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Product Launch Failure
Let’s be honest: it’s only human to get a kick out of the spectacle of powerful, infinitely rich companies making a disastrous entry into a splashy new field, like Google’s recent epic fail with Gemini Al. These are rare, special cases of plunging right over the edge, involving an unusually choice degree of hubris and corporate humiliation.
Thirty years ago, it was Apple’s turn in the barrel when it introduced Newton, predecessor of today’s tablets and smartphones. At the time, Newton seemed almost miraculous. To be fair, new products often don’t succeed, even when they aren’t paradigm-shaking novelties. Most of the time there’s nothing unusual, let alone disgraceful in that normal winnowing process. It doesn’t usually involve becoming an instant, media-wide, national laughingstock that spoils the launch of a Whole New Thing.
Back then, business people often carried Dayrunners, a trendy brand of totable small looseleaf notebook with calendars, notes, and contact info. Newton let you carry all that, reduced to the size of a paperback book and easily kept in sync with your desk computer. You could scribble notes to yourself, and—here comes the hangup—it could even read your handwriting. It was that one feature that led to ridicule, because Apple released it too soon after insufficient testing. Product designer Jony Ive joined Apple to revise the early Newton. A year later, handwriting recognition worked much better, but by then the PR damage had been done. After Steve Jobs’ return, he would keep Ive for every major product launch thereafter.
Newton’s main problem was it wasn’t networked. WiFi didn’t exist yet. When your 2024 smartphone does handwriting and voice recognition, it’s acting solely as a thin client; the work is done in the cloud and instantly returned to your screen. Newton, by contrast, had to do everything all by itself.
In retrospect, Apple’s big mistake was overpromising, with a pretentious ad campaign that implied a lot more AI than the little MessagePad could deliver. Newton’s basic idea wasn’t dumb. The proof was the late Nineties success of the Palm Pilot, a smaller, lighter, and cheaper Personal Digital Assistant.
My Newton, ready for an overseas trip in 1995.
Four years before the first Betamax arrived, more than a decade before Blockbuster stores would spread through our towns and cities, a U.S. company named Cartrivision released a domestically designed and built home video player. Unlike the handful of earlier attempts to sell home video recorders, this one had a specific marketing target and function: playing pre-recorded movies. Sold through Sears, Roebuck, & Company, the actual manufacturing was done by Packard Bell, a respected if second tier electronics company. Every Sears store that sold it also offered a fifty-film rental library of legal, licensed Hollywood feature films. No previous home video machine offered any.
This pioneering effort did things a little differently. Since most people didn’t live within daily driving range of a Sears, those rentals weren’t charged by the day, but by the number of viewings before a customer brought it back. (Each video cartridge had a simple mechanical counter, like an odometer. There were also a few cartridges for outright sale, mostly of the same kind of drearily cheap content that would later fill direct-to-VHS tapes.) The need to trade off rental tapes would bring customers back into the store frequently, which Sears liked.
It wasn’t a crazy scheme, but it didn’t quite work. Aimed at the top end of the market, for most of its existence Cartivision was available only as a built-in to “wideboy”-styled mahogany console TV sets for the living room. But the target buyers already had expensive color TVs, and didn’t need another console set. It also meant the huge, heavy sets wouldn’t be brought in for servicing, and few of the field technicians in the Sears service trucks had any training in fixing the moving parts of a videotape machine.
In contrast, when Sony came to America with Betamax, it too targeted a specific purpose: time shifting of broadcast programs. Just about any of the previous video recorders could have done that, but Sony was the first to make it the key to sales.
Often, the development period has been so long and expensive that the sunk cost fallacy takes over. That’s what happened to RCA’s incompatible, non-laser videodisc system; by the time it made it to market in 1981 they already knew it would flop, but after seven years of effort and $100 million, they couldn’t go back to their stockholders without making a valiant try. That four-year “try” wasted an additional $60 million.
In other cases, the product is stillborn, barely on the market at all. In 1951, it was CBS’s early form of color TV; a much later example is HD-DVD, the 2007 competitor of Blu-Ray. In 2012, Hewlett-Packard’s tablet computer lasted only 49 days before it was pulled. They all made it to the sales counter, but were almost immediately abandoned by companies that belatedly realized they weren’t going to win.
Most technological products become cheaper over time, but some have an intrinsic wall of high cost and limited demand that never fully goes away. Supersonic flight, Concorde style, never did enter a virtuous circle of becoming affordable. AT&T’s 1970 Picturephone, at a monthly rent of $100 ($775 in today’s money), couldn’t attract enough customers to make calling each other worthwhile. Color TVs, which started out three times as expensive as black and white, spent ten years as a niche for the rich that didn’t hit its 1955 sales goals until 1965, when they were only twice as expensive. But they doggedly hung around long enough to succeed, mostly because RCA, color’s chief developer, never gave up.
The failure of the Alto computer, invented a half century ago at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and a decade ahead of its time, was more than a simple case of lazy or overcautious corporate timing. What made Alto so unique, so advanced was its windows-icons-and mouse interface and its (relatively) high-definition bitmapped screen. At the time, fifty years ago, that required so many expensive silicon storage chips that the product would have been impractically costly. Then, a key breakthrough in cyber engineering allowed the computer to save most of that money by continuously, imperceptibly swapping parts of that screen image in and out of a smaller memory.
With the Alto, Xerox had a five-year head start on a workplace-capable, networked, windowing computer with a laser printer. But this is critical: they knew, they had to know it would be a rapidly depreciating asset. It was literally a case of use it or lose it. They didn’t use it in time, so, in one of the great what-ifs of corporate history, they lost it.
Apple’s nearly forgotten 1983 Lisa computer series preceded the Macintosh by a year, with much of the same system architecture—windows, icons, a mouse. The problem was a familiar one for groundbreaking new technology: it was way more expensive than planned. A well-equipped Lisa workstation cost about half as much as a car. From that point forward, the brand that once called itself “The computer for the rest of us” was twice as expensive as the computer for the rest of “them”—i.e., MS-DOS, later in the form of Microsoft Windows (with a capital “W’).
Sometimes it’s a problem of timing. The project is rushed to the market before it’s ready, like first generation fission power stations, the space shuttle, Newton, or VR headsets in the Nineties. Or it’s too late to reach the market, like Polaroid’s Polavision, instant (silent) home movies that would have rocked the Super 8 market in 1966. But when they finally appeared ten years later, they were overshadowed by truly “instant home movies”—video, with sound, on reusable tape. Sony’s Walkman cassette players were world-beating hits, but their much-ballyhooed 1992 follow-up, the MiniDisc, had a unique Sony recording format that didn’t have time to catch on before direct online digital delivery and storage (MP3 and Apple iTunes) took over from physical media.
At the other end of a particular technology’s birth, widespread adoption, and economic lifetime, there are often a few ideas, once novel, some quirky, that have had unpredictable staying power beyond the grave of obsolescence. Super 8 movies, vinyl records, vacuum tube music amplifiers, instant film cameras; hobbyists gave them ghostly afterlives, decades after their abandonment by the mainstream market.
Some costly corporate misfortunes are outright blunders, combined with, in many cases, infighting and ego. In the case of Google Gemini, it was wokeness, combined with willful blindness. To be fair, plenty of other bad product launches were normal misjudgments, combined with unexpected technical snags and plain bad luck.
Apple’s very recent cancellation of its decade-long, multi-billion-dollar pursuit of a practical self-driving car, is a rare, apparently laudable case of a megacorporation that prudently pulled back from the brink before taking that last, bet-the-entire-company risk of manufacturing and selling a vastly expensive new product. Even the world’s most successful firms are wary of the tricky transition between a promising idea that works in a lab and a commercially viable product for sale to the public.
One suggestion, though: if you’ve got a risky new product, don’t give it a too-easily-mockable name, like Edsel, Ishtar, or Gigli.
You don’t always know what, at the outset, will fail; on the other hand, you don’t always know when an established institution that seems to have been humming along practically forever is about to enter a failure spiral.
I recently opened a used book (Man Without a Face, 1997). After a lifetime of disillusion, Markus Wolf, Communist east Germany’s coldly brilliant spy master, spells out fifty different ways that he helped the DDR state cynically betray the cause of socialism. Nonetheless he couldn’t resist ending his postwar tale with a defiant dedication to Marx:
A demain, Karl! Until tomorrow.
Now, if that’s not a chilly ending, I don’t know what is.
Published in General
But that’s still a video CASSETTE recorder. Says so right on the front. And it uses cassettes, which is another clue.
This one is a VTR:
Better than regular AM, but not as good as FM. FM came along a little later.
I thought FM was invented in the 30s. But I guess it took a while to catch on.
FM was invented by Edwin Armstrong, once a pal of RCA-NBC boss David Sarnoff before they went splitsville over Sarnoff’s momentous decision to prioritize television over FM radio. Sarnoff made Armstrong remove his equipment from NBC’s floors of the Empire State Building’s radio transmitter section.
Apex, being, in effect, an AM higher definition system, had some of the improved music quality of FM, though unlike FM it was more subject to static and fading. Best of all, from RCA’s point of view, it didn’t require the Armstrong patents.
I’ve actually got one of those in my living room!
The cassette machine in Occupant’s comment is indeed a 3/4 U-Matic. The one in the picture is full tricked out, Game Day, broadcast quality mode.
The 1971-ish U-Matic for the home was a lot smaller and more practical than the Cartrivision scheme, but it was still the size of a suitcase, weighed 55 pounds, and cost the present day equivalent of $12,000.
Ahh, but the lack of static is SOOOO important…
It was color. And 1975.
Memories can be unreliable. However, as our studios were tricked out with large open reel video tape recorders (1” U-Matic?) and consumer video cassette recorders barely existed, I’m fairly sure we called any video tape machine a VTR. I was not a tech person, I was a reporter/writer and part time weatherman.
That was us traveling around Europe in the early 1980s.
I have 100s of VHS tapes still. My machine broke so my sister gave me hers. It amazes me how happy we were with crappy video, but then I remember how amazed I was the first time I saw an HD TV. Now I take it for granted.
I was amazed when my cousin showed me his calculator. It could add, subtract, multiply, AND divide.
When I had my first staff job, 1990, we had to do a lot of briefings to and for generals and colonels. Slides were done on computers then printed on white paper. Once approved, we took them to the AV building, grabbed a plastic sheet for each one, ran them through an ammonia process machine to print on the plastic, then returned to the office to mount them on the cardboard frames. The cardboard frames already had a plastic slide that had blue trim and the organization’s logo. A year or so later, PowerPoint came out and simplified our lives a lot…to a point. Generals then felt free to change things and even seemed to be trying to one up each other in productions.
The last major briefing I did for a general was in 1996. My 8th AF general had to brief the Centcom commander in Tampa. He told my partner and me to go with him on the Lear Jet. I thought it would be an interesting jaunt. Nope. He sat on the 2nd row and had the crew turn the first seat around so I faced him. He spent the whole flight reviewing his paper copy and making edits. When we landed, he and the generals went off for lunch while staff there were tasked to help us make the changes. We loaded the slide show, made changes, printed each changed page, made copies for everyone attending, then replaced all the old pages in each copy. We were just finishing placing the copies in each place at the table when they arrived. Briefing was a success and my general left happy. He never knew that when I started following the briefing with my copy, it was a clean copy. Somehow my marked up copy was placed at one of the spots on the table. The whole briefing I sat up straight and tried to spot it. Never did. Then we flew home, having had no lunch.
Once the offices had them, we had to have at least one with a shoe-box size removal hard drive that had to be removed and stored in a safe.
I still have all those cables.
Our first stereo system had a reel to reel, cassette, and turntable. it was a sad day when I took all our reel to reel tapes to “the dump” and pitched them when the player died. DVDs were the in thing. I still have my cassettes but haven’t used them in years. I need to pay Legacy Box to digitize so many of my family videos. Still have a rarely used iPod. I use the old iPhones as iPods now. Heck, I have an Apple IIE and floppies boxed up in a cabinet. Other forgotten items: wired keyboard, wired mouse, digital camera, Atari, CB radios…
After the EMP attack, I will still be able to sew. I have a treadle sewing machine carefully disguised as a lamp stand.
I got rid of a lot of VHS tapes a few years ago, probably over 1000, when I could verify that I had all of their contents in digital form. (And I mean clean digital form, such as recorded from satellite TV, not by copying/transferring the tapes.) Not many left now, just some movies that haven’t come out on dvd yet/ever, and the Letterman show from when he moved to CBS up to the end.
Some similar memories of mine are in the first comment at https://ricochet.com/948695/jim-steinman-rip
And now I also have a bunch of CB radios etc. Plus Marine VHF. I was thinking using VHF Marine band far inland would be less likely to be spied on/monitored.
That was the Diazo, or Ozalid machine. The two names are anagrams of each other. At my first assignment I used one everyday – I did thousands of over-head slides. Ours were composed by hand drawings or paste-up processes.
After that first assignment I never used one again. The ammonia could be very unpleasant, especially if one forgot to shut off the supply to the machine overnight. I don’t think anyone misses those things.
We changed over to ribbon transfer printers, or even dye sublimation prints on transparency if cost was not a factor, like for generals.
A couple years later Powerpoint arrived, and about the same time, video projectors. Those were life changing.
Animators use something similar to transfer drawings from paper to cel (sheet of cellulose), where the line outlines will be hand-painted in.
Disney first experimented with the technique with “One Hundred and One Dalmations” circa 1961.
Same here. Bought my rig at the Rhein Main Radio Club.
We had a word processor, I think it was a Wang. Because it was not TEMPEST certified, we had to take precautions so the Soviets couldn’t record the key strokes.
Butcher paper charts and acetate map overlays were my mediums.
In High School, our Public Speaking teacher was very new. She insisted that the reason that TV was so much later than radio was that “It was very difficult to get the pictures to keep up with the sound”
In a sense, she was totally right. That is exactly the difference. Analog pictures needed something like 500 times either the time or the bandwidth to keep up with audio. Like we say with the cubic inches of car engines, there is no replacement for displacement.
Of course, nowadays, digital “tricks” of bandwidth narrowing make the old rules irrelevant.
One of the droll ironies of the Cold War: from the late Seventies on, both Soviet and Western intelligence agencies bought their higher quality surveillance gear from the very same place: the shops at Frankfurt Airport while they were passing through town.
When I joined the conservative American Cinema Foundation in 1997, its offices had once been part of that pioneering office computer company. The lease was a fantastic deal. But it meant that potentially supportive social conservatives arrived for meetings in a conference room whose translucent welcoming wall was carved out with foot-high letters that said W A N G .
Silent movies.
A subset of the NBIs were TEMPEST certified. In addition, in the late 1970s/early 80s, NBI was the only word processor capable of inputting, editing, displaying on the screen (including the Greek characters), and printing, scientific equations in technical documents. As a result, NBI pretty much owned the defense industry/government contract business, of which there was a fair amount in Pittsburgh back then–Westinghouse, Rockwell, etc. In those halcyon days, there were a few customers whose accounts I couldn’t enter, owing to the fact that I had a green card. I remember a day when I was the only support rep on duty, and a serious problem occurred at Westinghouse Bettis (Atomic Power Lab). Normally, I’d never have been allowed within a mile of the place, but they took me in, under guard, so that I could fix the problem, then made sure I departed forthwith.
Another interesting account was the US Personnel Management Operations Center up near Slippery Rock, PA. I was allowed in there. You’d follow the directions you’d been given (there were no signposts, and no GPS in your car at the time) into a field in the middle of nowhere, and you’d suddenly find a large hole in the side of a hill, and a slope, down, down, down. At the bottom were enormous iron gates, and a man in a steel cage who’d look over your documents and reason for being there, would make sure you knew the way, and then–if you passed muster–would hand you a hard hat and a fire extinguisher, open the gates, and let you through into a vast expanse of old limestone caverns. There were no visible people, only doors with numbers on them (you had to know which numbered door you were looking for.) That was always a fun trip. AtlasObscura has a little more about the place, here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/office-of-personnel-management-retirement-operations-center
The sign on the door says NOFORN. You can’t go in there!
@jameslileks, is your “Post Of the Week” still a thing? If so, I second the nomination.