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Comment by paraschopra | Hacker News Reader

8 pointsparaschopra14 comments

New Coke indirectly made the company TONs of money. Before New Coke, cane sugar was used as sweeteners (expensive). They used high fructose corn syrup in New Coke and caused everyone to "hate" it. When they released Coke Classic, they used the old formula, but kept the corn syrup. Because people had become used to the taste, they did not notice the difference. This allowed them to considerably lower the cost of the materials.

There's a lot of urban legends about New Coke that are along these lines, but they're not entirely accurate:

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp

In addition is was a genius marketing move. People who hadn't had a coke in years suddenly remembered that they were HUGE coca cola fans and rallied to get it back on the market.

When classic coke went on the market, sales were way higher than they had been before the switch. It was a smart move.

"bright ideas that just didn't work out"

I'm pretty sure foursquare, farmville, hydrogenated oils, auto-tune, tanning beds, plastic grocery bags, and some other stuff on that list are still 'work[ing] out.'

DDT was a fantastic invention for combating malaria. Great invention, terrible application thereof.

Especially in light of

a.) the zillions of Chinese farmers who died from replacement insecticides that were actually bad for you right now, as opposed to in 20 years.

b.) the return of Malaria as a disease that kills tens or hundreds of thousands each year, from its state of "not really an issue anymore" in the DDT era.

Oh look, Time uses Tynt.

Pontiac Aztec is probably the worst invention on the list. But why is Betamax there? I thought it was a viable format that just didn't win.

Betamax was technically superior to VHS, but VHS won because its cheap, permissive licencing earned it the crucial network effects that made it the default platform. (Incidentally, you could say exactly the same thing about MS-DOS.)

Also, VHS traded off longer runtime against higher quality, while Betamax traded off the other way. Turns out people don't like switching cassettes in the middle of a movie.

From the article:

> Betamax wasn't so much a bad product as a lesson in marketing gone awry.

Which means it wasn't a terrible invention at all. So again, why is it on this list?

It's quite impressive that one guy managed to invent two of the entries on that list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.

He invented tetra-ethyl lead and CFCs.

I'm happy to pay 50 centimos for a pay toilet in Lima. They're pretty clean.

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