Did Kevin O'Leary once wipe out an entire industry?
When business TV personality Kevin O’Leary – one of the stars of the ABC hit show Shark Tank –made these comments last month, they triggered a mini-media squall, ratcheted up when he said he was considering running for the leadership of the federal Tory party.
If O’Leary was not jesting about investing in Alberta’s beleaguered oil patch – now reeling from crude falling to about $30 a barrel – should it accept his money? After all, one of the less well-publicized charges leveled against O’Leary is that he once helped destroy an entire industry.
In this case it was the educational software sector of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Back in those days, O’Leary was president of the world’s second-largest consumer software company, The Learning Company (TLC) Inc., before he helped sell it to Mattel, Inc. in 1999 for (US) $3.6-billion – where it immediately crashed and burned, devastating this once-flourishing business. “It killed the educational software industry,” says Bernard Stolar, a legendary figure in the video game industry with leadership roles at Atari, Sony and Sega before Mattel hired him to try and rescue TLC after O’Leary was fired. “It basically killed it. It killed it because there was so much product out there and all of the product was crap.”
Doug Carlston, co-founder and former CEO of Brøderbund Software Inc., a major, San Rafael, CA-based educational software and gaming company during the ‘80s and ‘90s, says the demise of TLC accelerated the collapse of the entire sector. “Most of the rest of the (educational software) industry went away,” he says, “pretty quickly.”
Charles Tyros, who worked at TLC as a reseller in Boston, MA, says there were more than 200 companies selling educational software products prior to TLC’s collapse. Afterwards, he says, “there were not many left after two or three years: there were very very few of those same companies.”
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