StingingVelvet wrote on Jul 20, 2011, 13:55:
Remember however that corporations plan very far ahead.
Yeah... no. They SHOULD plan far ahead, but most don't from what I've seen. They take short term gains over long term far far too often.
If they did, then the music industry would have embraced the digital age and they could have had much higher profits than they have now from itunes. Instead they tried to sue digital music out of existence starting with napster. Instead of embracing a huge shift in the business model, they tried to stop it. Movie industry did the same thing when TV's came out, then when VCRs came out. In each case they decried the technology saying it would kill all their business. Were it not for a SINGLE VOTE in the supreme court, VCRs and probably many other technologies would be dead today.
Ever watch the timing on the big coupons and sales from dell? Its usually right at the financial quarter end, so they can show increased money coming in for the quarterly report, even if they take much less profit on that last bump. Short term gain.
Borders is shutting down with 10,000 people out of work because they didn't change and embrace the changing times with regards to ebooks and online sales.
Huge companies like IBM tried to keep mainframes a going concern, then tried to close off the PC market with proprietary hardware, and it almost killed them.
Intel was so in love with bragging about higher megahertz on the pentium 4, they stuck with that crap netburst architecture until they couldn't overclock it past 4 ghz and had to do recalls since they couldn't sell a stable CPU at that point.
MS was so intent on getting xbox 360 out early, they ignored warnings from employees about horrible hardware failure rates (up to 75%) and shipped anyway. Result? A multi BILLION dollar hit.
The game industry is rife with games getting forced out the door early for christmas season or whatever, then it turns out its unpolished and full of bugs.
Those are just a few things off the top of my head. Corporations don't plan ahead nearly enough, they just want the next quarter report or next annual report to show growth for stockholders.
This comment was edited on Jul 20, 2011, 15:33.