{"id":1702,"date":"2010-04-26T14:07:01","date_gmt":"2010-04-26T21:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bspcn.com\/?p=1702"},"modified":"2010-04-26T14:07:01","modified_gmt":"2010-04-26T21:07:01","slug":"the-8-dumbest-business-decisions-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/2010\/04\/26\/the-8-dumbest-business-decisions-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"The 8 dumbest business decisions ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Minyanville<\/a><\/p>\n

These dead-wrong determinations seemed like reasonable choices to somebody at some point. But time has exposed them as mammoth mistakes.<\/p>\n

Mistakes they’d like to take back<\/h3>\n

\"Dumb<\/p>\n

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes,” Oscar Wilde wrote. And so it can be said that business history has endured some tremendously embarrassing and shortsighted experiences.<\/p>\n

At one point, a Texas tycoon looking to buy a software company decided that a young Bill Gates was asking too much for his startup, Microsoft (MSFT)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In London, an experienced music executive felt that four young men from Liverpool, England, weren’t worth his record label’s financial backing.<\/p>\n

Ten years ago, the chiefs of two major media companies thought their fortunes would be richer if they merged their operations. They could not have orchestrated a bigger flop if they had tried.<\/p>\n

Click through the gallery to read about these corporate missteps and other business decisions that proved to be stunningly ill-considered.<\/p>\n

1. Buy Google for $750,000? No, thanks<\/h3>\n

\"Dumb<\/p>\n

Remember Excite? Formed in 1994 as Architext and relaunched as Excite the next year, it was meant to be the search engine to end all search engines. With funding from some of Silicon Valley’s top investors, the company went on to enjoy a highflying initial public offering after hiring a new CEO, George Bell, in 1996.<\/p>\n

Back then, there was nothing that dot-com stock couldn’t buy, and Excite, a company worth $35 billion, went on an acquisition spree with its riches. In addition to many smaller deals, it paid $425 million for iMall<\/a> and a whopping $780 million for online greeting-card company Blue Mountain Arts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But when two young Stanford University students came knocking, looking for someone to buy their nascent search engine so they could return to their studies, Bell would have none of it. In 1999, Google (GOOG)<\/a> founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered Excite their business for $1 million. Bell deemed it too high, and a second offer of $750,000 was also roundly rejected.<\/p>\n

Google is a $180 billion company today.<\/p>\n

And Excite?<\/p>\n

In the fall of 2000, Bell resigned as the company’s CEO. By the time the third quarter of 2001 rolled around, Excite’s stock price had fallen to $1 a share.<\/p>\n