What Killed off the Giant Brands? – Part 2

Posted On 2019-01-29

The history always repeating itself!

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.

If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.” ( Chuck Palahniuk -Survivor)

As promised, the second part of What Killed off the Giant Brands ? is here , Hope you will enjoy & your kind comments and thoughts will be greatly appreciated.

1. Dell: is an American privately owned multinational computer technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell had a different idea, “Cut out the middleman and sell directly to consumers”. When the Internet arrived, Dell took off and competitors got whiplash trying to keep up with its skyrocketing sales.For more than a decade, it has been trying to break into almost every major electronics market, but it has less than nothing to show for it. With the PC market rapidly changing, Dell is now in danger of falling far behind. Dell stopped selling its last tablet & has finally discontinued sales of its Venue and Venue Pro Windows Phones. This is especially sad news because a little more than a year ago, Dell spent millions to move 25,000 of its employees from BlackBerry to the Venue Pro. So what happened?
2. No adaptation to the changes, Dell only speaks PC!
3. MP3 Project failed: Dell attempted to compete with the iPod beginning in 2003 with its Digital Jukebox and Pocket DJ devices, but failed to capture more than 3 percent of the market by 2006, when it decided to call it quits.
4. Release, fail, repeat! They didn’t learn from their mistakes!

• BlackBerry:There was a time when the primary mode of business communication was BBM & it was the phone to have in the mid- to late-2000’s (in 2007 it had more than half of the market-share of phones in the US.) The very first device to carry the BlackBerry name was the BlackBerry 850, an email pager, released January 19, 1999.The primary competitors of the BlackBerry are smartphones running Android and the Apple iPhone smartphone. BlackBerry has struggled to compete against both and its market share has plunged since 2011.BlackBerry’s global user base (meaning active accounts) has declined dramatically since its peak of 80 million in June 2012, dropping to 46 million users in September 2014 & also during the report of its third quarter 2015 results on December 18, 2015, the company said that approximately 700,000 handsets had been sold, down from 1.9 million in the same quarter in 2014, and down from 800,000 in Q2 of 2015. So the fatal mistakes were:

1. Being Super Overconfidence and ignoring everything & everyone!
2.  Lack of innovation, New products were so boring!
3. Enterprise interest was falling & they didn’t get it!
4. BB App World was a ghost town & developers hated making BlackBerry apps.
5. Pick the fight that you can win,They got head to head with Apple for no reason and lost their focus. below is BB TVC and Apple retaliation!

• MySpace: Was a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. From 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009.As of May 2014, Myspace was ranked 982 by total web traffic, and 392 in the United States. As of April 2016 the ranks were 1985 and 1747,correspondingly. So what went wrong?

1. Facebook saw what Myspace didn’t! People needed to connect on more than one level not just random bands trying to get signed.
2. MySpace, like everyone else in 2004, wasn’t sure what would make a social network click.
3. Sudden Management Shifts Suggest Desperation.
4. They decided to act as a middle man by adding functionality of allowing users to push photos, status updates, links and videos out to a Facebook profile or page, and also Twitter. This is basically Myspace undermining its own relevance, admitting that its social features are worthless and that its competitors are superior.
5. Myspace became a Den of Ill-Repute! For years, the site has been nearly synonymous with sex crimes, including pedophilia and rape. For example Myspace evicted some 90,000 sex offenders from its site.

” They Knew that the END WAS NEAR!!! “

Here is one graph showing  Myspace trend:

Now here is that same time period with Facebook included:

• YAHOO! : In January 1994, Yang and Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University when they created a website named “Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web”. The site was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In March 1994, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was renamed “Yahoo! The “yahoo.com” domain was created on January 18, 1995. Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s & by 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users. Yahoo stocks closing at an all-time high of $118.75 a share on January 3, 2000. However, after the dot-com bubble burst, it reached a post-bubble low of $8.11 on September 26, 2001. So what was Yahoo’s biggest mistakes?

1. Not buying or licensing Google’s technology in 1998, in 1998, Google’s two young co-founders approached Yahoo when they were making the rounds for backing in Silicon Valley. They opened the door to an investment, licensing deal or an outright acquisition of the duo’s technology. But Yahoo wasn’t interested.
2. Paying billions for Broadcast.com in 1999,While Yahoo’s 1999 acquisition of Broadcast.com for $5.7bn didn’t kill Yahoo, it is arguably one of the worst-timed acquisitions in tech M&A history, and one has to wonder how the ill-fated acquisition impacted Yahoo in subsequent years.
3. Not buying Google in 2002, Yahoo had the opportunity to purchase Google for $5bn in 2002. It was the last chance to acquire Google.
4. Hiring Terry Semel as CEO!!! Yahoo’s second CEO, Terry Semel, is the worst tech CEO in history. He received $489.6 million in total compensation during his six year run at the company.This jaw-dropping reminder of how much money Semel was paid to run Yahoo into the ground. He is among 25 top paid executives of public companies over the last decade.
5. Not buying Facebook ! Yahoo was nearly able to acquire the popular social network in 2006 for $1bn but due to a faltering stock price, Yahoo lowered its offer to $850m, allowing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to walk away from the deal.
6. Rejecting Microsoft’s buyout offer! In 2008, the Redmond software giant, eager to compete with Google, was willing to pay $44bn for Yahoo, but thanks to what many considered gross incompetence, Yahoo’s board rejected the offer.
7. Failure to buy DoubleClick! a few months before Google bought DoubleClick for $3 billion, Terry had an agreement to buy it for $2.2 billion. For whatever reason, however, Terry failed to sign on the dotted line.

” Terry Semel & Yahoo founders “

This is the end of part two!

Iman Soltani