Business Regrets? They've Had a Few

There are many reasons why companies go thumbs-down on good ideas. Some of those reasons seem reasonable:

- By Bill Saporito. Illustrations by Barry Blitt

The idea doesn't align with the current mission, or it requires too much capital or manpower or too much of management's focus. Then there are the cases when the big bosses were perhaps not paying enough attention. Consider Thomas Edison, who briefly employed in his lab a fellow named Nikola Tesla. Tesla had come up with an induction motor for alternating current and suggested to Edison that it was a better source of electricity than Edison's own direct-current dynamos. Spare me that nonsense, Edison is said to have told the underling, in one of the most luminous miscalculations in business history. Let's revel in a few more.

Apple Tunes

In In the late 1990s, as mp3 players were beginning to bloom, an engineer named Tony Fadell had an idea for a line of digital music players. Fadell had worked for big consumer electronics firms, but had been kicking around Silicon Valley for a decade trying to develop his own devices, with limited success. He took his player to one of the digital music leaders at the time, RealNetworks, which was selling music over a network and balked at creating a separate personal music device. Nor were consumer electronics firms like Philips and Sony all that interested. Finally, he found some guy named Steve Jobs, whose computer company was desperate to get mp3 players hooked up to its iTunes app. Fadell figured he'd do some consulting to keep his own firm alive. He figured wrong. Jobs informed him: You're joining Apple and building this in a year. Fadell, like many others, apparently found Jobs as irresistible as he was irritating. Five years later, Apple sold its 100 millionth iPod.