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Post by Baldobomb-22-OH-MAN!!! on Aug 6, 2022 16:08:39 GMT -5
I'll echo Target Canada. There was huge buzz when they were coming. I had a friend who constantly talked about how much she loved Target and would shop there anytime she was south of the border. Then it showed up in Canada and between the stock issues and underwhelming prices it completely failed to measure up in any way to its competition. The speed with which it collapsed was actually astounding considering how many seemed to be clamouring for Target in Canada. It basically killed one of the local malls. They closed all the Zellers and only replaced like half of them so the Southridge mall had no big department store anymore and promptly collapsed
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Post by castletonsnob on Aug 6, 2022 16:10:41 GMT -5
Some on here have said that Nintendo's decision to end their partnership with Sony is the worst business decision ever. I've heard a lot of people say that if the Nintendo-Sony partnership didn't end, we'd be playing games like God of War or Uncharted on a Nintendo console, or we'd be playing on a Nintendo PlayStation 5. However, given how console add-ons usually don't do well, I think the most likely scenario is that the SNES CD add-on flops, and the Nintendo-Sony partnership ends. They still would’ve been wise to continue the partnership. CD’s were clearly the wave of the future, and Nintendo’s failure to realize that arguably cost them the console wars. A simple “we’re not doing this accessory but let’s talk about next steps” might’ve enabled them avoid creating one of their biggest competitors. I don't think the partnership would have lasted, anyway. The past almost 30 years have shown that Nintendo and Sony have VERY different philosophies regarding business and video games.
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Dan Royal
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Post by Dan Royal on Aug 6, 2022 16:27:53 GMT -5
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks there was something fishy going on with Target Canada. I'm just some average dude and I could tell you opening 100 stores all at once in a brand new market is a bad idea. You're telling me, that smart people who made millions of dollars in business couldn't see the holes in this plan?
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Post by Cyno on Aug 6, 2022 16:33:02 GMT -5
There's a big difference between a bad decision at the time and something that only could've been known with having years, if not decades, of hindsight. Like the New Coke? Bad idea at the time. But the Coke buying Pepsi example is one no one would've had any clue about for like 40 years.
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El Pollo Guerrera
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His name has chicken in it, and he is good at makin' .gifs, so that's cool.
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Post by El Pollo Guerrera on Aug 6, 2022 16:53:22 GMT -5
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks there was something fishy going on with Target Canada. I'm just some average dude and I could tell you opening 100 stores all at once in a brand new market is a bad idea. You're telling me, that smart people who made millions of dollars in business couldn't see the holes in this plan? Well... when Canadians go to the U.S. to shop, usually one if the stores they'd hit is Target if it's close to the border. Execs must have reasoned that the Canadians were coming because of 'the brand', and missed that they were coming because of the price. Now if Target in Canada had managed to match the deals that Canadians were getting in the U.S. stores, it would still be open now.
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Cranjis McBasketball
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Post by Cranjis McBasketball on Aug 6, 2022 18:15:38 GMT -5
I think KFC switching from the wedges to original recipe fries. The fries are crisp and tasty but just not the same as the wedges. Their biscuits are also much smaller than in the past. I prefer KFC still to Chik Fil A but CFA is definitely more customer service oriented. As long as you're straight anyway 😜 And don’t want to eat on a Sunday.
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schma
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Post by schma on Aug 6, 2022 23:45:06 GMT -5
I'll echo Target Canada. There was huge buzz when they were coming. I had a friend who constantly talked about how much she loved Target and would shop there anytime she was south of the border. Then it showed up in Canada and between the stock issues and underwhelming prices it completely failed to measure up in any way to its competition. The speed with which it collapsed was actually astounding considering how many seemed to be clamouring for Target in Canada. It basically killed one of the local malls. They closed all the Zellers and only replaced like half of them so the Southridge mall had no big department store anymore and promptly collapsed We went through something similar when sears collapsed but I think the location saved the mall. It's just a couple km from the university and smack in the middle of a retail area that is right beside a ton of student housing. What used to house the sears is now 2-3 medium sized stores.
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Post by Savage Gambino on Aug 7, 2022 9:27:08 GMT -5
Tumblr banning NSFW content. It can't be overstated just how poorly this went for everyone involved. To put it into persepctive, Yahoo bought Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars. When all was said and done, after the NSFW content ban, they would end up selling Tumblr to Wordpress for 3 million. That is a shocking loss on investment, even without accounting for inflation. Then there's just all the little ways they failed: The ban was put in place because they were taken down from the Apple Store for NSFW content. They were not put back on. They say they did it, in part, to crack down on porn bots. After the mass exodus, the porn bots might actually outnumber live users. And then there's the absolute political landmine that is the term "female presenting nipple", which was not only a misogynistic way of defining "explicit content", but also kind of transphobic. Oh, and then there's the fact that the filter didn't even work half the time, routinely flagging things that weren't explicit, occasionally things that didn't even involve bare human skin (I'm sure it flagged a close up of a dog at one point). Just a master class of thinking you know better than your userbase... at the expense of your userbase.
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Post by Cyno on Aug 7, 2022 11:03:53 GMT -5
Tumblr was something of a safe space for erotic art and photography that wasn't necessarily pornographic. The platform had a lot of problems before the change in policy. Porn and spam bots were rampant. Extremist groups and individuals (including literal terrorists like members of ISIL) had accounts that were allowed to spew their hate unchecked.
But what did Verizon make the priority? The erotic art that wasn't harming anyone and already required by the Tumblr TOS to be in accounts flagged as 18+. The porn bots if anything became more prolific. And unlike Only Fans which backtracked from the massive user backlash, Verizon dug in their heels. The result was the complete tanking of a social media platform that was at one point in a position to be on similar level to Facebook and Twitter. Now it's a sad shell of its former self.
And "female presenting nipples" is such an awkward and hilarious phrase.
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Post by castletonsnob on Aug 7, 2022 14:47:31 GMT -5
When have companies created their own biggest rivals?
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Dr. T is an alien
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Post by Dr. T is an alien on Aug 7, 2022 15:48:43 GMT -5
Probably Gary Gygax telling the Blume brothers to take a hike from TSR in the early 80's (as they were running it into the ground and were trying to sell it out from under him to pay off the $1.5 million debt they had built up while Gygax was in Hollywood), only for them to turn around and sell their stocks to Lorraine Williams - a woman who hated gamers and thought D&D was anti-Christian - and making her the majority shareholder, which led to Gygax selling his stocks and leaving in 1985. Also, how Williams generally handled running TSR and D&D 2nd Edition (no playtesting stuff to make sure it wasn't absolute shit/imbalanced to hell, deciding to launch a card game because of how Magic: The Gathering was doing, running a bunch of Buck Rogers stuff through TSR because her grandfather owned the license and she was set to inherit it when he passed, drastically increasing the number of novels published by TSR, most of which ended up sucking and being sent back). Maybe just... TSR in general? Yeah, let's go with that. TSR did seem to foul up everything they did for years. I did like 2nd Ed in general, but I didn’t start playing until the revisions were introduced. I did take a shining to 3.0 & 3.5 though.
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chrom
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Post by chrom on Aug 7, 2022 15:59:48 GMT -5
Disney continued to slash the animation budget in the 80s which made Don Bluth quit in protest and went on to make The Secret of Nimh, An American Tail and others
It wasn't until The Little Mermaid that Disney regained it's title
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Post by James Fabiano on Aug 7, 2022 16:33:25 GMT -5
Disney continued to slash the animation budget in the 80s which made Don Bluth quit in protest and went on to make The Secret of Nimh, An American Tail and others It wasn't until The Little Mermaid that Disney regained it's title Ah did you watch the Black Cauldron video too?
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Post by Alice Syndrome on Aug 7, 2022 17:00:04 GMT -5
ITV Digital. "Hmm, how do we compete with Sky and their Premier League rights in the pay-TV market? I know, buy an inferior product for a price that we can't afford and hope to have as many subscribers as Sky do!" It went into liquidation less than a year after it was launched, leaving severe financial problems for the Football League teams who had budgeted for a fat TV contract that wasn't fulfilled. The irony is the consumers won, because without it Freeview would probably have flopped for years.
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Post by Alice Syndrome on Aug 7, 2022 17:05:41 GMT -5
Tumblr banning NSFW content. It can't be overstated just how poorly this went for everyone involved. To put it into persepctive, Yahoo bought Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars. When all was said and done, after the NSFW content ban, they would end up selling Tumblr to Wordpress for 3 million. That is a shocking loss on investment, even without accounting for inflation. Then there's just all the little ways they failed: The ban was put in place because they were taken down from the Apple Store for NSFW content. They were not put back on. They say they did it, in part, to crack down on porn bots. After the mass exodus, the porn bots might actually outnumber live users. And then there's the absolute political landmine that is the term "female presenting nipple", which was not only a misogynistic way of defining "explicit content", but also kind of transphobic. Oh, and then there's the fact that the filter didn't even work half the time, routinely flagging things that weren't explicit, occasionally things that didn't even involve bare human skin (I'm sure it flagged a close up of a dog at one point). Just a master class of thinking you know better than your userbase... at the expense of your userbase. The algorithm was also a learning algorithm, which as always, was coded by tech bros. Know what it picked up a lot of? Drawings with too much peach tones. Know what it picked up none of? The uncensored black on black porn that people kept spamming on their feeds for about 6 months to prove a point before Yahoo actually got the point.
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Post by Cyno on Aug 7, 2022 18:00:09 GMT -5
Another D&D-related one. Wizards of the Coasts' entire handling of D&D 4th Edition and the greedy business decisions surrounding it. A big part of what made 3.x and the d20 system in general was its open source nature. It really let third party creators stretch their imaginations in terms of what they could do with the base system so long as it wasn't stepping on Hasbro's trademarks like the settings unique to D&D and their other properties. They also had working relationships with publishers like Paizo for official third party magazines.
I won't go into the 4E system itself. But they didn't even do widespread beta tests for the system among the player base. Wizards' switch from the open SRD for 3E to the much more restrictive GSL for 4E also killed a lot of third party interest in the system and any elements that could've made for a fun alternate take on 4E in other settings. They also ended their relationship with Paizo. Paizo, seeing an opportunity for the disaffected people who wanted a better balanced, updated take on 3E and 3.5E instead of something completely different in 4E, started to develop a system that essentially was "D&D 3.75" in everything but name. That system became Pathfinder.
So all in the name of greed, Wizards burned bridges with third party developers, publishing partners, and a good chunk of its audience all in the name of greed. And in the process created their strongest competitor, one that actually became more popular than the current version game that it spawned from. 4E itself also saw minimal support in terms of supplements. A soft "4.5E" launch called D&D Essentials didn't help a lot either in making the game more popular or supported.
Wizards reversing course on most of the unpopular decisions that hurt 4E when they made 5E is all the proof you need on how badly they screwed things up.
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Mozenrath
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Post by Mozenrath on Aug 8, 2022 3:49:53 GMT -5
When have companies created their own biggest rivals? Nintendo did set the Playstation up due to falling out with Sony, but frankly, that was going to happen sooner or later given Sony openly coveted the Game Boy and its success, in particular, admitting they badly wished they'd thought of it first. In general, they were likely to get into gaming eventually, but Nintendo outright pissing them off certainly gave them a good time for it. Henry Ford and the Dodge Brothers' feud that began even while they were still shareholders in the Ford Motor Company is a good one. Even then, Ford correctly realized that the Dodge Brothers, frustrated with his resistance to move on from the Model T and lack of interest in their ideas, were using their dividends to build the foundations for their own, rival car company. Ford proceeded to intentionally try to damage the profitability of the company to get the brothers and other minority stock holders to sell their shares back to him to curb their pressure on him.
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Post by castletonsnob on Aug 8, 2022 4:43:25 GMT -5
When have companies created their own biggest rivals? Nintendo did set the Playstation up due to falling out with Sony, but frankly, that was going to happen sooner or later given Sony openly coveted the Game Boy and its success, in particular, admitting they badly wished they'd thought of it first. In general, they were likely to get into gaming eventually, but Nintendo outright pissing them off certainly gave them a good time for it. Henry Ford and the Dodge Brothers' feud that began even while they were still shareholders in the Ford Motor Company is a good one. Even then, Ford correctly realized that the Dodge Brothers, frustrated with his resistance to move on from the Model T and lack of interest in their ideas, were using their dividends to build the foundations for their own, rival car company. Ford proceeded to intentionally try to damage the profitability of the company to get the brothers and other minority stock holders to sell their shares back to him to curb their pressure on him. You think Sony entering the console race was inevitable? When did Sony say they wished they'd thought of the Game Boy?
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Mozenrath
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Post by Mozenrath on Aug 8, 2022 5:19:11 GMT -5
Nintendo did set the Playstation up due to falling out with Sony, but frankly, that was going to happen sooner or later given Sony openly coveted the Game Boy and its success, in particular, admitting they badly wished they'd thought of it first. In general, they were likely to get into gaming eventually, but Nintendo outright pissing them off certainly gave them a good time for it. Henry Ford and the Dodge Brothers' feud that began even while they were still shareholders in the Ford Motor Company is a good one. Even then, Ford correctly realized that the Dodge Brothers, frustrated with his resistance to move on from the Model T and lack of interest in their ideas, were using their dividends to build the foundations for their own, rival car company. Ford proceeded to intentionally try to damage the profitability of the company to get the brothers and other minority stock holders to sell their shares back to him to curb their pressure on him. You think Sony entering the console race was inevitable? When did Sony say they wished they'd thought of the Game Boy? With the kind of money involved? Definitely. Had they not done it when they did, they probably would have whenever Sega fell out of the hardware race. The Playstation contributed to that, but that, too, was likely inevitable given Sega's Japanese and American branch having zero cooperation and regularly undermining one another, along with throwing out too many products in too short of a time and competing with themselves as a result. I do not remember the exact quote, but Sony were kicking themselves because it was a masterstroke comparable to the Walkman, making entertainment portable and usable on the go, and they'd wished they thought of it first. Can't say anyone could blame them, as it was an enormously profitable venture for Nintendo and remains one of the most successful gaming devices ever released. Sony did try with the PSP and Vita, but for various reasons, they never could tap into what made the Game Boy work as an idea, nor catch up to the head start Nintendo had on them there with market share and brand awareness.
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Nr1Humanoid
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Post by Nr1Humanoid on Aug 8, 2022 8:13:36 GMT -5
NBC killing off the original Star Trek.
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