Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Hard to disagree but in both cases it's easy to see why those seemed like good decisions at the time. I can't believe that grayed out text ever looked like a good decision.
Barry
|
Agreed.
Xerox management was taking care of business and their business was printing and copying. PARC was a blue sky outfit and they invented lots of things Xerox had little use for and never bothered to lock up. It was a different time, patent-wise.
Blockbusters is harder to defend but they probably thought that their B&M ubiquity was superior to the three-five day mail delivery cycle. Short term thinking led them to believe quality online video was further off than it really was. Not hard to see when you consider that online rentals first hit the mainstream via gaming consoles (XBOX 360 followed by PS3) rather than PCs. NETFLIX library model was something entirely different from discrete movie rentals and it came later so it likely wasn't discussed at the time. (Of note, shortly after NETFLIX started their subscription service, Microsoft tried to buy them. No longer for sale at any price.)
Hindsight is 20-20 as they say, but B&N doesn't have that defense. Most of their missteps were questionable from day one. Like supporting generic ADEPT on the ereader but not the store. A headscratcher to start with, fatal when they hit decline.