Wank a Company, or Industry

[Deleted member 145219]

Take a company, or industry, that you are fascinated by, and rewrite it in a way that is dramatically better than OTL.

I'll do the American Steel Industry, followed by Railroading in the North East.

 

[CourtlyHades296]

Nintendo decides to have the N64 use CDs, resulting in Capcom and Square sticking with Nintendo instead of going to Sony. Thus, they come out on top in a heated battle of the fifth gen.

 

[The Banker]

watching out for this thread

 

[SodaMan1996]

Steak 'n Shake expands nationwide in the 1960s and '70s.

By 2010, it is the 5th-largest restaurant chain in the United States, with locations in 48 states (AK and HI being the only states without a Steak 'n Shake).

Also, Biglari never takes over Steak 'n Shake.

 

[CalBear]

Please use the Post-1900 Misc. thread for these sorts of WI.

You need to actually start a discussion not just ask a question or issue an AH challenge

Miscellaneous >1900 (Alternate) History Thread

It is often the case that people on this forum have miscellaneous or frivolous questions that could be easily answered by the many experts on this forum but are difficult to find the answer to on Google Scholar/Books or Wikipedia because they don't often deal in alternatives. There are other...

www.alternatehistory.com

Locked

 

[Derek Jackson]

LEO Lyons Electric Office, a cafe chain who had a good computer syytem,

 

[Mildtryth]

Please use the Post-1900 Misc. thread for these sorts of WI.

You need to actually start a discussion not just ask a question or issue an AH challenge

Miscellaneous >1900 (Alternate) History Thread

It is often the case that people on this forum have miscellaneous or frivolous questions that could be easily answered by the many experts on this forum but are difficult to find the answer to on Google Scholar/Books or Wikipedia because they don't often deal in alternatives. There are other...

www.alternatehistory.com

Locked

Did you unlock the thread or something? I mean, i remember it being locked a couple of days back.

 

[MKD]

Railroading in the North East.

Looking forward to this. I don't think the ECML can carry anymore services and still allow freight on the section between Northallerton and Newcastle. What are your views on increasing services along the Durham coast because of that lack of capacity ? Would you invest in reopening the Leamside? The whole line or just the northern part for metro? Would you upgrade Stillington at the same time?

Do you have any suggestions for new services/destinations? Personally the lack of direct services from Yorkshire/NE to Glasgow is a bit of gap

Oh, hang on, you mean in America ;-)

 

[Mike D]

There's a few British companies that could have rivalled Amazon for the home delivery market in the UK if they'd taken a risk on it in the early internet days.

Argos, Index (remember them?) or Littlewoods (Index's parent company), maybe even Woolworths or John Lewis. They were all big enough to have taken a punt on home deliveries ordered through a website in the late 90s/early 00s.

 

[MKD]

Seriously - I would like someone with knowledge to set out a plausible scenario for British Steel (making) to continue.

 

[The Byronic Hero]

Nolan Bushnell decides not to sell to Warner Bros. (He was having doubts up to the sale). The VCS remains a success, but Nolan wants to continue pursuing a new system and technologies in order to keep ahead of the jackals. He treats the programmers better than Warners did keeping many in house who would, instead, leave (No Activision, etc.). He still pushes Chucky Cheese to sell arcade games; though his idea of reusing cabinets by changing the motherboards is initiated reducing the cost of units to arcades. With many programmers staying in house, you don't see the immediate creation of third party delaying the glut of crap games. Nolan decides to license the Famicom as a next generation system for Atari in the mid 80s as well as using profits to push the Atari computer. Atari dominates gaming and, to a degree, computers into the early 90s.

 

[GJohn902]

Sears becomes the first major retailer to offer online shopping starting in the mid-1990s, basically bringing their long-standing mail order catalog to the Internet. With their prestige in retail, a wide variety of products available, plus their large chain of nationwide stores doubling as pickup and return centers for their online shopping service, Sears becomes the dominant online retailer by the late 2000s, with online sales easily surpassing brick-and-mortar sales.

Flush with cash as online retail sales (and profits) soar through the 2000s, Sears even buys up a few other fledgling companies along the way to boost their offerings like online bookseller Amazon.com and online home video rental service Netflix.

 

[Karelian]

Nokia sees the potential of Johannes Väänänen and MyDevice, and steals march from Apple by developing the first viable touchscreen smartphones.

 

[Deleted member 145219]

Looking forward to this. I don't think the ECML can carry anymore services and still allow freight on the section between Northallerton and Newcastle. What are your views on increasing services along the Durham coast because of that lack of capacity ? Would you invest in reopening the Leamside? The whole line or just the northern part for metro? Would you upgrade Stillington at the same time?

Do you have any suggestions for new services/destinations? Personally the lack of direct services from Yorkshire/NE to Glasgow is a bit of gap

Oh, hang on, you mean in America ;-)

Yepper.

I'm going to focus primarily on a No Penn Central scenario. I've tossed around the idea in my head of the expanded Nickel Plate Road in which the Van Swerigen Brothers and their Allegheny Corporation combine the NKP, C&O, Erie, and several smaller roads into a larger fourth system. But when you consider they could not pull that off in the 1920's of all years, it seems close to ASB.

So no Penn Central it is.

 

[JaguarCD]

In a situation with no World War II, light novels do a lot better and even penetrate the young adult market for audiences that could be called that in the 2000s to today.

YA novels intended for children (and/or adults and an audience of everyone in general) are probably dominated by Americans writing them.

 

[ramones1986]

Outside Manila and Cebu, broadcasting industry in the bulk of the Philippine archipelago didn't actually started until World War II, the most anomalous is in Zambales and Pampanga, where the respective American naval and air bases were located; I thought of an earlier introduction of broadcasting in the rest of the country in the rest of 1920s and most of 1930s.

 

[connorCD]

No/a more muted Comics Code could probably keep the comics industry more diverse for a while longer and prevent the oversaturation of the superhero genre.

 

[Fulano]

Damn, that's too many for me. At least in the IT industry.

BlackBerry, if they knew how to capitalize their first successful years in the smartphone era and managed to adapt in those post-iPhone years.
Nokia, if they knew how to capitalize their dominant position in the pre-smartphone era and understood their old phones were already in their last days.
Commodore International, if Jack Tramiel put more focus on the personal computer side of the business instead of being busy selling calculators.
Be Inc, if Apple made the deal with Jean-Louis Gassée instead of Steve Jobs, thus BeOS becoming the base for the new Mac OS instead of NeXTSTEP.
Seattle Computer Products, if IBM made the deal with Gary Kildall instead of Bill Gates, thus CP/M becoming the main OS in the IBM 5150 instead of DOS (PC-DOS).

 

[Nivek]

Nolan decides to license the Famicom as a next generation system for Atari

No a chance the reason why that happened is that kassar after the failure of the 5200, growth a hate to Atari engineers and wanted a hardware not made by them. If Bushnell retains Atari and put an IPO (something he wanted but thought the sec was a hassle) that is butterflied away.

No/a more muted Comics Code could probably keep the comics industry more diverse for a while longer and prevent the oversaturation of the superhero genre.

Iirc even the fraud (as he falsified his data) Friedrich Wertham only wanted a rating system like the movies

 

[The Byronic Hero]

No a chance the reason why that happened is that kassar after the failure of the 5200, growth a hate to Atari engineers and wanted a hardware not made by them. If Bushnell retains Atari and put an IPO (something he wanted but thought the sec was a hassle) that is butterflied away.

Kassar doesn't exist here; he came in with Warner's and only assumed control after Bushnell's ouster. Nolan has gone on record about the difficulty of an IPO and how issues both professionally and personally affected his decision to sell to Warner's. Running a separate "competitor" also created issues. The VCS was going to do well, regardless, and he was in the process of absorbing his competitor which would resolve financial strain. His divorce at the time also nearly derailed the acquisition. Keep the deal from progressing, let Atari become flush with cash that Christmas, and Nolan has a leg to stand on.

Nolan was excellent with programmers so him staying on negates that problem; they all knew things were turning when Kassar made it clear he had no idea what type of industry he was delegated.

As to technology, Nolan constantly saw his competitors as a threat which is why he was constantly pushing for newer technologies and ideas and would not support the crap that slipped through. He also established connections in Japan and Nintendo greatly respected Atari, believing they could be a partner for their American ventures.

It could have happened.