Just yesterday I posted about colossal product failures and (my bad) forgot to mention a major one in the making: Microsoft’s Surface. Microsoft has just written-down $900 million in unsold inventory of the Surface RT.
I first read about the impending doom via The New York Times, who on July 19, 2013, pointed out that Microsoft (in comparison to Apple’s iPad) had failed because of ‘impatience.’ In the context of the article impatience relates to having so many options it is confusing to customers – who want things to be easy. (This issue of overstuffing a product is a long-time issue for Microsoft.)
And then I read this spot-on piece in readwrite that was appropriately titled: Scratching the Surface: How to Guarantee a Product Flops. Which did a great job of delineating the major issues: customers didn’t understand what it was, the technology was confusing, the ads didn’t give any real information (also noted in NYTimes article), price points were wrong, and they didn’t have a strong retail strategy.
When I read these post-mortems, I see this list:
1) Didn’t know who their target market was
2) Didn’t have a strong value proposition
3) Didn’t talk to or test with customers
4) Never had the discipline to say ‘no’ to scope creep
6) Didn’t make clear promises at launch
Why no #5? Well, from what I’ve read they did have a product owner/lead – so out of the 6 things that will kill a new product – they only got one right!