#5

#5 35 Worst Decisions Made By Large Companies That Nearly, Or Did, Shut Them Down

Rubbermaid. Walmart made them lower their prices so much they went bankrupt. Someone bought the trademark. I believe Walmart is the reason lots of smaller companies went under in the late 90's early 2000's.

#7

#7 35 Worst Decisions Made By Large Companies That Nearly, Or Did, Shut Them Down

Netscape is a great example of why you don't just rewrite software from scratch. Was the most popular web browser and they decided the code was ugly and messy so they should rewrite it. After the rewrite, they realized the reason it was so ugly and messy before was because of all the bug fixes. The new release was buggy and the rest is history, now hardly anyone even remembers the name. I bring this up every time a software engineer wants to rewrite from scratch, because as ugly as code can be, it is usually on account of all the issues that have been fixed along the way.

#9

#9 35 Worst Decisions Made By Large Companies That Nearly, Or Did, Shut Them Down

I have to think about Toys R Us. They outsourced their online store to Amazon, who turned into their competitor.

#11

#11 35 Worst Decisions Made By Large Companies That Nearly, Or Did, Shut Them Down

Radio Shack trying to compete with Best Buy in bigger ticket consumer electronics rather than sticking to what they did best. I worked there in the early/mid 00s and you could feel the downfall as it was happening.

#15

#15 35 Worst Decisions Made By Large Companies That Nearly, Or Did, Shut Them Down

A radio station i used to listen to recently changed their format from 80% music, 20% talk show to 100% talk show. Then they were like “oh you can still listen to the music but it’s only going to be on our app.”

#17

#17 35 Worst Decisions Made By Large Companies That Nearly, Or Did, Shut Them Down

Schlitz beer once tried to increase their bottom line by using cheaper ingredients. Result: poorer quality (including a slimy mucus at the bottom of the bottles), which in turn caused sales to drop hard. They reversed back to the old ingredients, but the customer base never trusted them again, and Schlitz died off.

#19

#19 35 Worst Decisions Made By Large Companies That Nearly, Or Did, Shut Them Down

Smile Direct Club was pretty recent. Essentially from my understanding, an employee accidentally received an email of all the salaries in the company who then decided to forward it to the rest of the company. A lot of people realized they were getting underpaid and screwed over and essentially mutinied and quit. A lot of shady stuff started to get leaked as well and lawsuits were just piling up. They didn’t have enough workers to meet demand to overcome expenses and they just shut down a few weeks ago.

#21

#21 35 Worst Decisions Made By Large Companies That Nearly, Or Did, Shut Them Down

Not shut down but special consideration should be given to Xerox. They are the originators of both the mouse and the GUI interface every PC has been based on for almost 30 years. Both Jobs and Gates stole this technology.