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.