BlackBerry has been in the middle of a turnaround for the past two years and just ousted a bunch of executives earlier this week. They aren’t the only ones that have failed to find ways to turn around a floundering tech giant.
Bet the company on a product that isn't in your company's DNA.
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Remember BlackBerry?
Beginning in January 2012 when CEO Thorsten Heins took over, BlackBerry essentially bet the company on a touchscreen smartphone powered by a new BlackBerry operating system called BlackBerry 10. The problem, however, was that much of the phone was cobbled together from pieces of software that weren't actually built by BlackBerry, and the phone had little to no popular apps when it came out — leading it to be a complete flop that cost the company nearly $1 billion, and Heins his job.
Ignore major changes in your core market.
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Dell, formerly one of the most prominent tech companies in the world, basically missed out on the memo that the entire PC market was collapsing as the iPad and other tablets gradually ate away at it. The result: Dell finally went private last month in order to navigate a tricky transition to becoming more of an enterprise services company than a PC maker.
Hewlett-Packard is also in a similar boat, though its enterprise services are a bit more fleshed out and the company is still publicly-traded under the leadership of new CEO Meg Whitman.
