Ten catastrophes: All-time worst tech industry executive decisions

From zdnet:

Information Technology, software and computer companies are certainly not without their share of poor executive decisions and mismanagement. While dozens of notable examples could have made our list, these were by far the top top 10 worst in the history of the technology industry, causing many billions of dollars of lost revenue or resulted in the downfall of entire companies.

In no particular order:

• John Opel, IBM: Not buying Microsoft during the PC-DOS/MS-DOS negotiations / Gary Kildall, Digital Research, not licensing CP/M to IBM
• Adam Osborne, pre-announcement of next Osborne computer
• Lew Platt, Hewlett-Packard: Entering Itanium Partnership with Intel and discontinuing processor fabrication operations for PA-RISC and Michael Capellas, Killing off the DEC Alpha
• Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard: Compaq Merger
• Steve Ballmer, Microsoft: Windows Vista Project Mismanaged
• John Sculley, Apple Computer: Throwing out Steve Jobs
• Darl McBride, SCO: Attacking Linux
• Steve Case and Gerald M. Levin: AOL / Time Warner Merger
• Jerry Yang, Yahoo!: Refusal of Microsoft Acquisition Offer
• Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard: Penile Priorities mixing with company business/Leo Apotheker: TouchPad development and Infanticide, Hewlett-Packard

To see the full detailed article on each blunder, click here.