Why Apple Newton, EuroDisney, and another product failed

New Product Failures

Analysis of Three New Product Failures

Apple Newton

The Newton quickly became a product symbol of what happens when Apple attempted to get away from its strengths of innovation based on exceptional design and strove to create products out of their areas of expertise. The Newton failed because it did not reflect the best attributes of the Apple culture of innovation and quantum leaps in aesthetics, performance and usability (Rosen, Schroeder, Purinton, 1998). This was the first and most significant shortcoming of the Newton. It failed to be in alignment with the product development process inside Apple.

Second, its pricing, which ranged from $700 to over $1,000, was in retrospect higher than many of Apple's lower-end laptops of today. Pricing was also completely out of touch with the reality of the Apple customer base, may of which were more focused on paying for an exceptional user experience in their products and less on the note pad like functionality this very expensive device delivered.

Third, the promotional efforts did help to define the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) market when this product launched in 1993 (Rosen, Schroeder, Purinton, 1998). Apple product reviewers have been kind to call it prescient, yet the basic functionality of the operating system delivered a wake-up call to Apple which would later pay off in the success of the iPhone and iPad. Speed, deep functionality, integration and connectivity are effortless in the current Apple operating systems, all lessons learned from the Apple Newton failures.

Microsoft Windows Vista

Introduced in January, 2007, Windows Vista is easily the worst operating system produced in the last ten years. It is an amalgamation of features, many of which were incomplete at the time this operating system shipped, yet were included anyway to make this product appear more fully featured. The lack of product focus has led to this operating system being recalled by many Fortune 500 companies including Dell, a major Microsoft OEM. The quality problems became so bad that corporations began paying to downgrade their systems to Windows XP (Weiss, 2006).

Microsoft failed on this product in several areas. First, the company made massive commitments about performance and usability, only to find its EOMs and enterprise accounts request downgrades. Second, it was supposed to use performance-based memory management, yet reverted back to hybrid memory use, which causes system crashes (Weiss, 2006). Third, the usability and navigation are counterintuitive and very difficult to master. All of these factors, and the lack of recognition of them by Microsoft, led to a near-revolt against this operating system in companies who were also in the software industry (Weiss, 2006). Technology executives who had been die-hard fans to the Microsoft brand were advising their friends to by Apple products as a result. Microsoft took a serious hit to their credibility with the mismanagement of Windows Vista.