ATARI Failure What happens when a company focusses only on performance, profit and increasing their share price and neglects the health of the business in terms of the people it employs? As an example of a business that did just that, Atari was founded in 1972 by an engineering graduate from the University of Utah, Nolan Bushnell, and shot to fame and wealth with much loved games like “pong”. Bushnell worked at a pinball arcade to pay for his studies, and this is where his inspiration to put computer games into an arcade format originated. His first attempt at launching an arcade game called ‘computer space’ was not met with great success. Bushnell attributed the failure in part to the fact that it was the world’s first arcade game but also …show more content…
He developed the well known and loved ‘Pong’. Rumour has it that Bushnell never intended to take ‘Pong’ to the arcade market but just wanted Alcorn to ease into games design with something simple. In fact, the end product was an extremely fun and much more realistic game than Bushnell expected and he felt compelled to test it in the arcade market. It proved to be so popular that patrons of the tavern where it was initially installed opted to queue outside before the pub opened, just to play the game! There was a legal dispute over the rights to ‘Pong’ with a company called Magnavox, who claimed they had come up with the idea prior to the release by Bushnell. As the developer Ralph Baer had in fact patented his idea for the ping pong game and licenced it through Magnavox, Bushnell cleverly decided to pay a flat fee to utilise their licence. This freed him from paying royalties, and also meant he never had to take any of his competitors to court for infringing on patent …show more content…
Atari was finally sold in 1998 for a mere $5 million, yet the gaming market around them grew from strength to strength, and continues to grow today, so what went wrong for Atari? If you look at it in terms of the performance vs. the health of the company it is evident that under the leadership of Kassar he was focussed only on performance in terms of output and delivery whilst completely neglecting employee and company health. To be successful and sustainable it would then be fair to say that a company should value performance, in terms of financial and operational returns as well as health, in terms of its ability to align, execute and renew itself faster than the competition. Getting and staying healthy as an organisation means looking after all the people aspects. Whilst we do believe that Comair values performance and health equally, our question then is why is there a disconnect regarding employee buy-in into Comair’s Employee value proposition, which was developed to encompass both these factors, and how can we make the