Here are the ten worst cock-ups in the history of the electronics industry. The UK has had its fair share of them, and two of them came from one UK company - GEC.
Closing Elliott Automation and Marconi-Elliott Microelectronics
In 1971, Lord Arnold Weinstock closed down the UK's only two volume chip-makers just as the IC industry started to become significant both in its own right, and as an enabler of electronic systems.
The $5bn Iridium satellite constellation which was touted by Motorola as a global wireless operator. To the surprise of many, when the service was offered, it turned out not to work indoors. The manufacturers said they'd known this all along. Obviously they assumed it didn't matter. The constellation was sold for a pittance.
Japan's Fifth Generation Computer
An attempt in the 1970s to develop an artificial intelligence computer using massive parallelism.
Rabbit
The Rabbit wireless telephone system in the UK which could make calls but not receive them.
For inventing nearly everything (i.e. WIMP - windows, icon, menus, pointing devices) and exploiting nearly nothing.
Ferranti buying International Signal and Control Group
The purchase caused the demise of Ferranti when it transpired that International Signals' sales came mostly from illegal arms sales.
The world's first digital telephone exchange but so over-specified by BT that no other country except the UK would buy it.
Japan's ill-fated general purpose microprocessor.
GEC betting the company on telecoms
Lord George Simpson's strategy of turning GEC into a telecoms company called Marconi, which ruined a £15bn revenue company in a few years.
Lernout & Hauspie's $1.5bn acquisition spree.
In 2000, the world's top speech recognition company (investors Hitachi, STMicro, Intel and others) spent $1.5bn buying Dictaphone and Dragon Naturally Speaking. The following year L&H was bankrupt, ScanSoft bought most of L&H's assets for $39.5m, and the founders went to jail
I still reckon IBM agreeing to license MS-DOS when it could probably have bought it outright was a top ten contender.
Bally,
I think it boils down to semantics. It was a mistake. It was a terrible decision. But was it, truly, a genuine, copper-bottomed, Cock-Up?
To me, a Cock-Up means an attempt to do something and making a major hash of it.
IBM really did very well with their PC project. They standardised the entire planet on their architecture.
Along the way they majorly screwed up on not buying the OS when they could, I agree, but does that decision rightly fall under the definition of Cock-Up?
I'd agree with Bally.
To qualify as cock-up it should be a conscious decision (not just an industry trend), and it should have dire consequences.
On both counts, IBM's decision was a cock-up: it nearly bankrupted IBM (first as people stopped buying mainframes/micros, secondly as they bought Compaq, HP or Dell instead of IBM). The fact they have sold the PC business to Lenovo says it all.
The decision was a good one for the world, but not for them.
I'd suggest this replaces Rabbit. That was one company but there were actually four licencees.
And you could say that although the product bombed, it was still a good decision for Hutchinson as it helped them succeed brilliantly with Orange.
Well Roberto you've made Bally happy. We've argued about this at some length and he's glad to have an ally.
Faced with such formidable opposition, I give in, and officially declare Rabbit out of the top ten, and that IBM's decision not to buy MS-DOS is a top ten cock-up.
Best wishes
David
Ha - vindicated at last. Thanks Roberto.