Top 10 bad IT decisions

2. Apple losing Steve Jobs
Shaun Nichols: Through much of the 1990s it seemed that Apple could do nothing right. Stifled with a dated and unreliable operating system and under assault from cheaper Windows machines, the company was nearly killed off by one fizzling product after another.

Those woes, however, can arguably be traced back to a single decision: the removal of Steve Jobs. In 1983 Jobs himself brought John Sculley on board. Two years later, Scully convinced Apple's directors that the company had outgrown Jobs's erratic ways and moved to push the company's co-founder out of the business.

In the following years Apple would experience a fall from grace that would only become fully apparent 10 years after Jobs's departure. A former Pepsi executive, Sculley was unable to keep up with the rapid pace of development in the computer market and by the mid-1990s the company saw sales and profits take a dive.

With Apple on the ropes in 1997, Jobs returned only to find the firm on the brink of bankruptcy. Perhaps as a testament to the failures of the old regimes, one of Jobs's first moves was to halt development on nearly every new project and overhaul the company's entire product line. The rest is history.

Iain Thomson: Jobs lured Scully from his old job with the line "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" He certainly changed Jobs's world.

If I'd been on the board of directors of Apple at the time I'd probably have got rid of the annoying little git as well, given his penchant for meetings that began early or ended past midnight. Jobs is not a good person to work for, although he is an excellent person to serve if you are so inclined.

That said, Scully really should have hired people who knew what they were d oing after ousting Steve, and Apple's death spiral could only be halted by the return of the king. I just hope they know what to do the next time Jobs can't show up for work.

1. Digital Research
Iain Thomson: Very few companies are fortunate to know the precise moment of their peak. In the case of Digital Research it was when IBM came knocking.

IBM needed an operating system for its first PC and didn't have time to develop one itself. So it went to discuss purchasing a licence for CP/M, the leading operating system of the time and sold by Digital.

Negotiations didn't go well, due to IBM's notoriously strict non-disclosure agreement which totally gagged Digital while allowing IBM full use of whatever was discussed. On the advice of its legal team they declined the meeting. Luckily the chairman of IBM knew Bill Gates's mother and Microsoft was happy to sign because it saw the bigger picture.

In a way the final deal was a tipping point for two companies, not one. Digital saw Microsoft's code on the bulk of the world's computers, its competitive operating system drowned in numbers and not supported by Microsoft.

But for IBM it was also a tipping point. The company had just handed over control of the most valuable bit of the deal. It's understandable, as IBM at the time was all about big iron computing and that was insanely profitable at the time.

But the software industry, or at least a few people in it, saw that you could still make plenty of money by building something once and then copying it and selling millions of copies at almost no extra cost. Microsoft showed the world just how much that could be.

Shaun Nichols: Think for a moment about just how different the computing industry, and the world as a whole, would be if the Digital Research founder Gary Kildall hadn't baulked at IBM's disclosure demands. Perhaps Digital would be the biggest company in the business and Bill Gates would have be toiling in obscurity as a niche software developer. Without Windows does Apple become the dominant provider? Or perhaps Commodore and Amiga take over the market?

While it now looks like an epic missed opportunity, without the benefit of hindsight it's an understandable decision by Digital. Rather than pay royalties IBM was said to be looking to pay out a single lump sum, and who could have known that the PC and DOS would take off the way it did?

Unfortunately, the deal was never made and the saga with IBM and Microsoft haunted Kildall until his untimely death at the age of 52.

As Iain noted, the deal was also a turning point for IBM, though I think it was bound to happen sooner or later. The company has all the savvy and precision of a well-oiled machine, and when it comes down to it they want little to do with the low-margin PC sector. Ironically, outside its server efforts, IBM is now for the most part a software and IT services outfit.