Blackberry is a mobile phone brand which at the peak of it's success had a 43% market share in the smartphone industry. The company started failing in 2016 when it lost its dominance in the market to Apple. In January 2022 blackberry decided to stop supporting it's iconic operating system on older models.
Nokia is a mobile phone brand which is infamous for its keypad phones. At its pinnacle nokia had a 51% market share and was valued at 300 billion dollars. Nokia failed as it could not keep up with the rapidly changing demands and the rising popularity of touch phones. This failure to innovate caused Nokia's downfall, and its smartphone business was sold to Microsoft for a mere 350 million when compared to 300 billion at its peak.
Kodak was truly one of those companies that people though were "too big to fail". Kodak is an American company that manufactures and sells various products related to photography. Kodak's end came from greed and ignorance. During its peak in 1996 the company was worth 31 billion dollars and had a two third market share in the industry. It's refusal to adapt to digital cameras (as they thought it would affect their film making business) and not innovating their products enough are some of the reasons to kodak's fall.
Theranos was an American healthcare company created by a 19 year old elizabeth homes in 2003. The company claimed to have made breakthrough discoveries which included bring able to make hundreds of blood tests with a single drop of blood. Ultimately all these claims proved to be false and the company once worth 9 billion dollars at its peak and made the world's youngest self made billionaire, failed.
Sears is an American departmental store chain which once upon a time was the biggest retailer in the world. Sears was so big that its revenue represented 1% of the United States economy with two thirds of the Americans shopping there. Fast forward to 2018 Sears filed for bankruptcy and was down to just 50 stores from 3500 in 2010). The fall is mostly credited to failing in finding the target demographic.
Lehman brothers was America's fourth largest investment bank until it filed for bankruptcy in 2008. The firm collapsed with the fall of subprime mortgage market. Lehman had acquired several lenders and when the market collapsed they couldn't pay back their debt which led to them filling for bankruptcy.
Enron was an American energy, commodities and service company. Enron is seen as one of the biggest failures of the corporate world and a role model of how a company should not be run. Enron's business strategy was to privatise the energy sector and sell electricity much higher than it should. This caused massive protests in various countries resulting in some deaths too. The end of Enron was in 2001 when the US government realized the greedy tactics of the company and put an end to it. As a result 28000 employees became unemployed and over a billion dollars in pension funds were lost.
Myspace is a social networking site that was popular in the early 2000s. During 2005-2008 it was the most popular site it the world even surpassing Google at one point. At its peak it was worth 12 billion dollars. It failed in the later years due to high competition from facebook and other sites combined with heavy spending and an inconsistent product.
Yahoo once upon a time was the world's most popular site. Even though it is doing fine now, Yahoo was on its way to become the biggest company back then. Yahoo is also called the "mother of bad luck" because of its poor business decisions and now serves as a case study in business schools. One of the major mistakes it did was failing to acquire Google on two separate occasions. Yahoo was finally sold to Verizon for 4.83 billion dollars.
The biggest failure in the history of businesses would probably be blockbuster. Today blockbuster serves as a case study in Harvard business school. Blockbuster's demise started when it refused to innovate into the growing tech world. It refused to buy Netflix stating that the price was too high, and was a bit too late to adapt to the streaming services. Today blockbuster has one store remaining in the whole wide world, down from 9094 stores in 2004.
