Companies of any industry, from the smallest to the largest, regularly make mistakes, and only the size of enterprises determines the scale of the consequences of these failures. Information technology is a very young field, whose age is only a few decades, and the high risk of mistakes, the novelty of many problems and the financial interest in the industry have made several unsuccessful solutions with textbook examples of poor management, and sometimes the names of their authors have remained only in history and management textbooks.

SCO vs. Linux

Successful and even named by Eric Raymond the “first Unix-company” Santa Cruz Operation has little to do with what the SCO Group ultimately called itself. Until the early 2000s, commercially sought-after Unix for x86 servers was created in Santa Cruz, but things got worse after being bought by Caldera Inc., led by Ransom Love, who hoped to create the best Unix based on the acquired developments.

The partnership with Intel and IBM in an attempt to implement the Monterey project, the operating system for the Intel Itanium architecture and the IBM POWER, was unsuccessful: the market rejected IA-64 in favor of 64-bit versions of the x86 architecture, and the free Linux operating system occupied Unix. In 2002, Ransom left Darle McBride's post, and part of the Canopy Group renamed itself SCO Group, and instead of developing new products, the company focused on legal proceedings.
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In court, SCO not only accused IBM of introducing part of the Monterey project code into the open Linux kernel, but also attempted to recover damages from smaller players: large buyers, end users, and Linux-based manufacturers, including Red Hat and Novell. For this, SCO gained outlaw status in the open source community.

The litigation lasted for years, and SCO quickly lost customers, industry confidence, and even its NASDAQ index as not passing along the lower bound of the stock value. The company was a skeleton that dealt only with lawsuits - all other employees were dismissed. Already in 2007, SCO announced its bankruptcy. In the end, the court decision was not in favor of SCO, and the company's Unix assets were sold.

AOL / Time Warner

The growing popularity of the Internet in the USA in the late 90s was spurred on by the dial-up access giant AOL, whose foundation was a closed ecosystem with content available only to subscribers to make a whole series of purchases, the most notable of which was the 2000 acquisition of Time Warner for a huge amount of $ 164 billion .

The fusion monster, led by Steve Case (AOL) and Gerald Levin (Time Warner), desperately lasted for 9 years. Since 2002, the number of AOL Time Warner subscribers has steadily declined, almost 30 million customers have turned into just 5 million already in the 2007th.



The company's market valuation fell from 240 billion to a couple billion dollars (2011). After taking on the post of Tim Armstrong's new CEO, AOL Time Warner announced a breakup into two independent companies with the same names, which represented the end of many years of fruitless collaboration. Only recently, AOL began to straighten out, absorbing several fresh media: About.me, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post and others.

Yahoo and Microsoft

At the end of the 90s, Yahoo changed its tactics of rapid growth to calm purchases of companies and deploying their services under its own flag. So on Yahoo there were financial news, image hosting (Flickr) and sites (Geocities). But in the end, Google and Facebook took over, and new acquisitions did not always succeed in monetizing successfully, which dropped the company's revenues.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was looking for a platform from which the company could conduct its presence on the Internet, and Yahoo was quite fit for this definition. In February 2008, intentions to acquire Yahoo for $ 47 billion were announced, but Jerry Yang, co-founder and then CEO of Yahoo, decided to fill his price and refused, saying that the company is undervalued and does not need new co-owners.

A few weeks later the negotiations finally reached an impasse. Karl Aykan, a Yahoo shareholder, tried to force Yang to make concessions in the presence of Microsoft representatives. Tired of unsuccessful discussions, Ballmer gave orders to start developing his own search engine and web services under the Bing and Windows Live brands.

In 2008, due to an unsuccessful attempt to merge with Microsoft by Yahoo, a series of layoffs swept, and the company's market value began to fall sharply. In 2011, its value amounted to only 17 billion dollars, almost three times less than suggested in Redmond.

In January 2009, Jerry Yang took the post of Carol Bartz, who, ironically, dropped a deal with Microsoft about using Bing search for Yahoo services. But Carol did not manage to improve the situation, and on September 6 of last year from her iPad she sent a letter to her subordinates, informing her that only one bashful phone call was required for her dismissal. After Carol’s exit from Yahoo, layoffs again followed, the company broke up with 14% of its employees.

As it became known recently, Marissa Mayer has become the new executive director of Yahoo. It is not clear whether she will be able to restore the giant's former power, but you can imagine the pleasure of Balmer and the whole of Microsoft with memories of the refusal of further negotiations in 2008.

IBM and Microsoft

A few people at IBM in the late 70s began developing a future legendary machine 5150 PC, for which the operating system had not yet been prepared. The CP / M from Digital Research, which was already used on the Apple II, Osborne 1 and Kaypro machines on the market, was almost the only suitable one. In 1980, IBM contacted Gary Kildall, but CP / M licensing negotiations on the 5150 platform and all future PCs failed, and they had to look for other people.

More young Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen, the first workers of the newly created Microsoft, accidentally came across a tiny company Seattle Computer Products, which had an 86-DOS, x86-compatible operating system with a CP / M command interpreter. The operating system was acquired with all the rights to endless use for a measly 75 thousand dollars.

After negotiations, during which IBM didn’t really pay attention to the non-exclusive licensing terms, MS-DOS, which is an 86-DOS with famously distant references to Seattle developers, became widespread in the future market of tens of millions of machines.

Digital Research could go forward and be softer in conditions, IBM could tighten conditions and buy MS-DOS or even both companies. But history does not tolerate the subjunctive mood, and it was from this point that the success of the Redmond company began, which, having turned into a giant itself, in the 90s forced IBM out of the market of its own PC platform. CP / M never became popular. Digital Research tried to make its own DOS clone - DR-DOS, which, despite several advantages over the Microsoft product, also failed. Later, the DR-DOS operating system was sold to Novell, then Caldera, then it became the property of the already mentioned SCO.

Resignation of steve jobs

Because of his eccentric and even violent nature, it was always very inconvenient to work with Steve Jobs, and gradually Steve's relationship with the Macintosh team and Apple's board of directors led by him in the early 80s became worse. In light of the company's growth to work as an executive director in 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley from PepsiCo, where he held the same position.

In 1984, Apple released the first Macintosh, replacing the successful Apple II and the not so popular Apple III. Stiff competition from IBM, Compaq and other giants selling PCs and their clones, inflamed the inner world of Steve, who perceived the company's problems as personal. The board of directors asked Scully to limit Jobs in his costly and dubious undertakings, which was extremely annoying to Steve. In 1985, Jobs tried to remove Scully and take over his post, arguing that John was the wrong person to run the company, but unexpectedly for Steve, the board took Scully’s side and fired one of the founding fathers of Apple.

That 11-year period, which the company did not exist under the leadership of Steve, is almost always considered its worst years. Several people changed positions as CEO, but without Jobs’s visionary leadership, they had no chance of improving Apple’s position. By the mid-90s, the company was in poor condition, and the Macintosh operating system was far behind its direct competitors in development.

In 1996, Apple's new successful company Steve NeXT, which did not go into oblivion: the NeXTSTEP operating system later became what we now call OS X. As early as 1997, Steve, having previously had the status of a consultant at Apple, and in 2000, he removed the prefix "temporary" from his post. Steve immediately shut down many hopeless products; In the following years, the company branched out, introducing and improving other digital devices. With the release of iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad for Apple, the most successful period began.

Windows vista

No one ever expected that Windows XP will last so long. Even before its release, work began on a new project with the code name Longhorn. The first demonstration of the successor took place in 2003 at the Microsoft conference.

In August 2004, due to dissatisfaction with the size and functionality, the Longhorn project was started from the beginning. Simple tasks were set for the future Windows Vista: to improve the security of the operating system and support 64-bit systems, to refresh the user interface. It took more than five years of development, and the result was not satisfactory.

Windows Vista sales began in January 2007, and the new operating system immediately received negative ratings. Users were unhappy with high system requirements, the incompatibility of many popular programs and the inconvenience of the User Account Control, who constantly asked too many intrusive questions. Of course, the subsequent Service Pack solved many problems, but the reputation has already been undermined.

Much more successful, Windows 7 still managed to force many conservative XP users to change the operating system, but who knows how much Microsoft cost such a big blunder and how many users went to the Apple platform.

Osborne Computer Corporation

After the successful sale of the company for the publication of books and manuals on computers, Adam Osborne decided to create an inexpensive personal computer. Without further ado, the Briton called the new company and his computer with his own name. With a weight of 10.7 kilograms and astonishing vitality, Osborne 1 focused on CP / M 2.2 and had a tiny monochrome 5-inch screen, 64 kilobytes of RAM, a Zilog Z80 processor with a frequency of 4 megahertz, two floppy drives and cost only $ 1,795 , while it came with a program and a half thousand dollars.

For eight months, Osborne Computer Corporation sold 11 thousand computers, another 50 thousand were received pre-order - and this despite the high marriage. At the peak, 10 thousand computers were sold per month, although it was initially calculated that so much would be sold for the entire Osborne 1 period. The company’s growth is difficult to realize: in just one year, the company grew from 2 people to 3 thousand, and its income was 73 million. dollars. The head of the company, returning from a business trip for the week-long exhibition, hardly navigated in office space. By October 1982, 500 copies of Osborne 1 were produced daily. It seemed that OSC was a success.



In early 1983, OSC was about to launch the Osborne Executive, a more advanced successor to the Osborne 1. The Osborne Executive had twice the amount of RAM and a larger screen, and it was still distributed along with the necessary software, but it cost almost 2.5 thousand. dollars. The following actions by Osborne today are taught in business schools as an example of errors that cannot be repeated. Wanting to push a more expensive computer, in hotel rooms with tightly closed doors, Adam Osborne showed reporters a new car and spoke about prices and technical specifications.

Although the press, as promised, didn’t appear until mid-April, suppliers found out about the announcement and immediately canceled all orders for Osborne 1. From April 17, Osborne showed the Osborne Executive dealers a week and stressed that the new microcomputer is not a competitor to the old, but it had no effect. In July, Osborne 1 cost 1.295 dollars, in August the price was reduced to 995, but that did not help either.

Sales fell almost to zero, the company suffered losses much higher than expected, and already on September 13, 1983, OSC declared bankruptcy. Later there were attempts to release Osborne Vixen, which again failed. Today, Osborne Computer Corporation is remembered only in the context of its failure.

Sometimes another OSC is called the death cause: the more advanced Kaypro computer, which was cheaper, or the management’s incomprehensible decision due to the presence of the motherboard of the old model for 150 thousand dollars to spend 2 million to complete their construction into the finished product, when the production of new machines began .

Nevertheless, today it is the Osborne effect that is to blame for the fact that companies severely restrict the dissemination of information about new developments and the characteristics of future models, and people learn about new devices in our digital age from such old-fashioned tools as rumors.