Is the Quick Death of Failed Tech Products a Good Thing?

Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, HumanEmulator writes "The NY Times reports on how the Hollywood summer-movie business model is being applied to tech products: 'Every release needs to be a blockbuster, and the only measure of success is the opening-weekend gross. There is little to no room for the sleeper indie hit that builds good word of mouth to become a solid performer over time.' New products are being pulled from shelves only weeks after a lackluster release. What if the TouchPad, the Microsoft Kin, or even Google Wave had had more time on the market? Is this blockbuster-or-bust model a good thing for consumers, or for the industry in general?"

Comments

It's an investment strategy

[plover]

I knew a guy who started .com companies like popcorn. His business plan was the same for all of them: be successful enough until someone bigger buys you out. His goal was to work for a year at trying to get a thing going, then sell it for a couple million dollars for that short duration that it would be hot. Most of these things were very transient. They were unknown a month ago, on the rise a week ago, popular today, and by next month they probably wouldn't even be a memory.

I think these big companies learned their lessons. They tried over and over to pump money into these little concepts that never had longevity as a part of their plans. They bled red ink.

So if they don't see that initial wave, they're cutting the bleeding off now before they pump additional useless money into a concept that never will make it. It makes financial sense.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[mwvdlee]

Either I don't understand you, or that doesn't make any sense.

Companies cut off product that don't have immediate success because products that have immediate success tend to have no longevity?

Re:It's an investment strategy

[m50d]

Because products *in general* tend to have no longevity, as far as they're concerned.

dotcoms have taught us that however big a product is right now, it could be dead in two years. Companies deduce from this that future value is worth nothing.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and there were guys who said that the Gasoline automobile would never catch on, too noisy, to gimicky and that gasoline stuff was down right explosive. They were just plain dangerous.

It took a few years and some smart investment but the dang thing finally caught on.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

The post says that they won't invest in something without immediate success because of lessons learned that showed little or no ROI in longevity.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because *one* example succeeded, automatically all idiotic schemes will. Got it!

Re:It's an investment strategy

[elrous0]

Ha, I remember back in 2000, before the first internet bubble burst, Leo Laporte was talking about Dialpad on Screensavers. When he explained how it gave long distance calling away for free, Patrick Norton asked him how they make money. Laporte laughed and said "Oh, nothing on the internet actually makes *real* money." That pretty much sums up the first internet bubble in my memory. You make your millions from investors and your IPO, then worry about the actual business model later.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[tepples]

Companies deduce from this that future value [of a product] is worth nothing.

So why do they keep pushing for ever-longer terms for the copyright in a product if the value of that copyright is nothing?

Re:It's an investment strategy

[insertwackynamehere]

It's also the second one except that investors know how to cash in (advertising). Still, the creators aren't thinking in terms of real money though, just cool ideas that attract a userbase. The money should sort itself out if there is a userbase that is significant.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[TWX]

Yes, because *one* example succeeded, automatically all idiotic schemes will. Got it!

No, but some "idiotic schemes" will succeed, even if the vast majority don't. Look at the personal computer itself. In the first hobbyist, non-kit computers came out in the mid seventies, and various other hobbyists worked on their own over the years. Xerox got interested but not enough to release a finished product, and Apple, IBM, and Microsoft all got involved. IBM bowed out, Apple almost died several times, and Microsoft became the Evil Empire, but the PC ultimately took off despite all of the suits who claimed no one would ever want one and there would be no use for them.

Now, it'll be up to history to decide how much we've wasted versus gained by the widespread adoption of the PC, but sometimes cockamamie ideas will take off and will cause revolution.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Penguinisto]

That's easy - in case someone else actually does make it into something useful and long-lived. Nobody wanted that generic photo of Obama as candidate until some guy ran it through a photoshop filter, slathering it in red and blue colors... all the sudden it became a hot property. The original photographer, now seeing that there's a chance to make some dosh off of his work, immediately launched a lawsuit.

That said, I think you're conflating creative products (movies, songs, books, etc) with physical products, which generally do not have a copyright. OTOH, they have patents, which, as we've seen lately, can be damned profitable in themselves, even if the original product that used them never really went anywhere.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[anyGould]

Companies deduce from this that future value [of a product] is worth nothing.

So why do they keep pushing for ever-longer terms for the copyright in a product if the value of that copyright is nothing?

Because the copyright is more valuable than the product itself. No-one will buy the product, but the copyright prevents anyone else from doing it either.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[tepples]

That's easy - in case someone else actually does make it into something useful and long-lived.

Except I've seen that some companies are often more willing to decline a given use entirely than to offer a licensing arrangement.

I think you're conflating creative products (movies, songs, books, etc) with physical products, which generally do not have a copyright.

Creative products are often sold fixed in a physical product (DVD, CD, printed book, etc).

Re:It's an investment strategy

[geekoid]

"That's easy - I'm wrong"

there, fixed it for you.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[hedwards]

Which is only the case if you've got incompetent MBAs running the place. But I repeat myself, only an MBA would think that way, which is why if I ever own a company I'm not going to be hiring any of those incompetent jack asses to help manage the place.

Tech products are a bit tricky because often times they're completely useless if they don't hit critical mass, cue cat anybody? However, those sorts of products are generally easily spotted, for things that don't depend upon having a large install base to function there's no particular reason to pull the plug so quickly.

That being said, for things like MS' Kin which only sold about 5k units, if that's all you're managing to sell in even a week end, especially following an ad blitz, it's probably best not to waste money on something that's failed. Best to just take the lessons learned and try again.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[hedwards]

And at some point it's going to hurt folks with a real idea. I remember being burned by iwantsandy, I can understand needing to find revenue sources to pay for the cost of providing the service, but not giving the community a chance to pay or even giving any indication that he was about to fold operations was damaging to future attempts at doing that sort of thing. What's worse is that at the time of notice there wasn't an export utility nor were there any promises of one until folks raised a stink about it.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[gl4ss]

it's throwing 1 billllliiiiiooon dollars into something that was done with couple of million a decade ago. you start going through the numbers in excel and realize you've been had and you paid many billions for linux with sdl.

add to that a pre-built support organization, that you built needed you it or not because it was in the manual, also having acquired a very, very expensive organization to go with that linux with sdl and couple of default apps. that's what makes sleeper hits impossible, hard to justify the on-going expenses and scaling down something that's "absolutely necessary" is pretty hard.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies deduce from this that future value is worth nothing

Companies don't need to deduce this -- it's built into the DNA of the corporate model.

Companies with shareholders are legally required to maximise short term shareholder value. This means that long term thinking is becoming less and less important to the decision makers, leading to the whole exonomy becoming very impatient with failure.

It's getting to the point where no-one is willing to spend money now unless they're virtually guaranteed to realise a return on the investment within a year or two. In the fast-moving tech industries it's even shorter. That's why these products are being pulled so quickly.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[m50d]

It's mostly Disney doing that, and they know they can make money off their back catalogue (partly because they're selling to children and there's always a new generation of those). More generally, a lot more people are willing to buy content from e.g. the '80s, than want products from then.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Moryath]

No, dotcoms have taught us that products designed to be a fucking flash in the pan will - surprise surprise - be a goddamn flash in the pan.

PHBs and cro-magnon MBA types wrongly have decided that this applies to every product, whether designed well or not. You know the type I speak of: the ones who don't know what all this "fire" stuff is really good for and are busy focus-group testing the wheel to figure out how many corners it should have and whether it should come in black, brown, white or mauve.

The sort of morons who in the entertainment industry, destroy smart and intelligent shows like Futurama, Firefly, Dresden Files, and Eureka while simultaneously letting Tyler Perry make movie after movie and greenlighting the latest piece of shit "ow my balls" level reality show or sitcom about rednecks fucking their sisters while getting into a love triangle with the neighbor's dog. ... crap. I just gave the Fox producers another show idea didn't I?

Re:It's an investment strategy

[ILongForDarkness]

Not to mention at some point there will be so many large sites out there that it will be hard to get enough of an audience to use a advertising revenue model. There is only so much marketing money out there and it is by definition a faction of companies budget.In my mind if your product provides real value than people should be spending real money on it even if it is larger than their marketing budget.

Back to physical products: quick death not so sure. Processes to build them could be used elsewhere and companies need to be able to keep things around long enough to find a product that can use the components profitably without giving up on each innovation as soon as it isn't an immediate success. Hence the need for patients.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[bws111]

But the article is not about concepts or classes of products, it is about individual products. The people who said those things about the early automobiles were correct - no matter how many years those particular cars stayed on the market, no-one was going to buy them. People came out with DIFFERENT products that addressed those issues, then the idea caught on.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Kashgarinn]

Investment strategy?

Sounds to me more of an investment trap. i.e. you try and blow things out of proportion to try and gain more money until it's time to run off with the cash.

Good things start from evolving from small beginnings as a good basic idea, that's the true start of great things.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

PHBs and cro-magnon MBA types wrongly have decided that this applies to every product, whether designed well or not. You know the type I speak of: the ones who don't know what all this "fire" stuff is really good for and are busy focus-group testing the wheel to figure out how many corners it should have and whether it should come in black, brown, white or mauve.

I think you'd get a kick out of this video for MC Frontalot: First World Problem. Features cro-magnons, a dot-commer, and what should happen in pretty much the exact scenario you describe.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

You know the type I speak of: the ones who don't know what all this "fire" stuff is really good...

Of course. Everyone knows we need to determine if people want fire that can be nasally fitted before it's taken into production, and then it's marketing's juob to get it sold no matter how useless it is.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Moryath]

Well I was somewhat referencing the Hitchhiker's Guide radioplays, but they are a tad obscure...

Re:It's an investment strategy

[tomhudson]

Companies with shareholders are legally required to maximise short term shareholder value.

[citation required]

Counter-citation

Everything Old is New Again: Lessons from Dodge v. Ford Motor Company

M. Todd Henderson

University of Chicago - Law School

December 2007

U of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 373

Abstract:
There is much more to Dodge v. Ford Motor Company than meets the eye. Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule protects many decisions that deviate from this standard. This is one reading of Dodge. If this is all the case is about, however, it isn't that interesting.

But Dodge is a part of the corporate law canon because it is about much more than this. This essays shows that what the Michigan Supreme Court did was actually an elegant solution to a complex legal and policy issue. The history of case and the parties also shows how many prominent aspects of corporate law and practice have long and under-appreciated histories.

Henry Ford failed twice as an entrepreneur before finding success with the Ford Motor Company. His failures, which he blamed on meddling investors, presaged not only his conflict with the Dodges, but also show the importance of allocating and exercising control rights deftly. The history demonstrates how modern techniques for allocating control rights separately from economic rights would have helped the parties avoid costly and acrimonious litigation. Perhaps most interestingly, however, the back-story of the case shows that it is not clear at all that the parties wanted to avoid litigation. Both the Dodges and Henry Ford used the legal process as a tool in what was at base a business dispute. To paraphrase von Clauswitz, litigation is business by other means. The history of this case provides a prototypical example and also shows an example of how courts can resolve disputes well in these cases.

This essay also shows how practices common today in venture capital transactions, corporate reorganizations, and other areas of corporate law and practice appear vividly in the back-story of this case. Many seemingly new ideas are not, and examining their historical roots can help us better understand them and their place in our modern understanding of corporate law.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 39

Keywords: corporate law

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes ideas need to cook a bit longer though. Dodgeball got bought by Google and shelved. The founders somehow managed to reform it as 4square without getting in trouble. The CueCat scanner was an obvious fiasco; but now you have those pixelated blobs that people scan with smartphones.

I'm not suggesting that the CueCat guys should have stuck it out. There were plainly way too many years between the idea and a practical implementation. OTOH, Dodgeball could probably have done well with the proper care. Of course a lot of these things have their peaks. I haven't heard too much about 4square lately. The buzz seems to have died down a bit. It might be past peak...

Re:It's an investment strategy

[hitmark]

I think may be pandering to the stock market, as the modeling neoclassical economists apply there assumes that high risk equals high returns. Except that their models are about as real as D&D is medieval...

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well.. partly right. But you still didn't understand him.

Tech is, largely, a short-lived product life. Something newer and better tends to come along and replace whatever you're selling.

So companies cut off product that don't have immediate success because products that don't will be displaced by better products before they have time to become successful.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[hairyfeet]

Sadly I can answer that first one, greed, greed to the point of stupidity greed.

I should know because a friend and I had an idea for what I thought would be a neat little product...DOSBox...In a box. It would have been a flash stick with a preset and configured DOSBox loaded up with games, you'd have a shooter stick, a puzzler stick, platformer, variety pack, you get the idea. We were also gonna avoid the games everyone already has ways of running easily, your Wolf3Ds and Dooms and the like and concentrate on the offbeat and the quirky.

So what happened? Simple half the games when we started researching are forever lost in a no man's copyright land where the company has changed hands so many times nobody has clear rights to squat, but the worst was the second category, where we would find games with a clear title and the owners would want more than when it was new because "We might want to do something somewhere sometime with it". We are talking games that could be bought on eBay by the crateload for $5 and the assholes are wanting 30% of the gross!

So if you want to know why the bastard Valenti made sure copyrights were "forever minus a single day" it was so greedy pricks could lock huge chunks of our history up, either behind paywalls or just to let it rot until they could find a way to "maximize the profit potential of the IP" which is of course never.

Our little idea wasn't designed to make iMoney, hell we would have made maybe 3% profit after BOM and throwing some back to the DOSBox guys, we were doing it because we loved classic gaming and wanted to make it easy for the younger generations to try the games. Instead most likely the games will never get re-released on squat, simply because of the greed and endless copyrights. if I there is a hell I wish Valenti a nice spot in it, the sorry piggish fuck.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[gorzek]

You wanted to profit off of other people's games and were then upset that they wouldn't let you--or rather, you were unhappy with the terms under which they would permit it. So, why not sell it without games or with some FOSS games instead?

I hope you hadn't invested much in developing it, considering you hinged its success entirely on what third parties would charge for the games you wanted to include.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Penguinisto]

You can of course prove it so, instead of merely trolling?

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Anonymus]

"Our little idea wasn't designed to make iMoney, hell we would have made maybe 3% profit after BOM and throwing some back to the DOSBox guys, we were doing it because we loved classic gaming and wanted to make it easy for the younger generations to try the games."

Re:It's an investment strategy

[gorzek]

So? The point was, the project couldn't go forward unless it at least broke even, and from the start it was destined to be a net loser because of licensing.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[hairyfeet]

The problem with the Kin was it was targeted at the wrong group. they tried for the hipsters, which already were quite happy with the iShiny. you DO NOT target a product at a group that has one of the highest satisfaction ratings of all time that is seriously fucking dumb. What they SHOULD have done is targeted it to the tweeners and teens, the groups that can't afford an iShiny but would like to stay connected.

If you were to give me the kin today i could make it a hit. would it be an iShiny hit? Fuck no, there is only one WoW. And THAT is the problem. Just as too many MMOs all want to be WoW too many OEMs want to be the iShiny and anything less they consider massive fail. so they target the iShiny crowd, get their asses handed to them on a plate, and then give up.

Like I said give it to me or anyone else who knows you can't be WoW and you'd have had a profit making product. I predict the same uber fail for WinPhone, simply because yet again they'll go for the hipsters and yet again they will get slaughtered when compared to the iShiny. It is like trying to sell the Mustang to Ferrari owners, it is just fucking DUMB.

Want to win against iPad? Do a Dell. 1.4Ghz single core ARM, 512Mb of RAM, 4Gb of flash (with MicroSD support) and sell the thing for $8 over cost, which would put it at about $159. Use the profits to buy up a sweetheart contract for dual core ARMs and make the second generation duallies for $199. Massive hit, pads everywhere.

Would you make iPad profit per unit? FUCK NO because a lot of what sells Apple is the name and history, same is if you sold a Ferrari knockoff you ain't getting shit compared to a Ferrari, even if you made one so damned identical someone on the assembly line couldn't tell the difference. Again everyone wants to be WoW, when they can't make WoW profits they roll over and die.

Just goes to show why China will win in the end, companies like Lenovo are quite happy to take those 6-8% profits, whereas if it isn't making double digits and climbing per quarter the "damn everything but the quarterly reports!" MBA fuckheads here in the states will call it a complete loss. HP had a BOM of $318 which is too damned high, but if they would have sold it for $350 they could have had a solid seller if not iShiny money, but that simply isn't good enough here anymore, it is iShiny or bust. That is why they will fail.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[hairyfeet]

Wow, talk about not getting it. Would you happen to be an MBA? The WHOLE POINT was these were games that hadn't been sold in over 20 years which means they were earning ZERO PROFIT understand? None, zip, zero, nada.

Now someone comes along and tell you something you are making ZERO MONEY from could actually earn you some money? Do you say "sit down and lets talk turkey" or do you say "I want 35% more than it cost new, just cause I'm special" as in Special Olympics?

As I said we were planning to make MAYBE 3% for ourselves after licensing and throwing some back to the DOSBox guys, but the sheer douchebaggery of those with games earning ZERO PROFIT would have caused the price to be around $200 A STICK. I'm serious, games that sold for less than $5 at the bargain bin they wanted more than a AAA game for. That isn't profit that is sheer dipshit stupidity. And now they are making ZERO PROFIT again. Wow, that was smart, I wonder why China and other countries that don't deal with this bullshit are kicking our asses, it sure is a mystery.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[gorzek]

I guess you didn't "get it," either. :)

You don't own the rights to those games. They do. They get to set the price, and by asking for an exorbitant sum, it's just their way of telling you, "Fuck off, we're not interested."

They have no incentive to license an old game at a cheap price to a hobby product, when they're better served holding onto that property so it can be sold en masse for millions of dollars with a bunch of other properties. They're thinking big, you were thinking small.

Did they miss out on some money there? Probably, but I suspect not much. The harsh truth is that it would likely not have been worth the lawyer fees on their side to go through with it unless you were paying a handsome sum.

I don't know why you use China as an example, considering their strategy is to just make poor-quality knockoffs of everything and pay little or no attention to anyone's IP rights. Certainly that's a recipe for innovation and success.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[aix tom]

Of course they not really "own" the game they have a "copyright" on it. "copyright" that was intended to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", so that IN THE END the product that is created winds up in the thing we call "culture".

If all the Grimms fairy tails had still be copyrighted, and the Grimms descendants hat wanted Disney to pay exorbitant licensing fees, what movies would Disney have made?

Nowadays most stuff that gets created just vanishes into never-to-be-seen-again copyright black holes. AT LEAST "copyright" should be coupled with a "copy obligation", that everybody requesting a single copy should be able to get a single copy at the last suggested retail price from the copyright holder, or you lose the copyright.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[aix tom]

Most of the "Failure" in history also provided valuable hints and ideas to the things that then became the big success.

So back then you had perhaps 90% failures and 10% successes.

These days, once there is even a hint of one of the 10% successes happening, it will immediately be sued into oblivion by the 90% failures, so that less and less successes actually make it.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[aix tom]

Of course, there is always the Benz example, that it simply might take a while and a specific example to make a product successful :

He finished built his first "production" car, the "Benz Patent Motorwagen" in January 1886, after over fifteen years of development. He build three of them, and sold none.

It wasn't until two years later, when his wife Bertha took one of them without telling him and went for a 120 mile round-trip to visit her mother that people actually realized "Hey, this funny thing seems to actually work" and started buying like crazy.

The same could be true today. Some thing like a tablet on the marked for month, no large sales, then suddenly some other guy that tinkers with it creates the killer use case. (Of course it can't really happen, since things are too locked down to actually thinker with them)

Re:It's an investment strategy

[hairyfeet]

Bimbo Newton Crosby, nice to see that SOMEONE gets it. The IPs we were looking at weren't the Wolf3Ds or anything that could currently be bought or even played on a modern system without DOSBox, we're talking the weird and cheesy stuff that sold on Shareware discs back in the day. in fact that was what gave me the idea, to create a modern shareware style device so that those that don't remember what that was like could get a taste.

But when we actually tried to sit down and talk to these people, people that were making ZERO PROFIT on the IP, and had NO interest from anybody? Most wanted $75k+ upfront and 30% of the gross AND many wanted rights to anything We did. yeah go fuck yourselves.

The bitch is i could have outsourced it to China and probably have them selling on Chinamart RIGHT THIS MINUTE and not have to give a shit. It is THIS which is why China will win, because it is EASY to simply ignore the copyright bullshit and IMPOSSIBLE to play by the rules.

Sadly as you said like the movies that are disappearing now (you know about that right? tons of movies from the 30s and 40s are rotting in the vaults because the studios can't figure out how to "monetize the IP" and won't give up the rights either) the vast majority of these games will go right into the black hole, never to be played or enjoyed. simply because copyrights are so rigged that every corp thinks their shit don't stink and they can get AAA prices for nothing.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Hognoxious]

They have no incentive to license an old game at a cheap price to a hobby product, when they're better served holding onto that property so it can be sold en masse for millions of dollars with a bunch of other properties.

One teeny weeny problem. It can't be "sold en masse for millions of dollars yada yada", because it isn't worth anything close to that.

They're thinking big, you were thinking small.

No. They were thinking greedy, he was thinking realistic, and you think you're a lot smarter than you are.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[wisty]

Isn't that the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves? Ali Baba finds the thieves cave, and a reasonable amount of their loot. His brother comes in, and takes so much loot that the thieves are able to catch and slaughter him. The moral - if you try to make out like a bandit, you might get your ass handed to you.

The problem with the publishers is, they think their baby worth more than any reasonable market value.

People who kill tech products are often making the same mistake - they overcapitalize (because their idea is worth bazillions), then have to shoot the white elephant they ended up raising.

Google Wave does some cool(ish) stuff. But they made it too big, too fast, and found it couldn't support the development budget they had allocated to it. And I bet shrinking the budget wasn't an option, because everything became big, slow, scalable, and impossible to manage with a small team.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[wertigon]

They may very well own the games, but...

"Hey guys, we can make you some free profit. Not much, maybe 100-200k, but we need permission to use your old IP, we offer you $5 to each stick sold, how does that sound?"

So, they get the offer to basicly free money with no drawbacks. Sure you can turn the offer down, but dang they're stupid for doing so. :)

Re:It's an investment strategy

[hairyfeet]

THANK YOU it is good to see someone understand. Some of these games? BAD, we are talking MST3K bad. That was part of my desire, because in the days of shareware you got the good, the bad, and the cheesy, all on one disk. the only real difference between what we had and the shareware of old is instead of "300 games for $5!" like in the old days we were gonna try to do it by genre, puzzle, horror, shooters, etc. Hell I even offered to do like Shareware and link to their site so they could try to upselll them or sell other properties!

But sadly trying to "deal" with these MBA shitbrains I saw why China WILL win, it is because for them it is either "insane iMoney" or nothing, so they get nothing. look at HP getting rid of their PC line which makes damned good money, but because it is ONLY 6% or 7% profit that simply isn't good enough. Its not iMoney! They must make "More monies growing per quarter nom nom nom" or to them its completely shit. Lenovo and the other Chinese companies will be more than happy to take that 6% profits and if their IP reindeer games get in the way? China will tell them to play a nice game of hide and go fuck yourselves. like I said if I'd have outsourced I could have it on Chinamart right next to those Nintendo emulators with 300+ games.

But instead its just one more American idea and business that simply won't get made thanks to the copyrights and patents minefield. That is taxes that won't get paid, jobs that won't be filled, and for those greedy pigs ZERO PROFITS because they sure as fuck aren't gonna sink a dime of THEIR money and at the prices they want a single shit game would cost more than your average AAA game. Meanwhile if I was willing to just deal with China? I could have kept the money and told them to take a flying fuck. if this isn't proof copyrights are broken I don't know what is. Copyrights destroy markets and innovation, simple as that.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[jawtheshark]

It wasn't until two years later, when his wife Bertha took one of them without telling him and went for a 120 mile round-trip to visit her mother that people actually realized "Hey, this funny thing seems to actually work" and started buying like crazy.

... and thus was the "Pit Babe" born.... ;-)

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Eric S. Smith]

if this isn't proof copyrights are broken I don't know what is.

Actually, it's just proof that either the people you were dealing with were being silly, or that you are lousy at making that kind of deal.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[hairyfeet]

Nooo, it is proof of their pure MBA driven greed. Are you saying HP doesn't know how to make deals? Because they are getting rid of a consistent money earner because it ONLY gets 6% profit. That ain't iMoney! Dealing with them I could tell EXACTLY what was going on. They would tell me to get back to them in a day or two, they would go to WSJ or some other site and find how much the biggest sellers on the app store were making and then ask for 30% above THAT. After all if anyone at all asked for our IP it must be uber valuable, right?

That is why I'm seriously thinking about seeing how much it'd cost just to do the whole thing in China. I could get the code written and have a prototype made here and then have it cranked out in China and sell it on Chinamart and places like that. Because dealing with IP holders I've found the sheer unstoppable greed of the MBA dipshits simply makes dealing with the minefield not worth it. Then I can tell them to play hide and go fuck themselves like the Chinese do. It simply isn't worth doing anything in America if it involves IP anymore.

Re:It's an investment strategy

[Zen Punk]

The thing about mod points is, when you've got them you struggle to find posts worth modding, yet once they're gone you seem to find gems like this in every story.

Bravo, sir, you've hit the proverbial nail smack on it's proverbial head.

Fishing.

[couchslug]

When you go fishing, you don't expect to catch 'em all. So what, and what is this silly article doing on Slashdot?

The more options proffered, the more choice consumers can select from, and the more failed products those who like pottering with such things can exploit.

No problem.

Re:Fishing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the article? You're responding to things that weren't said and not responding to the things that were. The problem isn't that some things fail (and frankly, it's asinine to even pretend you thought someone would say that). The problem is that anything that doesn't succeed both hugely AND IMMEDIATELY gets thrown away, which prevents useful and valuable things that don't catch fire immediately from building an audience.

Seriously Slashdotters, it's okay if you don't want to read every article, but don't post if you can't be bothered to read.

Re:Fishing.

[idontgno]

Well, since you seem to want a fishing analogy, not many anglers just drop the lure into the water and reel in if there's no immediate hit. (Discounting working a lure that needs to be reeled in just to play it. I'm thinking like fly fishers or maybe good ol' fashion bobber and sinker fishing.)

Anyway, some of these product introductions is like making one cast and then giving up on the entire pond after 15 seconds.

Re:Fishing.

[hedwards]

Sounds like the same geniuses that run Fox.

Re:Fishing.

[Sockatume]

Well, since you seem to want a fishing analogy, not many anglers just drop the lure into the water and reel in if there's no immediate hit.

They would if it cost them $1.5m a minute. (Microsoft, HP etc.) Of course if it's only costing you $10 an hour, then you can afford to relax. (Small startups.)

Re:Fishing.

[c]

> Anyway, some of these product introductions is like making one cast
> and then giving up on the entire pond after 15 seconds.

If the guy in the boat next to you is using what looks like the same line, lure, bait, and boat and is pulling in 309 fish per second, it not actually be the dumbest strategy.

Re:Fishing.

[gl4ss]

you got it wrong - this leads to _LESS_ consumer choice. the products are on the market for a short while and if you're not buying in that while then you can't buy it ever. want a nice clamshell linux pda? should have bought when sharp was selling them.

wanted a newton style pda in 2003? sorry no go.
want a really good force feedback joystick? well fuck, ms made them in late '90s - now they'll sell you a xbox pad.

want a pepperpad? better be ready to hunt ebay or some such and have lot's of luck. and still, the cpu will be outdated. that's what you get with these short product runs, if you want a split keyboard(on sides of screen) tablet now YOU CAN'T GET IT.

Re:Fishing.

[idontgno]

Conceding a market is a rational response, assuming the market's already dominated pretty well. The smart time to do it is before introducing a product.

Only the damnest fool of a fisherman dips a line in a lake that's already being strip-fished by half a dozen commercial fishing ships. Don't even get out of the car. Find another pool.

Discount bin

[roman_mir]

It would be good to be able to get those products even after they are pulled off the shelves so to speak, get them at a discount if possible. Yes, it is better to have quick turn over because this means more products are created and more things are tried. If something is not selling well, then maybe it's not exactly the product that people are looking for and maybe another product is needed that is similar and yet different, better in some way.

a good thing for, banks...

[G3ckoG33k]

The blockbuster-or-bust model is a good thing for banks, but a catastrophy for the producing tech industry in general.

Product cycles have become too short for companies to financial absorb the eventual yet short-lived dips in sales.

Companies should only be required to report per 12 months.

Wall Street should not be allowed to do more than 6 transactions per company and 24h.

Re:a good thing for, banks...

[jonhorvath]

Reducing the number of time a company report their finances would only hurt the individual investor. Without insider information, how would I know if a company was in dire straights? Regular public updates on a company's performance helps to level the investment playing field.

There were wide swings in the stock market before computer based trading algorithms (ex. Crash of 1929). Reducing transactions probably would not make any changes to our current stock market volatility.

Re:a good thing for, banks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wall Street should not be allowed to do more than 6 transactions per company and 24h.

6 transactions per 24 hours?

So, which 6 people get to buy BofA stock today, and which 6 get to sell?

Re:a good thing for, banks...

[Toonol]

Wall Street should not be allowed to do more than 6 transactions per company and 24h.

That's a little extreme. Do you mean no more than 6 transactions per day per buyer per stock?

I'd be happy with just introducing a random delay of 1-10 seconds into every transaction.

Re:a good thing for, banks...

[ka9dgx]

I'd be happy with just introducing a random delay of 1-10 seconds into every transaction.

You didn't go far enough, I think that transactions should be batch processed, with a maximum rate of one batch every 20 seconds. This would help restore the fair market ethos we all value in western society.

  There should be phases

• Submit orders to the market system
• Receive confirmation of intent from the trading system when enough volume is present to build a transaction
• 5 second delay for any cancels
• if the volume is still there... execution according to a publicly known market making algorithm
• else go back to submit phase
• finally - notification to everyone of ALL results, who bought what from whom, with a copy to log file, SEC, and a new public domain Stock Market archive

HFT isn't high frequency trading, it's High Financial Theft, in my humble opinion.

Trades should be at best as fast as the humans on the floor... any faster and we're all subject to flash crashes, and subversion of the Fair Market.

There can be several reasons why a product doesn't

[vkt-tje]

There can be several reasons why a product doesn't sell.
One of the possible reasons is that the product in question is crap.
In that case the manufacturer will have learned all there is to learn from their screw-up in a very short time. It is then no problem that the product gets pulled rather soon.

A second possibility is that the competition is better and/or cheaper. Also in that case the manufacturer can take their expensive/under-performing product rapidly off the market.

But in many cases the reason that a product doesn't not sell immediately is simply that the consumers don't know it exists. Established names like Apple, and Microsoft can bring out a product and even get coverage on the evening news. Others simply don't get that exposure to the masses. Then it is normal that a product doesn't take of immediately.
The problem is that while a product is on the shelf, competing products are coming out. Since they are newer, there is a large possibility that they will be better or cheaper, pushing the "old" product towards one of the categories described above...

Well, then...

[vlpronj]

"What if the TouchPad, the Microsoft Kin, or even Google Wave had had more time on the market" Then maybe they would have been as successful as the Zune?

Re:Well, then...

[NatasRevol]

Seriously. Crap is crap.

Sometimes it takes the product being on the market, and getting real feedback, before the CEO/company says whoops, and pulls it. The salesguys always lie.

And it feels like companies release a lot more crap these days than they used to. Hence more failures.

the good of the few

[tverbeek]

The only people this is good for are the folks who swept into Best Buy and bought up a bunch of $99 Touchpads to sell for $250 on eBay.

Depends

[geoffrobinson]

If there was a multi-multi-million dollar ad campaign and there's no interest, you at least need to regroup.

Winners never quit and quitters never win, but if you neither quit nor win you are just a fool.

Re:Depends

[markhahn]

an ad campaign is no substitute for careful and/or intelligent pricing. most pad vendors are just being pricing idiots - that was clearly HP's problem.

Re:Depends

[Paul1969]

I thought you were going to make some clever analogy based on adult disposable diapers. Some of them do appear to have a longer useful product life than certain recent tech devices.

Re:Golden Girls!

[camperdave]

Um... a pal and a confidant.

confidant (knf-dnt, -dänt, knf-dnt, -dänt)
n.
1. Someone to whom secrets or private matters are confided.
2. An intimate friend.

It works because...

[Anonymous Coward]

This model is so popular because of the money gain that happens in such a short amount of time, investors love it. Should you actually run a proper company, creating software, tech, blah blah blah and you actually kept giving out updates, providing support and such that you make a constant profit of let say 4 mill a year.

You may be doing good, but investors don't like this at all. The stock price stays the same, where do they make there money?

Re:It works because...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dividends are the best friend of a wise investor.

Re:It works because...

[Neil Boekend]

"Once again, the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor"

What about your reputation thereafter?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with pulling the plug quickly on a newly released device, is that you're turning off all those who bought your product, and now have a 1 month old device that is no longer supported. You can garantee these people will never return to you as customers, as it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. This is what happened to Sega - after releasing and shutting down the Sega Saturn, almost nobody of those Sega loyals were interested in buying the Dreamcast. They had gotten screwed once already. Turns out, Sega pulled the plug early on the Dreamcast too, guaranteeing that not a single person would buy another console from them, had they tried to release something else.

Re:What about your reputation thereafter?

[couchslug]

No loss unless you cling to your company name. For each new product, creating a new shell company is trivial.

All is branding.

Re:What about your reputation thereafter?

[Osgeld]

and yet apple does that with every single product and people still line up before they can buy

Re:What about your reputation thereafter?

[hjf]

No loss unless you cling to your company name. For each new product, creating a new shell company is trivial.

All is branding.

Sony and all its line of failures would like to disagree with you.

DAT, MiniDisc and Betamax come to mind. While they never really caught in the mainstream market, some gained some sort of popularity in "niche" markets. DAT is the interesting example: it was developed to replace the Cassette but was never popular in home environments, but it found a loyal user base in the semi-pro (and pro) community, since it let you have a (rather) portable unit with CD-quality digital audio.

MD is weird too. I only knew 1 person who used MD, and this was in the pre-MP3 times (I was the only freak in town with a Diamond Rio), about 2000-2001 when Sony started bundling the MD deck with the GRX line of audio systems. This guy liked it so he got the MD walkman. In Japan, the MD seemed to be very popular. Japan is weird... CD-R wasn't as big there as MO is. Sony still made TAPE Walkmans (!) until last year, long, long after the rest of the world gave up on tapes.

Japanese companies seem to support their products in japan for much longer. Maybe the japanese law requires it? As soon as the xbox 360 came out, Microsoft slashed the xbox AND new game licenses. They moved everything to the 360. Sony still makes the PS2 and licenses new games, years after the PS3 came into the market. Maybe Sega or some subsidiary is still supporting the Dreamcast over there?. They released the SNES in '90 in japan and discontinued it on '03 (91 to 99 for USA). They also have very obscure, rare, japan-only stuff (Nintendo-licensed FLASH cartridges you can download games to, https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nintendo_Power_(cartridge) )

Mitsubishi is the example of one of those japanese "conglomerates" that use the same brand for everything from pencils to cars. They don't create shell companies.

Re:What about your reputation thereafter?

[amRadioHed]

You sure about that? Which Apple product was discontinued without support after only one month?

Re:What about your reputation thereafter?

[AllyGreen]

MiniDisc was pretty big in the uk for a while, I was just finishing high school when they were around and all my mates had them. They were viewed as quite cool, though that might've just been where I was from!

Re:What about your reputation thereafter?

[Osgeld]

no one said ONLY ONE MONTH dumbass

apple typically waits 8 months to a year like most other companies. go ask the guy who owns an iPad 1 if he is going to get another in the future, he will probably say yes. That is because the platform will have not radically changed in short time span, just some fixes and improvements, no big deal.

the sega problem was in reverse, sega kept fucking around with their product line so developers and retailers would piss away millions in resources just to find out a whole new platform totally incompatible with the last will be out in 3 months.

Re:What about your reputation thereafter?

[Anonymous Coward]

MiniDisc was pretty big in the uk for a while, I was just finishing high school when they were around and all my mates had them. They were viewed as quite cool, though that might've just been where I was from!

MiniDisc did seem to enjoy a moderate surge in popularity around the turn of the millennium here (which is strange given that it had launched several years earlier and done very little, though this may have something to do with a sales push Sony did at that time).

Even so, "big" is relative, they never achieved the massive, universal popularity of the traditional cassette here, and they were displaced by MP3 players a few years later.

Re:What about your reputation thereafter?

[hjf]

Minidisc had some popularity in Europe but it was never really that big. Just bad timing, I guess, since in 1999 the Diamond Rio was out and by next year Napster was the shit. If it wasn't for MP3, maybe MD would have been the alternative.

Depends on the brand...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

This is really a marketing decision based on the strength of the brand of the company offering the product.

A small company without a well-known brand may be more likely to keep a losing product alive (assuming it has other revenue streams) because there is no master brand to damage.

However, a "big name" company like Apple, HP or Microsoft can't afford to have losers in their portfolio because those technologies hurt the master brand. So...they yank badly received tech quickly. This happens in plenty of other consumer-facing industries too: think of "New Coke", the "Azteca" car, Zest trying to sell bath poufs to men, etc.

(Things sometimes work a little differently in business-to-business tech markets, BTW. I've seen tech products languish there for years before getting the ax due to long sales cycles or a cross-selling strategy that takes a while to test out.)

Re:Depends on the brand...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It sounds like the companies need to have "Farm brands" in the same way that sports teams have "Farm Teams" where potential talent can practice and be evaluated.

Either by creating one de novo, or by using an aquisition's brand(the way HP uses 'Compaq' as a codeword for 'cheap consumer shit', while the decent stuff is "HP" or "HP-Compaq", depending on the product's history), products could be tried and eventually absorbed into the mothership if sufficiently successful, kept under the "farm brand" if unexciting but not money-losing, and cut loose to die if they can't hack it.

This is what the music industry has become...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard more than one major artist from times past remark that they would have never made it in today's climate because no one will invest in "unrealized potential". Some of the best selling albums of all time came after a few modest selling ones.

Re:This is what the music industry has become...

[cashman73]

Which brings us to the next part of the model. After you do develop an artist's material and it becomes popular, sue all the consumers who download said music over the Internet to make a profit. Companies do this, too. Their called "patent trolls".

Products need more time....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

48-49 days does NOT make a developer community. The Kin was an exception as there was no development community but HP did WebOS no favors. People aren't going to buy the damn thing if they can't get or program apps. This all started when Palm was REALLY LATE with the SDK. HP did it no favors, but it was right on the cusp of something that could have been cool.

Leo Apotheker was and IS the WRONG person to lead HP. HP hasn't ever been about the high end servers for years. Sure, people bough Superdomes but IBM had far eclipsed HP in the amount of servers it sold. Sun did too (but still failed). Leo is going down the wrong path. HP made great calculators, printers and computers and was KNOWN for them. They made servers too but when was the last time you heard them talk about that? They had HPUX and Tru64. Did nothing with either.

This is a sad sad road that HP went down and it might ultimately kill HP.

Re:Products need more time....

[robot256]

The only time I hear about HP servers is when our corporate bookkeeping system is "experiencing technical difficulties" and "we are working with the HP technicians to resolve the issue".

Re:Products need more time....

[Anonymous Coward]

48 - 49 days also means they miss out because for products that are a large % of my disposable monthly income I might to wiat 60 days!

Though I guess Im just not the type of consumer they want.

An excellent way to ensure poor sales

[petes_PoV]

New products are being pulled from shelves only weeks after a lackluster release

So now people will think: I'm not going to buy this new product in case they pull it, and I can't get support any more - or a software update - or a bug-fix.

Once this becomes the established pattern, everyone will defer their purchases until at least version 2 (as most wise buyers do these days, anyway) just to see if the product has got a future. If products get pulled because nobody buys them - because they're all waiting to see if anyone *else* buys it, then the whole industry is in a downward spiral. The only way out would be to start applying serious bribes to reviewrs, if that doesn't already happen.

Re:An excellent way to ensure poor sales

[seifried]

This is one of the reasons I go with Apple for my phone/tablet, on the phone side they have consistently supported phones for 3 or more years and on the tablet side it looks like it will be similar.

Re:An excellent way to ensure poor sales

[petes_PoV]

on the phone side they have consistently supported phones for 3 or more years

Though they were still selling the iphone 3g well into 2010 - only to "desupport" it when ios 4.3 came out less than a year later. So the trick seems to be: choose products that look like success and THEN buy them ASAP, as they can have a very, very short supported life if you leave it too long.

Re:An excellent way to ensure poor sales

[tverbeek]

There's a similar pattern that plays out in the comics industry. Readers are reluctant to try a new series (meaning genuinely new series, not just another new title starring the X-Men or Batman) because they aren't sure whether it'll last long enough to tell the story the writer is setting out to tell. So they wait, perhaps for a collected edition of the first several monthlies into a paperback, which indicates that the publisher is committed to it. But because they're not buying the monthlies, the sales on them suck, so the publisher gets cold feet and the series gets cancelled. The readers don't trust the publishers and the publishers don't trust the readers, and the result is a lot of unfinished - or at least unnecessarily discontinued - stories.

Re:An excellent way to ensure poor sales

[rjstanford]

Of course, if each monthly actually told a useful and interesting story itself, that worked together to form a bigger story arc, that problem just wouldn't exist... If you're going to serialize something, each episode needs to be able to stand-alone - this applies in many other industries, so why should comics be any different? If something needs all n portions to be readable, why not release them all together?

Re:An excellent way to ensure poor sales

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but I am not going to buy very expensive device that is going to be rendered without support in 2-3 yeras.

That also "makes financial sense".

Re:An excellent way to ensure poor sales

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheFireflyEffect for more on that exact subject.

Re:An excellent way to ensure poor sales

[tverbeek]

Economics and cash flow. I agree with you in principle, but saving it all up and releasing it as one volume is pretty difficult when working in a medium that typically takes a person working full-time a year to produce about 100 pages of material. Unless you're Warner/DC or Disney/Marvel, the money just isn't there to pay a reasonable wage for the work as it's produced (with no income from sales of the monthlies), and if you are one of those companies, you don't want to invest that kind of time and money into something that might sell only a few thousand units when it's finally finished.

Bad products

[nine-times]

The problem with the examples given (TouchPad, the Microsoft Kin, and Google Wave) is that they were ultimately not great products. Not only should they have been yanked, but they really shouldn't have been offered in the first place. I say that not having actually used the TouchPad, but having had experience with WebOS and being generally unimpressed.

And... well... it's not necessarily so much that they're bad products, but that they're marketed poorly. Most of you will misunderstand and think that I mean that they weren't advertised well, but marketing is a different thing. A large part of marketing is determining that there is a market, determining what that market wants/needs, and then building/adjusting a product to meet those wants/needs. None of that was done very well with any of these products.

The Kin, for example, was a semi-smart phone released into a world where people generally either want smartphones or they want dumb-phones, and even the people who want dumb-phones are dying out. Since the smart phones have been so successful, there is a big demand and development community for smartphone apps, and there's a limit to how many incompatible platforms are going to be supported. As a result, the whole world is being divided into iOS and Android, and if you want to compete, you have to offer something compelling enough to displace one of the two big guys. The TouchPad suffered from the same thing: it was developed for a market that didn't exist. The world is all Android and iOS, and there isn't really a market for a 3rd platform at the same price point with no compelling advantages.

Google Wave had a different problem: it never defined what problem it was trying to solve. Was it a collaborative document editor, a replacement for email, or a weird IM client? I used Google Wave for several months, and I still don't know. They also launched a communications platform on an invite-only basis, which meant that you didn't have anyone to communicate with. By the time they had a wide release, everyone had already given up.

In each case, I wouldn't say it's an issue of the developer/manufacturer giving up too soon. The problem is that they didn't give up soon enough.

These are bad examples

[Tridus]

The trouble here is that some of these are bad examples. The Kin wasn't a bad idea, when it was first ready for release. It's the 18 month delay to retool it to run on Windows that actually killed the product. Released on time with what they had initially? Who knows.

The TouchPad was released at the same price as the iPad but isn't as good. Who thought that would work?

Pleanty of products still get time to mature. Android itself wasn't a massive success day 1, but has gained traction steadily and is huge now. There's a difference between something that is promising and just needs more development and a "me too!" inferior clone product that the market really doesn't care about.

Hell, some ideas don't get killed off fast enough. Fully electric cars have been worked on for how long now? They still suck.

And while we're on the subject, Hollywood is a bad example. Movies are one shot deals in terms of being profitable. A better analogy is TV, where a show that's a mediocre hit can get retooled to try and improve it but a lot of networks instead drop it after 6 episodes to throw something else at the wall.

Re:These are bad examples

[geekoid]

The Kin was not a good idea. It was what a sales guy thought people wanted to do with the net. As opposed to a device that lets people do what they want to do. It was like watching your parents try to be cool and modern. Just...painful.

However the Kin was cute.

Re:These are bad examples

[jonbryce]

Electric cars were very popular in the 1920s when diesel cars had only recently been invented, were very noisy, smelly and difficult to start, and their main competitor the steam car took about 20 minutes for the boiler to heat up and had a similar range to electric. A lot of people don't realise that electric cars were invented about 50 years before internal combustion engine cars.

Elecrtric trains are pretty popular and generally outperform diesel models because they can get their electricity directly from the mains and don't have to worry about battery life. That means their range is effectively unlimited. The only downside is the additional capital cost of setting up the power supply, so they are not used on lines that only see a few trains per day. High speed rail manages about 300-350 km/h. You would struggle to find a car that can do that consistently on the motorways.

Re:These are bad examples

[Anonymous Coward]

The Kin was an awesome idea. It was a cheap phone designed in 2008 that had some of the best features of a feature phone (facebook, email, and text messages) for a lot less than the monthly price of a feature phone. They knocked that one out of the park. They could have sold one to ever kid between 16 and 25.

The Kin was a terrible phone. It was an expensive phone released in 2010 that had a miserable subset of the features of a smartphone, for the same montly price as a smartphone. They couldn't sell it to anyone.

Re:Golden Girls!

[Skarecrow77]

Bea Arthur in space. That's just crazy enough to work.

Publicly-trade companies do this

[Anonymous Coward]

Shareholders and board members only care about quarterly profits and growth year-on-year. Who cares if your business is actually making money if it isn't making MORE money than it was last quarter?

Interoperability effects

[tepples]

There are cases where choice isn't the best, such as where the value of a good or service lies in its interoperability. Some products are platforms that are valuable for the variety of complementary goods that can be used with them, such as personal computer operating systems and video game consoles. Other products are valuable for network effects that depend on the number of people whom you can reach using them, such as telephony, e-mail, and Internet social networking sites. A failed product will lack those valuable qualities. For example, when both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc were available, some end users waited until all six MPAA studios supported one format before adopting it themselves.

Pokemon

[sakdoctor]

As someone from the pokemon generation, I actually do expect to catch 'em all.

Re:Pokemon

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone from the pokemon generation, I actually do expect to catch 'em all.

I don't find this post funny. I find this post a very sad, very true impression of the current generation of nerds, business owners, and corporations.

Depends...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Arguably, the degree of goodness or badness really depends on how 'tightly-coupled' a product is:

By 'tightly-coupled' I mean an(admittedly rough) measure of how tightly integrated the product is to ancillary products, services, drivers, support, etc.

Something like, say, the Dell "Inspiron 15 (N5040)" would be 'loosely-coupled'. Other than BIOS updates, which can only be Dell-provided, virtually all related software and likely services would be unaffected by its discontinuation: You can still trivially buy/download an OS to run on it, if you decide to upgrade, drivers are available for the various parts from their respective OEMs/in kernel, all the software you are likely to use is still available from 3rd parties, it isn't tied to a specific ISP, there is no "Dell App Store" that you lose access to, and so forth. A 'loosely-coupled' product can die without a ripple(for anybody except the company who failed to produce a product that made them the money they wanted it to.) Even current owners are only slightly harmed(incrementally harder to get parts for devices with shorter production runs).

A "tightly-coupled" device would be something like an iPhone. Not that Apple would cancel it; but you would be pretty much SOL if they were to: It is cryptographically locked to a specific software source, the system is designed to defeat 3rd-party OS modifications(and no 3rd party OSes exist in any but the most vestigal state for the embedded platform...). Were Apple to pull the plug on the ecosystem, only the most enthusiastic jailbreaker crews would be able to continue.

Something like an xbox or PS3 is mostly tightly-coupled: it is locked to a specific online service, cryptographically dependent on a single vendor for updates and downloadable games; but its use of physical media for most major commercial titles means that it would be degraded but not rendered useless by a vendor pulling the plug.

In general, I'd argue that the churn among 'loosely-coupled' products, while it may be wasteful, shortsighted, MBA/shareholder-whining driven bullshit, is mostly harmful to the companies that engage in it. It means that SKUs change a lot; but it doesn't really do too much harm to product-holders. Churn among 'tightly-coupled' products, though, particularly ones that involve esoteric and/or cryptographically locked embedded systems, or systems that are wholly dependent on some online component, produces a lot of bricks, and directly harms consumers(it also, most likely, has the perverse effect of harming the companies that do it: If consumers know that many new products get shitcanned and bricked, why would they take a risk on your bold new innovation? You are probably just going to kill it...)

While this is less of an issue at the consumer level, more of an enterprise/SMB problem, tight-coupling among software products can cause similar issues: if interfaces between the various horrid bug-nests that keep your company running are relatively sane and clean, getting EOLed by the vendor merely sucks. If they aren't...

Re:Rick Perry Is An Idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

At No point in that rambling incohernet response, did you approach anything nearing a rational thought. Everyone here is now dumber for having read it. Therefore, I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.

Fail Fast

[NicknamesAreStupid]

A Silicon Valley saying. We deal with failure better than success because we see more of it. The trick has always been to move on quickly and try again. Michael

Huh?

[LWATCDR]

Example of products that where not smash hits and are still moving forward.
1. Bing. It is still has a small market share but Microsoft keeps putting resources into it and it is growing.
2. XBox. The first XBox didn't make a profit but the 360 looks like it finally has.
3. Windows Phone 7 "I don't think this is ever going to be more than a poor 3rd place myself but they are till pushing it".
4. Android. Remember the G1. It didn't sell that well and was only on TMobile in the US.
5. PS3 After the mad launch rush it sales just slowed. The Wii was the big hit and the 360 was out first and sold well. Sales of the PS3 are still improving even now.

Of the other products mentioned well let's take a look at them
The Kin. It wasn't WP7 it had no real apps, it was tied to an expensive data plan. Yes it stank out of the box. Microsoft really did a good job killing Danger after they spend a pile of money to buy them.
Google Wave. I tried to find a use for the tech but I just couldn't It was kind of neat but didn't have a good use case for a lot of people.
Touchpad. This one was murdered in it's crib. HP bought Palm and then the CEO was kicked out in a scandal. His replacement had no interest in the consumer market. Palm had three products in the works and those where the Pre III, the TouchPad, and the Veer. HP dragged their feet on those and took a year to get them out the door! What??? WebOS is actually are really good OS but HP again shipped it on old hardware! Of course the new CEO is also going to spin of the PC division as well. Of course you have to love HP not wanting to risk the long term investment in Palm so instead they took a 12 billon dollar stock hit.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is one of the more insightful posts. I feel the author is subject to some sampling bias. They are only looking at the "failed" products. As you suggest, it would be nice to include some "successful" products, and see how the fared early on in their life cycle. Then again, "Sell Big or Die Fast" is a much catchier title than, "Some Products Fail to Gain Market Share Fast Enough for Investors".

Re:Huh?

[azadrozny]

Remember the Apple Newton. A good product, but was before its time. I wonder how many of these failed products will inspire technology that has yet to be developed.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

1, 2, and 3 may not make the money but you forgot about the hidden ones that sustain it.

If Windows/Office was every replaced by something else and gained the same market share MS would be totally screwed.

Re:Huh?

[Samus]

The Touchpad won't. The card ui is nice but I haven't found much else innovative about it so far. HP failed to generate hype around it, they failed to generate much of dev community and they failed to put out hardware as good as the ipad and priced it at the same amount. At $200 dollars less than the ipad it would have been a compelling proposition because I could take the money and pop it into apps and accessories.

Re:Huh?

[LWATCDR]

The card UI is more than nice.
Lets' face it as far has hardware goes a tablet leaves little to no room for innovation. Every one knows the specs that must be in a tablet.
1. An ARM CPU.
2. Mulitouch with a touch screen.
3. Some flash and some ram.
4. a battery.
5. Wifi.
6. A front facing camera.

If you are going to add mobile support it will add a cell radio+gps.
About the only option will be microSD and or a camera on back. As I said the HP failure with Palm was caused by a lack of any vision or passion for the market by the new CEO.
After owning Palm for a year all HP did was release products that where in the pipeline and did that late.
 

Re:Huh?

[LWATCDR]

And the three examples that they give of killing product where?
Kin which had the same support as 1,2,3
Wave "Google"
Touchpad "HP"

Re:Huh?

[LWATCDR]

Thing is that the two of the three examples given where not good products.
The Kin was just dumb. It was late and didn't fit in with Microsoft's current line up.
Wave was just odd at best.

I think a better article would be about what happens when a company looses it's identity and passion.
I think both HP and Nokia are good examples of this.
HP isn't HP anymore the latest CEO is trying to turn it into SAP. Nokia is becoming Microsoft's phone company.
That is why HP didn't have the stomach to go head to head with Apple and Android because the CEO isn't really an HP kind of guy so making HP into his kind of company. Same thing with Elop. And that is why Apple's stock has gone up over 11,000% since Steve Jobs came back. Passion! Jobs didn't come from another company and isn't going to another company.
You can see the same thing happening to the Car companies in the past.
Do you want make money making a great product or do you just want to make money?
If you make it by making a great product and keep making great products you can thrive long term. If you just want to make money... Well you can do that but it will never be great.

Re:Huh?

[xhrit]

> XBox. The first XBox didn't make a profit but the 360 looks like it finally has.

It made so much profit they can afford to give one away with every new windows pc.

Re:Huh?

[Skuld-Chan]

That is why HP didn't have the stomach to go head to head with Apple and Android because the CEO isn't really an HP kind of guy so making HP into his kind of company. Same thing with Elop. And that is why Apple's stock has gone up over 11,000% since Steve Jobs came back. Passion! Jobs didn't come from another company and isn't going to another company.

Actually... he came from NextStep...

Re:Huh?

[LWATCDR]

Jobs founded Apple just incase you didn't know.

Re:There can be several reasons why a product does

[shugah]

In two of the cases cited: HP Touchpad and Microsoft Kin, they were "me too" products that offered nothing new, compelling or innovative and were entered into markets that had dominant players with better products. It is also important to note that all three of these products relied on network externalities - a certain critical mass of users (in the case of Google Wave and Kin phones) or developers in the case of the HP Touchpad. All three were late entries into the market - MS Kin phone started life as Danger Inc's "Sidekick" phone, but had to be converted from a Java based software stack to Windows CE / .Net which significantly delayed its entry to the market.

Google Wave - I'm just not sure where it fit in the Google universe. Cloud based groupware / team collaboration? CMS portal? Social networking?

Different market means different expectations

[redelm]

Movie blockbusters are a human stampede, and occur for ephemeral reasons -- people are going to see a movie, the question is which one, and the answer is mostly the one they can talk about with others.

Choosing assets such as communicating and computing machinery is a much larger investment with much longer usage/payoff period. There is going to be more research, and a longerinitial adoption period. The Wii and especially Android are examples.

Demanding instant success (Wall$t HF junkies) is the same as demanding a never-ending stream of sequels.

Re:Golden Girls!

[networkBoy]

I don't know which is funnier, if that was a typo that you corrected, or if that was a really clever troll and caught you.
Either way that was very entertaining.

Thanks guys,
-nB

would would end up right back in the 80's

[Osgeld]

100,000 different models of computer goods, ranging 3 generations of machines, totally incompatible and the 3rd party market booms as you now need 45 different types of sd card readers to fit each of the 100,000 different plugs

fuckit, die quick get out fast

Marketing Rules at All Levels ...

[foobsr]

Just recently talked to a person who is related to the consumer electronics business (website java) who confirmed that for instance TV-sets have to be updated each half year (in Europe), otherwise 'shareholder-value' would be in danger because negative ratings ('not able to innovate') were the consequence of a more sensible product cycling.

CC.

Re:Marketing Rules at All Levels ...

[0123456]

It's almost like cars in America having to change the grille and cupholders every year so they can claim it's a new model.

ADHD

[cgfsd]

When the target audience suffers from ADHD, get the failures out of the market as quick as possible and hope your next product will be a success.

The one advantage to ADHD, is people forget failures a lot faster than they forget successes.

"The 5 d's of blogs, Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and um Dodge"

pay attention MBAs

[Anonymous Coward]

corporations should start to pay attention to the hype they're creating, how successful it is, and then react to public opinion. public opinion is much more educated these days or rather the tools to verify statements/"facts" are more readily available leading to more educated response/backlash.

use the comments of the educated geeks to give you REAL forecast information.

people don't have any patience for crap any more.

Re:Rick Perry Is An Idiot

[desdinova 216]

Billy Madison FTW!

Not Just Hardware, Software Too

[DERoss]

It appears that Google and Mozilla are attempting to follow this same pattern with their frequent, rapid-release versions of browsers and related applications. Firefox 4.0 was released by Mozilla on 22 March of this year. Approximately 14 weeks later (on 21 June), Firefox 5.0 was released; and all support -- even fixes for security vulnerabilities -- ceased for Firefox 4.0. Then, 8 weeks later (on 16 August), Firefox 6.0 was released; and all support ceased for Firefox 5.0.

All this seems to be wreaking havoc with businesses and organizations that deployed Firefox as their internal standard browser. System administrators are having difficulty keeping up with the changes.

Yes, this was all reported earlier in Slashdot. Now we have a name for it: Quick Death. And the products do not even have to fail.

It depends on why they failed.

[Andy Dodd]

If it's unique and new and people aren't quite capable of justifying it yet, it'll take off slowly. Just look at the early days of DVR.

If it's a "me too attempt" at competing with something out there using a similar product - it becomes quickly apparent whether you've got what it takes to "stay in the game" (Android) or you don't (WebOS, Blackberry PlayBook). If upon release your product simply sucks and gets killed by reviewers for being incomplete - then it deserves to die. This was the case for the TouchPad and PlayBook.

When you're up against Android and the iPad in the tablet market - if you release a halfassed incomplete product, you die and you deserve it.

touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[SCHecklerX]

The touchpad was simply overpriced. If HP had sold it for, say $150 for 16GB, and $200 for 32GB, it may have sold better to begin with. The crazy rate that everyone sold out of all stock means that there are now a whole lot of WebOS tablets in people's hands now. App developers saw a huge spike in downloads after the sale. Getting WebOS out there, people will see what it is like and perhaps not settle for the inferior interfaces of Android and iOS.

HP's own tablet making may be dead. WebOS isn't quite done yet. Wouldn't it be cool if Dell got into the tablet business and licensed WebOS for them...

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[Chanc_Gorkon]

No it was priced right according to iSuppli who did the teardown. If HP sold it at $150 there would have been a loss on each device sold.

http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad-Carries-$318-Bill-of-Materials.aspx

They probably COULD have saved money somewhere, but they already chintzed on the plastic in the back.

The real problem is there were no apps. There was no real push by Palm OR HP on gaining developers. At least not one like there should have been. Plus the SDK was REALLY late. By that time, Palm was already dead in the water, HP picked them up and did NOTHING with them.

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[Anonymous Coward]

Although HP took a $100,000,000 charge on an estimated 250,000 units, selling at a loss would probably have been cheaper. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/18/hp_eats_100_million_charge_to_cover_unsold_stockpile_of_touchpads.html

The loss leader approach could have been very successful and market disrupting.

TFA also doesn't touch on the other side of the coin. The tech consumer is a fickle consumer. If a product isn't available when the consumer wants it, they wander off to the next shiny thing - very few product segments have people willing to wait in lines for extended periods of time. This means that the company has to either not have a large amount of inventory at launch and let customers walk away or they need to have a large amount of and hope they get the customer counts they need.

If they get it wrong (either too little interest or too much interest), then the company has problems and the product is still-born. Of course this is what the "Marketing" team needs to get right (Marketing != Sales, Marketing = Market segmentation, analysis and demand generation). And in tech it's _really_ hard to get this right.

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[fluffernutter]

The thing that got me was the ABSOLUTE SILENCE after the sale of Palm to HP. If this were Apple, they would have kept the hype building from that point forward until product release. Ads would have been taken out, prototypes shown, and bloggers paid to rave about the new thing. It would have reached a fever pitch before release, and then the quality of the product versus the price would not have mattered so much.

HP did not really fail so much as the heart of the company was not invested in it. They have much more return for their dollar in the business world as opposed to promoting consumer toys.

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[Telvin_3d]

Nooooo. And besides, it's a doomed long term strategy.
iSuppli figured HP spent a little over $300 on just material costs. Figure the other cost of manufacture ad shipping bring it to $350 a unit. At $150 sale price they would have planned to take a 50 million dollar loss just on their initial 250,000 units. And god help them if it did become popular. The iPad has sold 30m units. For the Touchpad to have matched that HP would have lost 6 Billion dollars. 6 Billion just to get their foot in the door!

And then what? They are stuck at that price point. So when they decide to stop losing money they either triple the price for the same product (it would never fly) or make the next version a fraction as capable for the same price (also never fly).

So, doomed all the way.

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[hitmark]

Except that Apple do no such thing (outside of the paying bloggers part, but sadly there is no way to prove that).

Instead they keep deathly quiet, but ever so often there is a "leak" so some "rumor"-page that goes "Product X may show up in time for some holiday or other and may have feature Y!!!".

The ads only show up when a product is good and ready to be sold, after Apple have invited the press faithfuls and Jobs have delivered his superlative-soaked presentation.

Sometimes i wonder if the "leaks" are covert attempts at gouging reactions by seeing the net emotion it gets in the media.

Hell the only reason the iphone was announced months before it hit market, was because the FCC had to approve it and so the surprise would have been spoiled by the paperwork.

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[Anonymous Coward]

The talk about the right price for the touchpad being $99 or $149 is really funny. Its a $499 tablet on closeout. Go buy a tablet where the MSRP is $99 and see what it buys you.

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[Shompol]

The loss (overhead) already happened when they invested in R&D and established manufacturing pipeline. Selling it for any price at that point would have been profit (before counting overhead, which was gone by then either way). There is no need to let it all go to hell for $99 when it would go like hotcakes for $250.

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[markhahn]

the manufacturing cost for any 10" capacitative tablet is about $300 - if HP had chosen to sell at $150, it would have been a loss-leader. that's still an intelligent strategy, though obviously only as _part_ of a plan.

HP, like other tablet vendors, seems to have seen Apple making money and said "we want some of that". so they produced a more-or-less comparable tablet and blithely assumed that they could sell it at Apple prices. but regardless of Apps, or whether HP's product was technically at par, we all know that Apple customers pay a significant premium (say 20%) just to be members of Club Apple.

a 7" tablet, at 250 or so would have been a smart place to start, preferably with a big-brother 10" model at 350-400. and yes, being able to run other software stacks would have been another good move - at the very least it would have generated a lot more buzz.

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[slackergod]

I think SCHeckler's point was that $150 - $200 was the right price to sell it at, given what the TouchPad provided. The fact that it cost HP $318 to make something which only had $200 of value to the customer... just shows why selling it at an even higher cost wasn't going to fix anything. They chose the other obvious option, and stopped selling it.

I'd agree that lack of apps was a problem, but only at the $500 price point. Look at how crazily it sold at $99 (and still successfully reselling on ebay for $200)... all of that is happening with the near *promise* of no new apps, and the vaguest homebrew mutterings of "I wonder if we can port Android". I'd argue the lack of apps becomes an increasing concern only when the price starts making the customer think "what else am I getting, besides a ereader / browser?". Which seems to happen around $300.

Not that it's impossible to move tablets without a major app ecosystem. HP had two other choices besides give up: make a cheaper tablet (as you pointed out, that probably wouldn't have worked); or follow the XBox strategy: sell drastically under cost to flood the market, then ramp up the price on the next gen TouchPad2. The gamble is that the initial glut would grow the marketplace to the point that people looking to pay $500 decide the TouchPad2 has enough apps to make it worth it.

For some reason, they tried to start *out* at that point, selling the premium, without any carrot to pull people in. They should have worked their way up to it; but seemed too risk averse to invest the money needed to carve out the mindshare. Not that there's anything wrong with being risk averse, but why did they even try the half-assed way, when the figures should have blatantly showed it was an all or nothing situation?

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[Nyder]

The touchpad was simply overpriced. If HP had sold it for, say $150 for 16GB, and $200 for 32GB, it may have sold better to begin with. The crazy rate that everyone sold out of all stock means that there are now a whole lot of WebOS tablets in people's hands now. App developers saw a huge spike in downloads after the sale. Getting WebOS out there, people will see what it is like and perhaps not settle for the inferior interfaces of Android and iOS.

HP's own tablet making may be dead. WebOS isn't quite done yet. Wouldn't it be cool if Dell got into the tablet business and licensed WebOS for them...

All the tablets are overpriced.

The price you listed is a great price and why no one is pursing this market is stupid.

Re:touchpad firesale hopefully good for webos

[Anonymous Coward]

A loss on each product is not so bad if it builds up the ecosystem and fuels future demand. As I recall, the Xbox was sold at a loss, and the money was made on the software. I think loss-leading is about the only way you could challenge Android and iOS these days.

And the underappreciated 3DS

[BigCatRik]

The 3DS is a great gaming device (I've played at least 5 games for over 20 hours each) and will get better as more games are released. The previous generation of consoles took up to a year or longer to establish themselves but the doomsayers came out in droves when the 3DS *only* sold 3.6 million within its first few months (and in a non-holiday time frame) instead of the 4 million that Nintendo was hoping for. Luckily, instead of pulling it off the shelves, Nintendo has cut the price (leading to a massive sales surge) and pumped up the publicity for the new games with their major names that are due shortly.

block buster

[Anonymous Coward]

You cant have a middle because then there would be a middle class everything has to go to the top one percent they cant control middle so instead kill it.
My riches cant wait.

Re:Golden Girls!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Will someone please turn off the Wild Wasteland trait? KTHX.

Re:Golden Girls!

[Cryacin]

She's tall enough.

It's not the time on market that's the problem

[guruevi]

The problem is they're trying to imitate an already established or hot product. Imitating is fine if you can keep the price well below the 'original' product or you make massive innovations to it. Microsoft Kin and HP TouchPad were not only knockoffs, they were bad knockoffs with inferior UI, software and performance and cost as much as the original.

The Android model has fared better because it's going on much cheaper phones and a lot larger choice of phones (sometimes even better phones) than the iPhone and it has as a result flourished among developers. Symbian was a decent smartphone system predating the iPhone but it died because they actively excluded most of the home-brew developers and only targeted their own phones which were decent but because they didn't foresee any competition stagnated in features and performance.

Re:It's not the time on market that's the problem

[mjwx]

Symbian was a decent smartphone system predating the iPhone but it died because they actively excluded most of the home-brew developers and only targeted their own phones

This is the single thing that kept WinMo going all those years. The fact that developers were actively modding and improving it. A lot of XDA dev was WinMo before Android came along.

In the final analysis, it's this community that drives adoption by testing out what new ideas work and what new ideas fail. Having used CyanogenMod for most of the last 2 years they have always been ahead of Google in features, but CM had some shocking releases that would have sent most companies bankrupt if they ever released something half as bad. Without an active and technology minded community, you cannot test new ideas in real world conditions and will fall behind companies/organisations that can.

How much shelf space does a product take up?

[jfengel]

A movie is taking up very expensive real estate. It requires a large screening room, with several employees to manage it. Further, the movie is selling not just itself, but the snacks that go along with it. (And that's actually most of where the theater makes its profit; it's showing the movie nearly at cost.)

A tech product can moulder on the shelf, waiting to be discovered. A movie really can't. Netflix has shifted that pattern a bit, but only a bit.

In other words... these are apples and oranges.

Re:How much shelf space does a product take up?

[clodney]

A tech product can moulder on the shelf, waiting to be discovered. A movie really can't. Netflix has shifted that pattern a bit, but only a bit.

A tech product can moulder on a virtual shelf, but not on a physical shelf. Every foot of space in a brick and mortar store is expected to bring in revenue. If a product is taking up 10 feet of shelf and not selling, the retailer will fill those 10 feet of shelving with something that will sell.

This market ruins it for me

[fluffernutter]

Some years ago (three? Four?) I bought a 1st gen iPod touch. I enjoyed it in the beginning. Just a year later I wanted a new skin for it and found all the skins fit Gen 2 and not Gen 1. A year and a half later Apple was releasing a version of iOS that wouldn't work with my 1st gen and three months after that I found that many of the apps I wanted to use were incompatible.

This keeps me in Windows 7 laptops and netbooks because a 1.5 year lifespan on a $600 product is nuts, in my opinion. With windows I could run an MS-DOS application if I wanted to.

Re:This market ruins it for me

[fluffernutter]

Before someone replies to this, I realize I was comparing forward compatibility to backward compatibility there. My point should have been that the PC I bought with windows XP five years ago has Windows 7 now and still runs any application I would like to put on it. Likewise, I am running three year old laptops with Windows 7. That is a much better use of my money.

No single answer

[Anonymous Coward]

If the underlying products is good technically and fits the company vision then staying the course and building a strong base makes sense.
If the product is trash technically, perhaps just an attempt to get on the bandwagon, then dropping the hot potato before getting burnt is the way to go. Few companies can afford to loose millions of dollars for years like Microsoft did with the Xbox.

like tv shows

[riffraff]

Kind of like the tv shows. Nowhere Man lasted only 1 season, years ago, but that was still 22 episodes. There are shows today that get canceled after 3 episodes. Perhaps they should be left out there a little longer to give them a chance to build public interest. I see this in a lot of things, tech, tv, movies, for example.

Re:Golden Girls!

[snooo53]

Yeah, that was a catchy TV theme. Golden Girls in space... who knew?

Wave could have been around forever

[Anonymous Coward]

And it still would have been crap nobody was ever going to use.

Not if support ends as well

[HalAtWork]

Because it leaves users with no way to interface with said tech product in order to access and restore data. Outdated support software (drivers, client software, etc) will no longer work on new OSes, and eventually even though the tech product still functions, it is effectively useless. If a tech product is considered failed, its interface documents should be made public domain so that the community may support the device so that it does not end up as garbage and waste, and so that the users may recover their important data.

I own a Kin

[adeft]

Twom actually. I came due for a new phone as my Verizon contract was coming up as well. I had a EnV touch, which stopped working correctly to the point of being unable to dial most of the time. This was the point where they were trying to liquidate their Kin stock as the project was pulled. I was warned by Verizon staff that the phone is horrible. See the Kin was originally supposed to be a smart phone, but Microsoft and (partners) discontinued all the various interactive online services that communicated with the device rendered it simply a device that could text (qwerty keyboard), make calls (capacitive screen), take pictures (8MP camera), play music (Zune), and surf the net (WIFI) All of these things it does very well, for very cheap and NO required data plan. As a smart phone, there's plenty of better alternatives, but for those of use too primitive to own a smart phone, this thing has no equal. My point? Right product, wrong aim.

The TouchPad may be a and example

[Registered Coward v2]

HP decided they couldn't compete at manufacturing a tablet so they killed it. WebOS still exists and may resurface as a licensed OS on 3rd party tablets from companies who know a bit about manufacturing.

HP appears to have decided that, in most cases, manufacturing technology products is a losing proposition and appears to have decided to remake itself as a software / IT consulting firm. It remains to be seen if they are successful or just become another company that gets bought out and disappears.

The singularity is coming

[Iamthecheese]

Rapid product turnaround is only a symptom of the real problem. Somewhere along the road it was discovered that riding the bubbles makes a quick buck and that enough quick bucks makes a business. Now you have 400 companies at the startup pony races. The company that plods along focusing on long term results, reputation, employee satisfaction, and making a great product tends to be ignored by all those gamblers. And those companies are quietly sitting on the sidelines pulling in cash at low risk. You won't hear about them because they don't tend to make news but those companies are the real future. When today's booms are memories they will be selling tomorrow's products.

This makes no sense.

[blair1q]

It makes sense to pull a movie that's not making money because the exhibitor can make more money by filling that theater with another movie. And the investment in a movie's release ends at its release. Even if you do pull it from theaters you have secondary markets in TV, video, and on-demand services. You only need to provide one copy and many people can consume it.

With a manufactured product you have a large productive system built to make only that product, and shutting it down before giving its product a chance to catch on is wasting the cost you put into it, and the cost you'll incur by shutting it down.

That said, these days it may be much cheaper to rip up a production line, if your business model is to buy your product from a big manufacturer that makes a lot of different products and will absorb no capital loss by shutting down production of your product and selling the capacity to another.

If it walks like Foxconn, quacks like Foxconn, and lets you treat a new technology like an internet posting, it must be the giant sucking sound of jobs moving to China.

PADS are WAY OVERPRICED...

[rmdyer]

iSupply is wacked. The price would be less than $100.00 based on components in lots of 1000.
The prices listed in the BOM look like off-the-shelf component costs.

For example, here's the TOTAL comsumer cost for a new 27' TV...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001431&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Monitors+-+LCD+Flat+Panel-_-SAMSUNG-_-24001431

There is no way a tablet is going to be priced MORE than the above monitor.

Or how about this TOTAL consumer part...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130593

The cost of the high-end engineering that goes into the above graphics card is much more than most tablets these days. Even more considering the market for which these graphics cards are supposed to sell.

There is a reason that APPLE is making a killing on the iPads these days. Consumers wallets are getting taken to the cleaners.

Re:There can be several reasons why a product does

[cdrguru]

When a product fails because "consumers don't know it exists", it simply means it wasn't launched properly. You can't make money without spending money, and today's marketplace is very expensive to get into. That means you need to buy TV ads, billboards, radio ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, web ads, and more and more ads to properly launch a product. You also have to line up the "spokesman" type of folks that will represent the product to the public - they aren't going to talk about it on G4 TV unless you (a) give them one and (b) probably pay for placement somehow. Then you need to get it into retail, which is more pay-for-placement. If you don't want your new product hidden in the back of the store you need to have a nice display stand that the store people can put together and pay for the floor space that it will be taking up.

Not doing all of these things mean you are going to have something that people do not know about. It will not make it into the popular culture mindset, so nobody will talk about it. Should anyone actually mention they heard about it or (gasp!) bought one they will be ridiculed, shouted down or ignored. Because you didn't make it into the popular culture by paying the toll. It is incredible to see the number of product failures that are caused by this simple omission - they didn't understand how to launch a product.

Obviously, this applies to products that are to be mass-marketed to the consumer. If you have a product that is used only by architects designing office buildings you are going to have a whole different kind of product launch. But while it is different, there are still steps you have to go through and tolls to be paid. Failure to do all of the steps or pay all of the tolls means you will likely have a failure.

Also understand that in today's world your investors are going to pretty much demand a product that doesn't sit on the shelf for a long period of time. They are forking out the money for the product to be a success and failing to present it as a success to the consumer will do nothing but piss off the investors. The only way out of that is a complete by-your-bootstraps company where there are no investors. Then I suppose you can take as long as it takes for a product to catch on.

Kill Linux? Kill the CD? Kill VHS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am glad someone didn't kill Linux the moment it didn't take 15% of market. The first VHS systems were not a hit from the beginning. CD's took years to become dominant. EBooks were in use and declared dead on arrival more than a decade before the Kindle. In all of those cases someone kept trying.

However, today there is no patience in the company board of directors, or the investor.

So, yes the flash of excitement is cool, but I sure hope there are inventors out there willing to chip away at a product.

Why are you posting about this on Slashdot?

[SideshowBob]

Why are you posting about this on Slashdot when you could be out making your fortune. Go get yourself an Android license and start cranking out $150 tablets. You're going to make a killing!

Well, why are you still here?

The touchpad is actually a decent product

[Chirs]

I haven't used the others, but I bought a Touchpad for $99. It's fine. A $7 app plays all the downloaded TV shows I have, the built-in browser views all the websites I tried without any problems, including embedded flash video, a kindle app is free, a facebook app is free, there's a decent free weather app, it's got Angry Birds, and a developer mode is easy to enable which gives access to the homebrew apps and custom kernels.

Sure there are minor feature additions that would be nice, but on the whole it's a decent machine. I wouldn't pay full price for it, but then I wouldn't pay full price for the iPad or Transformer either.

Re:The touchpad is actually a decent product

[nine-times]

I wouldn't pay full price for it, but then I wouldn't pay full price for the iPad or Transformer either.

Well but that's kind of my point when I said they weren't necessarily "bad products" but they were products without a market. Obviously there's a market for $500 iPads because Apple is selling them at a healthy pace, but you aren't part of that market. You're also not part of the $500 TouchPad market, and you're not alone-- there is no market for $500 TouchPads. Your market-- the "I want a $500 tablet for $100" market-- obviously exists, but there's no business model for that unless you're subsidizing it some other way.

You just benefited from a huge blunder by a major company and got your product for 1/5th of the price, and still your evaluation is "It's fine." Hardly major praise.

the initial iPod was not a blockbuster...

[Anonymous Coward]

The first iPod was a sleeper. So was the first AppleTV. Nuff said.

Second Best Possible Decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the blockbuster or bust mentality a valid business model? Sure but it depends.

The HP TouchPad was something someone at HP thought they had to do but that they didn’t do it wholeheartedly and the result was ridiculous—a situation that basically amounts to:

“we’ll give you an operating system no programmer cares about, worse hardware, uglier design and poorer logistics than Apple does, with inferior craftsmanship thrown in for free, and you can have it for about the same price Apple is asking. Walk past that iPad display and come on down!”

Given the above situation, cutting their losses like good little corporate lemmings, after performing a mulitimillion-dollar experiment to determine whether tablet buyers were either cretinously stupid or infinitely charitable was a good idea.

In fact, shy of their doing nothing at all until they were *really* ready to take on the iPad (either staying out of the tablet market altogether or only entering it when they had something that wasn’t garbage when compared to an iPad) was the best decision they could have made.

NY Times complaining about rushes to judgment?

[markdowling]

Like that time they crucified Blackberry Storm while RIM were still rolling out post release performance fixes?

Google Wave

[ka9dgx]

Google was IS a really cool technology, with some very bad design decisions layered on top of it.

It could have been the web as TBL envisioned it, writable by all, and Xanadu as Ted Nelson envisioned it, hyperlinked with automatic transclusion.

Mistake 1 was insisting on having each portion of a document appear as part of a thread, instead of seamlessly merged like a real document.

Mistake 2 was making ownership of each portion of the document a primary thing, instead of something best discovered later, as wikis do it.

Mistake 3 was making it look exactly like threaded email, and then letting it get sucked into that pigeonhole, and not trying to pull it back away.

Mistake 4 was in not supporting experimentation into different uses of the underlying protocol at launch time.

Mistake 5 was giving up too soon after it didn't catch on as the threaded mail everyone initially thought it was, and turned out to be a very poor version of.

Wave as a technology is awesome... but it hasn't been tried yet in a usable form. Think sub-etha-edit meets wikis with rich formatting.

Copyrights are so broken that...

[tepples]

if this isn't proof copyrights are broken I don't know what is.

Actually, it's just proof that either the people you were dealing with were being silly, or that you are lousy at making that kind of deal.

That or it's evidence that copyrights are so broken that they make MBAs think being silly is profitable.