Posted on 10/17/2012 8:29:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Yeah, but Coke’s still number one. “New Coke” is a most overrated mistake.
The kings in those times were essentially small businesses. They were personally responsible for those investments as well as their own kingdom’s debt and revenue. Phillip II built the Armada to cut off English attacks on Spanish trade and settlements in the New World. He risked his own money with a promise from the Pope that he would subsudize it if the Spanish won. Instead, Phillip squandered the investment by sending it into the English Channel. It was the English fire ships and Armada immobility that lost the battle. The weather was only a factor in the attempted excape around Scotland. Philip II would later go bankrupt. It was absolutely a business investment gone bad.
I have a rural mail carrier still driving an Eagle in my area. I’d like to know how many miles it has. You’re right, they built some good stuff. I’m going to drive my 4.0 Wrangler forever.
Companies come, companies go, that’s Capitalism.
I remember laughing at some of the responses we were getting in our surveys towards the latter part of the campaign. The first part was always questions about what you've purchased in the past week or so. You'd yet these responses, "coke, coke, coke", then you'd ask how they liked New Coke and they'd almost universally pan it. (There were at least 6 different formulations of NC out there that I could identify based on responses). However, the important part was that they were still buying coke anyway. This was after you knew there was no longer any original coke to be had nationwide.
Like I said, I think the whole thing was brilliant, and was a really interesting study on brand identification and loyalty. I wish I could get access to the original data we gathered. It would make for a really interesting paper.
Even I knew about broadband in the 90s and I was just a stupid kid. What is with the “pooh-pooh” instinct? Admittedly because a lot of new waves are false. People are more likely to be cranks than visionaries. More importantly because of laziness, a much underrated human motive.
What about Decca rejecting The Beatles, because “guitar bands would soon go out of style.”
OMG, wish I could edit that post and strip all the accidental copy/paste out of it! lol.
Everything you say is true, only remember it wasn’t on purpose.
It wasn’t on purpose, I freely acknowledge that.
It was an incredible tactical and strategic damage control that boosted product loyalty. The only other example I can think of that’s close is the Tylenol tampering case which is widely cited as the best corporate damage control case study of all time.
I still give the edge to Tylenol because people actually died from product tampering but they could have easily not just lost the brand but the whole company.
Coke, if they had been pig headed in defending the indefensible, would have just bled a slow agonizing death. Instead they catapulted ahead of the competition.
Yup.
We do not like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out of fashion.
Probably the biggest mistake by the publishing house Grandpa Recording made in 1962. Refused the famous Beatles.
I almost thing of Thompson Electronics and they had some facilities in Indiana which is now gone.
> I know of a company - located in my neck of the woods - that borrowed $85 mil from Wall Street to expand its factory with three new state-of-the-art production lines in the mid-1990s. This factory manufactured a critical element used in every color CRT manufactured anywhere, and they were one of two or three dominant producers of this component world-wide.
There is no reason why someone would want a computer in their home.
This was the opinion given by Ken Olson, president and founder of Digital Equiipment Corp (DEC). And not so long ago, 1977.
“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”
— Lee De Forest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926.
Fred Astaire: Can’t Sing, Can’t Act. Balding. Can Dance a Little. - Studio expert.
Have you ever read Hans-Hermann Hoppe? Your thesis reminds me of his writings.
Okay, the old kingdoms were relative to modern democracies more like businesses. Unlike a president who serves for four or eight years at most the state is the king or prince’s private property. They take care of it their entire lives and attempt to pass it on intact or enlarged to their offspring. They are infinitely less likely to squander the nation’s wealth as compared to the governments which merely stand in for the people. Not that they could squander it had they wished, given their limited control over the nobility.
I balk at calling the Spanish empire small, if a business at all. It was a multinational conglomerate if anything. But let us drop the analogy. It was only a businesslike relative to other forms of government. There remains a fundamental distinction between the political means of enrichment and the economic means. If the king’s relationship with his lords was quasi-voluntary and akin to private citizens now buying security guards or P.I.s, in the very least its rival England was not like a competitor for marketshare. Coca Cola does not send people over to slit Pepsin employees’ throats (or at least not on such a scale).
I don’t doubt that trade was involved, nor that Spain lost money. But trade war is war, and investing in implements of killing is not a business investment. It is a war investment. Do not let the interrelations of economy and warfare blind you to the difference between trading and killing.
By the way, I don’t deny that the English victory was thanks to English virtues in addition to bad Spanish luck. Only the single instance shouldn’t settle the armada’s usefulness for all time.
“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?”
— Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter’s call for investment in the radio in 1921.
If you want show biz / arts mistakes...
E. T. Was passed on.
Harry Potter was rejected by nine agents.
Twilight was optioned then given up by Paramount.
Fox failed to secure any of the Star wars licensing rights.
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