Paul Murphy writes for the LinuxInsider: “Personally, I’d put DEC’s failure to recognize that commercial VMS users weren’t remotely like mainframers in solid second place, although I can think of some other contenders too — including AT&T’s purchase of NCR, the Defense Department’s choice of staff and criteria in the development of ADA, and Intel’s decision to continue 64-KB block addressing in the i80286.”
The Top 10 List of Worst Business IT Decisions
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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that’s one of the worst decisions made by the “industry.”
IMO having every peripherals gouging the CPU isn’t very efficient at all.
“Never again!”
1) Gary Kildall’s missed meeting with IBM to discuss supplying them with an OS for their new ‘PC’ …he decided to go fly his plane instead apparently.
2) Apple’s decision to kill the Newton. A product ahead of it’s time killed before it’s time. What could have been?
3) IBM’s decision to go with MCA instead of getting behind the evolving ISA standard…why follow the other guys when you can make the thing proprietary they figured…bad decision. Compaq overtook them in the market place for the first time and they’ve been playing catch-up ever since.
4) Lotus’s decision to ‘hang-in-there’ with the DOS version of 1-2-3 and not get the Windows version out in time. MS beat them to the punch with Excel/Word and have owned the market ever since.
5) BeOS’s ‘focus change’ to IA’s …a white elephant if ever there was one, right up there with the NC.
6) (a) Xerox’s decision not to commercialise the Alto and (b) to give Apple’s guys ‘open slather’ on the prototypes.
7) IBM giving MS the rights to retain ownership of the DOS source code and redistribution to rivals. “The real money’s in the hardware anyway”…good call.
8) Red Hat’s decision to change their licensing and pricing structure just as large corporations were about to make the switch. If you listen hard enough can almost hear the echo’s of CIO’s around the world saying “Jeez…that was close”.
9) Microsoft Licensing 6.0 …the less said the better.
and the overall number 10 worst decision…
10) Novell deciding to sell…well…whatever the hell it was they sold to Caldera/SCO.
[quote]6) (a) Xerox’s decision not to commercialise the Alto and (b) to give Apple’s guys ‘open slather’ on the prototypes. [/quote]
Both true, though Xerox did get a million shares of Apple for opening the doors of PARC for them. This was just before Apple’s IPO so they made $$$.
Apples choice to charge too much for Firewire.
The biggest: IBM trying to control everything in the 90s.. It almost caused their complete demise
Can Clippy go on this list? How about the stupid search dog in XP? Those mascot helpers are all terrible.
What could have been when it comes to desktop operating systems if IBM had been clearly committed to OS/2, instead of waffling back and forth.
Similarly, what might have been if IBM had, for the past 10 years sold desktops using its own PowerPC processors rather than or alongside x86 PCs/laptops? It would have given them a distinguishing feature and allowed them to justify selling hardware at a premium, which is what they tried to do with standard x86 hardware. Additionally, that move, coupled with a committment to OS/2 would have given them control of both the hardware and software, rather than entrusting both of those things to Intel and Microsoft. IBM isn’t a systems assembler like Dell, and they screwed up by trying to be one instead of playing their considerable R&D assets to their full potential.
>>>>Similarly, what might have been if IBM had, for the past 10 years sold desktops using its own PowerPC processors rather than or alongside x86 PCs/laptops?
The BIGGER problem was that IBM invented the RISC chip concept long ago, but didn’t capitalize it. SUN capitalized the RISC technology.
BeOS’s ‘focus change’ to IA’s …a white elephant if ever there was one, right up there with the NC.
while i agree 100% with you, their chosen market, PC and Mac wasn’t doing all that well either.
ideally, either be should have sold itself to apple OR
be should have gotten beos to run on apple powerpc hardware
OR even introduce their own pc’s
By the early ’90s Apple, IBM and Motorola made an agreement to “ask for” (apple), “design” (ibm) and ·manufacture” (motorola) the ISC processor (601) that run in Macintoshes. This was he first “big change in texhnology” for Apple.
Last year, the second one with the PowerPC >> G5
That way, IBM developed (IMHO) withour risk the desktop RISC that now is going everywhere (including PS3 and xbox2).
This (once again, IMHO) vas a very clever (althought maybe inconsciouness) decision by IBM.
And (maybe) modifies the point of view on previous commentss.
Anyone remember the CueCat?
Q. How many Apple Newtons does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Farve
a) Be Inc. started out making their own computers. There just wasn’t a market for an new architecture so they ported to PowerPC and then to x86.
1) BeOS the contender against NextSTEP for aquisition by Apple. They chose Next and Be Inc. went its own way.
*sigh* BeOS rules.
That way, IBM developed (IMHO) withour risk the desktop RISC that now is going everywhere (including PS3 and xbox2).
This (once again, IMHO) vas a very clever (althought maybe inconsciouness) decision by IBM.
And (maybe) modifies the point of view on previous commentss.
Oh, I understand where you’re coming from. I guess it’s just hard for me to see why IBM tied their fortunes to Intel and Microsoft so much with their PCs and now ThinkPads.
They have their own hardware and software platform (the hardware side of which is optimal for their PC focus on laptops), so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to purchase these things from other companies, then have to spend further money figuring out how to work with them optimally.
Further it seems that perhaps they could have improved volume economics for their desktop-oriented chips by being their own best customer.
But what do I know? 🙂
IBM did manufacture PPC laptops for a while, three in fact. The RS/6000 860 which replaced the earlier Thinkpad 850 and 820.
The 820 and 850 ran a PowerPC 603e (same as pre-G3 Mac laptops) at 100Mhz.
They ran AIX, Windows NY and eventually OS/2 and were rather pricey, I believe.
IBM killed the Personal Power Division group which made them and the RS/6000 group took up the slack, making the 821, 822, 823, 851 and finally the 860. The 860 ran at 166mhz and was finally killed in 1997.
Good to know. Thanks.
while i am inclined to agree with you, and the above on the focus shift to IA, if they remained committed to x86, would they have survived, and if so, how?
Can’t remember the name of the company (either Shiva or Spyglass or something) or even the exact story, but what about the company that brokered a deal with MS for some internet software, with MS promising xx% of profits?
MS had a clause saying that they got the code if the company went bankrupt.
So what did MS do? They gave the code away. Company gets no income, gets bankrupted, MS gets the code for themselves.
Actually, from MS’s point of view, it’s a bloody good decision.
Does anyone know if this is true?
Yes, the company was SpyGlass and what you wrote is true. SpyGlass got screwed bad.
Oh, I understand where you’re coming from. I guess it’s just hard for me to see why IBM tied their fortunes to Intel and Microsoft so much with their PCs and now ThinkPads.
Because you are a geek and not a businessman. Your interest is technology first, end results second.
IBM, OTOH, is run by businessmen whose primary goal is making money, not making cool toys.
[Most] People don’t buy PCs because of what they *are*, they buy them because of what they can *do*.
Yes, I am a geek, but it seems a perfectly reasonable business decision to want to have control over any system that’s bringing in revenue. Besides, while I can see the wisdom in keeping their options open, it would have been nice if IBM hadn’t embraced quite so eagerly its own competitors’ technology.
I suppose it’s to be expected that the right hand doesn’t know what the left foot is doing in a company as large as IBM (just look at Sony).
I also think a major (and committed) PowerPC push into the personal computer space by IBM years ago could have altered the market to the point where NT/PPC would have happened and there’d be no difference in “what they can do” or other operating systems would have filled in and become more dominant than they have.
Of course, now it’s all academic, or at least will be for the next few years. IBM fortunately seems to have finally grasped this problem and decided that they can’t afford to spend a fortune developing all kinds of neat stuff, then for the sake of being conservative bury it all and go to more expense adopting someone else’s technology.
Whoa…deja vu? Didn’t MS try to do basically the same thing to Sendo? Spooky
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7823
This link is better:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7015