning down bids from the likes of Google and Viacom.

WhenFacebook investors showed up to sell the company, Yahoo depreciated the valuation they offered- founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg expected a billion dollars, but Yahoo reduced it to$875 million resulting in mark walking out.

not long after this in 2008, Microsoft CEOSteve Ballmer tried hard to buy Yahoo, which was now in a solid second place in the searchengine race.

In February of that year, Yahoo’s board decided that Microsoft’s $44 billionoffer was “too low" and as we all know how it turns out for yahoo in the coming years.

Yahoo couldn't keep up with the competitions and ended up selling its core assets to Verizonfor a mere $4.

8 billion in 2016, 10 times less than what they could have gotten frommicrosoft.

10.

Jobs Strikes A Deal With XeroxXerox founded its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970, which brought together someof the world's best computer engineers and programmers.

In the 1970s, PARC was the meccafor innovation in computing.

In 1979, Steve Jobs asked Xerox to let him tour PARC, andin return he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of Apple for a million dollars.

After much discussion, Xerox agreed.

Among other notable achievements, the PARCteam had developed a prototype of their experimental Alto workstation.

The Alto embodied a numberof the most advanced ideas in computing, including graphical user interfaces, the mouse, bitmapdisplays, windows, icons, and local area networks.

Legend has it that when Jobs was shown theworking Alto prototype with all its innovative capabilities, “he was very excited.

andstarted jumping around the room, shouting, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything with this?This is the greatest thing.

This is revolutionary!’ ”Jobs raced back to Apple and told his engineers to change the course of the personal computersand copy the Alto’s advanced capabilities he had just been shown at PARC.

He wantedmenus, he wanted windows, he wanted a mouse! The result was the Lisa introduced by Applein 1980.

in 1981,Xerox announced the Star workstation,the successor to the Alto called the Xerox 8010 Star.

It was expensive, slow and underpowered.

It was the first commercial system to incorporate technologies that have subsequently becomecommonplace in personal computers, such as a bitmapped display, window-based GUI, mouse,Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers and e-mail.

The Xerox 8010 Star, despite itstechnological breakthroughs, did not sell well due to its high price, costing $16,000per unit.

A typical Xerox Star-based office, complete with network and printers, wouldhave cost $100,000.

It was not a commercial success, and eventually Xerox withdrew altogetherfrom the workstation market.

Meanwhile, Apple followed the Lisa with theMacintosh in 1984.

The Mac became one of the most successful and influential products inthe history of IT.

Apple beat Xerox in the marketplace because while it took Steve Jobsonly a minute to see the huge potential of the Alto capabilities to revolutionize personalcomputing, the Xerox team did not appreciate the enormous value of what they had created.

Jobsin later years said"If Xerox had known what it had and had taken advantage of its realopportunities,it could have been as big as I.

plus Microsoft plus Xerox combined.

"Xerox sued Apple in the late 1980s for using their GUI technology, but the case was dismissed.

On the plus side, their Apple stock came to be worth billions of dollars, so atleast Xeroxgot the happy ending that eluded many other business fumblers throughout history.

Source: Youtube

#(10 #All #Bad #Blunders #Business #Decisions #of #Time #top #WORST #|#Top 10

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