On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 12:56:27PM +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote > On Wed, 11 May 2011 20:40:02 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: > > > > KDE devs decided to take the risk and make the jump ahead of the > > > curve. > > > > Coca Cola went from Coke Classic to New Coke; at least they had the > > guts to admit that it was a bad idea, and reverse it. > > > > IBM walked away from their market leading AT. Rather than put a 386 > > cpu on the motherboard, they went with the PS/2 design, which bombed. > > > > Micropro *OWNED* word-processing with a DOS-port of their cpm-based > > Wordstar product. People were begging and pleading with them to patch > > it to recognize subdirectories. Instead, Micropro dropped Wordstar, and > > came up with a "user friendly" menu-driven abortion called Wordstar > > 2000. That was the end. > > > > Do you see a pattern here?
> The pattern I see is that of selecting only changes that failed and > implying they are the norm. > > Why not add other improvements that were so bad, like the switch from > floppy disks to hard disks, or CDs to DVDs? Companies try to predict > where the market should go so they can lead. No one gets it right all > the time, the ones that survive are those that get it right often enough. > The ones that are most likely to fail are those that never try to > innovate in case someone doesn't like it. Floppy disks were being sold long after hard disks were invented. Ditto for CDs after DVDs came out. If Coca Cola had brought out "New Coke" *IN ADDITION TO" "Coke Classic", it wouldn't have been a problem. "New Coke" would've died more quickly, and Coca Cola wouldn't have seen so much backlash. Corporations (IBM's biggest customers) were begging and pleading for ATs with a 386 CPU, not proprietary PS/2s. IBM ceased to manufacture ATs, and said PS/2s or nothing. IBM is no longer a force in the corporate desktop market. If Micropro had added directory support to Wordstar 3.3, it would've been around a lot longer, and Wordstar 2000 wouldn't have been the death blow it was. Hard drives and DVDs competed against their predecessors and won. They were obviously superior. But if your new and allegedly "improved" product can't stand on its own 2 feet and compete against older generation products, and you have to shut down or drop support for the older products for the new one to survive, then it's obvious that the "new and improved" product is a piece of crap. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org>
