4 ms·

Good leadership wouldn't have turned around MySpace. Sometimes, it's too late.

• colmvp 11y ago
  On the flipside, sometimes it seems like we rely on hindsight bias. Would we still be talking about Apple in 2015 if Jobs hadn't come back? Or Tesla if Musk hadn't taken over as CEO in 2007? Both companies had significant uphill battles. And if you had the foresight to imagine Apple in 2015 back in 1997, you're probably a rich man. Just hypothesizing but imagine if MySpace had focused its industry connections in the music industry to focus more on music instead of social networking, and pushed for an on-demand music streaming player for mobile and desktop. They had millions of dollars in the bank and a head start in the U.S. market over Spotify and Rdio. Or imagine if Blockbuster video had either taken up Netflix's offer to be bought out or had invested in online streaming long before Netflix. I'm not saying it's easy or always viable or that luck doesn't play a role, but I often think we discount the potential for a company to still exist today because the only outcome we know of is the outcome that happened rather than the potential of alternate decisions.