Businesses are always on the move and the inability to move with it is simply failing. Businesses are not a roller coaster also, they can be fun for a whole lot of people. A lot of businesses have failed over the years due to the fact that they failed to adapt to changes while others failed due to lack of management and other effects. Some businesses failed very fast in public while a few others failed slowly but swiftly.
What do you say about Blackberry and Nokia? They were the kings and queens in their time with Nokia ruling in the 90s and black berry in the early 2000s. Nokia’s failure for due to the slow movement to during the internet boom. Nokia stayed on calls and maintained their logo “connecting people” but in connecting people, we aren’t saying calls only but everything that could involve connection. Their slow movement into the changes in the internet gave room for products such as Sagem, Samsung, Motorola and other companies that were interested in the internet to take over the market. Blackberry on the other hand believed in their uniqueness both in their software, they selling chat BBM and their keyboard look that they were not willing to adapt to other new changes when the android OS version came out and Whatsapp started to change the game of messaging.
Steve Sasson a Kodak engineer in 1975 brought digital photography to the Kodak executives but it was turned down as Kodak leadership were scared of losing their current position in the market due to a new product and didn’t see potentials in digital photography. Soon after digital photography became a thing and Kodak had to adopt some 17 years after but they were out of market already and had to file for bankruptcy in 2012. In January 2020, Kodak reappeared again and their share price spiked in NYSE, this maybe because of their vision to lunch a new crypto currency called Kodak coin.
Segway, a company that was believed to bring innovation to the world of transport with its Segway scooter product will become something used at airports and by tourists. The company failed to make it clear what the scooter was for and this made it difficult for people to know where to take a ride in the Segway scooter. The police had doubt about rider’s safety and thought it should be used on pedestrian lanes, pedestrians thought it was not meant to be used between people walking but rather should be on the road or in streets. You could read more about Segway’s failure in my post “The Segway Story; A failed Innovation”
Yahoo being a god in the early dotcom days, was valued at $125 billion and were on of the major players in online advertising, mailing and messaging with the yahoo messenger but soon Google took over the market and created similar tools Yahoo had but didn’t capitalize on like the yahoo briefcase which is overtaking by Google drive. Yahoo also refused to buy Google in 2002 as well as let go of a deal with Mark Zuckerberg after lowering the price to buy Facebook from him which he refused to sell. Failing to capitalize on opportunity brought Yahoo down.