Example of Company who passed up on Major Invention or Idea?

Question

Can anyone provide examples of well known products or ideas that were rejected initially but turned out to be successful?

Answer 1

WANG Laboratories, formerly WANG Computers didn't develop Word Processing software for PCs. Instead they imagined people would want to do word processing on terminals made for that specific purpose.

The original company went bankrupt in 1992.

Answer 2

Trivia Pursuit, the board game, was invented by a couple of Canadians in a place called Niagara-On-The-Lake. They tried for years to get funding from local people/businesses. When they couldn't find investors in Canada they went to the US and now, Trivia Pursuit is the mega-game we know today.