Neopets, Sears, and Other Missed Opportunities

[Moonface]

I'm mostly making this thread because I wanted somewhere to talk about how badly I think Neopets missed an opportunity to modernise itself to have remained incredibly relevant and popular on todays market instead of being...whatever state it is in nowadays. I just went to their website and it seems they finally woke up to updating their site to work on mobile, although to what extent I have no clue because the announcement banner about their mobile update takes you to a generic changelog page where I'll be damned if I can find any actual proper announcement of their mobile update.

Whatever that place is up to, I still think they really missed a chance to jump onto current trends when they were hot out the door. For example, if Flash wasn't dead I can bet their games would still be running entirely on that platform and no work would be made on converting them to HTML5 or anything that runs on mobile, because they could and should have worked on making their entire site work on mobile years ago. Their whole idea is basically suited to being given mobile support. Your pet needs feeding? Push notification. The giant omelet has refilled for you to take a new slice? Push notification. I remember how predatory it was back in the day about not neglecting your pet, and ethics aside that sort of guilt tripping would thrive on push notifications for mobile devices. Maybe some day they'll add all of that stuff, but I don't think it'll reap the level of success it could if it was done five or ten years ago.

Neopets aside, the only other company I know as a standout story for missing the boat is Sears. I'm not super versed in them because they were an American only company but from what I know they were basically Amazon before Amazon, just without the online store side of things that Amazon provides nowadays. I've heard that if they had moved their catalogue online they could have beaten Amazon to the punch, but instead decided to stay stuck in the past until it was too late and now they're completely dead. I don't know if they would've stopped the rise of Amazon outright but they would've probably been able to carve out their spot in the online market and hold onto it by establishing themselves before any competition would appear.

What are some missed opportunities that you guys know of or think happened for companies or products?

[Mr EliteL]

I didn't even know Neopets are still going, how the heck are they even? I don't even want to know actually. Yeah I did play on Neopets for a bit back in the day, was weird how they refused to have mobile support and kept doing whatever they were doing. I can't what made me pull away but happy I did.

I'm not sure what were other missed opportunities from any other company/product, if I did happen to come across it at some point, it left my mind just as quick I guess.

[Moonface]

I didn't even know Neopets are still going, how the heck are they even? I don't even want to know actually. Yeah I did play on Neopets for a bit back in the day, was weird how they refused to have mobile support and kept doing whatever they were doing. I can't what made me pull away but happy I did.

I'm not sure what were other missed opportunities from any other company/product, if I did happen to come across it at some point, it left my mind just as quick I guess.

I know that everyone here who was into Neopets back in the day all collectively bowed out at roughly the same time because of something I found and posted on EGF about it that was pretty negative about it. I'll have to see if I can find the post. I only recall it was something posted because I was at one time talking about making a Neopets forum on there and then quickly stopped any work on it because of what was found. I won't be surprised to discover what we found was just all bullshit that we bought into because of our ages.

Another one I know that happened was when Yahoo was offered $47 billion by Microsoft to be purchased and they turned it down. 8 years later, Verizon would purchase the company for a mere $4.83 billion. I say mere in the sense of comparing it to the original offer. While both are still huge sums of money, that's a hefty loss of value in 8 years. XD

[Karo]

There are so many of them I know K-Mart is one of them that made a stupid decision they didn't keep their store updated and decided to pick up a dying company and thus dooming themselves.

[Moonface]

@Karo: I didn't watch the video yet but I did look up the company on Wikipedia to get a quick rundown, and saw they were owned by the same company that owned Sears. Considering that Sears didn't adapt to the times I'm not surprised that K-Mart suffered a similar fate.