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The advertisement said it was the car of the future. It promised more chrome, more safety features, and more style than any automobile on the road. But Ford's Edsel had a major fault: It was ugly. Two years later, in 1959, it was out of production.
The history of the PC industry is riddled with similar flops. And just as the Edsel was the brainchild of one of America's big three automakers, many failed PC products come from companies that still control huge portions of the microcomputer market -- IBM, Microsoft, Lotus, Apple, and Compaq have all had their share. Other failures have come from companies that quietly faded away.
"Some products were marketed before their time," said Julian Horwich, executive director of the Chicago Association for Microcomputing Professionals (CAMP) and longtime industry watcher. "Sometimes the specs were bad, or the marketing, or the implementation." For some, it was the problem of an entrenched competitor. For others it was simply bad timing.
"Another problem . . . was checking the integration with all the other products," Horwich added. "Some software products made bad assumptions about where the (hardware) technology would be in a year or two. One of the classic problems is the 'field of dreams' syndrome: You assume that if you make a technically superior product people will flock to it -- but they won't. It has to solve a business need."
The years 1983 to 1987 were particularly rich with product failures. "I put a lot of products away forever during that period," said Brett Glass, a Palo Alto, California-based consultant.
"People were in the mood for hype; people were finding out how far they could take the computer," said Spencer Leyton, vice president of business development at Borland International Inc., in Scotts Valley, California. "Developers were ready to try anything, but people weren't ready to buy anything."
That's not to say that all products released today are assured success. For all the hype and front-page coverage OS/2 received when it was introduced, the operating system that Microsoft designed for IBM's PS/2 line is one of the industry's most renown sales disappointments. Of course, it may still reach --even surpass -- both companies' revamped sales predictions, but for now it remains less...