Can you think of examples where a corporation is just in love with an idea and keeps releasing products with it, no matter how often it fails? This came about when talking about Honda motorcycles. They are once again releasing motorcycles with automatic transmissions, something they’ve tried at least twice in the past. People that like motorcycles have no problem with shifting, and people that don’t aren’t avoiding them because there’s no automatic option, and yet Honda continues to think “thar’s gold in them thar hills.”
The only other case that comes to mind is Microsoft’s insistence that Mr. Clippy is beloved by Office users.
Actually Clippy (aka Office Assistant) had a fairly short life. It made its debut in Office 97, but in Office XP (2001) it was disabled by default, and it was completely removed in Office 2007.
My former company released a software app that seemed to be a hastily thrown-together compendium of bugs and quirks. But I’ll give them a pass (sort-of) on that because (I think) they were rather novice programmers in those days, working in 1990 or so when much less was known in general about good software engineering (compared to today anyway), and it all went back to the CP/M days! :eek:
Since then, they spent 20+ years selling this product, piling on patch upon patch and ad-hoc bug fix upon ad-hoc bug fix and new features, every one of which, hydra-like, broke 7 things that were working right before.
One of our standing jokes in Customer Support was that, if you dug down through all the patches to find the original core code, you would only find that . . .
Microsoft. Office 2007+ ribbon control
Microsoft Windows 8 for non-touch screen PCs
Complete disconnect with what existing consumers want. They make so much money in other things (like servers) that they can throw whatever they want at end users and not really be affected by the outcome, especially since their previous versions gave them a high market share and everyone is kinda stuck with it as it’s the only thing they know.
I think the US automobile industry could be a good example of blindness.
Starting with the Model T , which Henry Ford said people could buy “in any color they want, as long as it’s black”…(This may just be an urban legend, but it’s supposedly one reason that Ford lost its total domination of the early car industry).
And a better example: the blindness of American car companies in the 1970’s to small cars. The executives kept producing huge gas guzzlers… and then could not comprehend why the public bought those new silly little Toyotas and Hondas. That was blindness on a scale of multi-billion dollars.
And there is the famous example of IBM completely ignoring the small-computer market until it was too late. Real men use real computers, right? Mainframes, not silly little toys…there’s no market there,obviously.
There’s a story (or legend?) I’ve heard that is like this, but with a bit more depth to it.
Seems like Ford commissioned a survey, in which people were asked what they wanted in a car. What mostly everyone said was, they wanted a reliable car that went when you stepped on the gas, and stopped when you stepped on the brake, and got you alive where you want to go. Esthetics be damned. People wanted good and reliable functionality, and they said so.
(We pause now for a brief reality check. Old Henry Ford should have too.)
So Ford build squarish boxy cars like the Model T that looked like shit (although what did the people have to compare it to anyway in those days, and never mind that it’s been viewed as a classic in the days since). The other big manufacturers, however, thought they knew better. They built cars with esthetic, sexy rounded contours and other such niceties that they felt consumers would buy, regardless of what those stupid consumers actually said in those silly surveys.
Guess what. They were right. Consumers flocked to those sexy curvaceous cars and left Ford in the dust. I assume they got a choice of various colors besides black too. (BTW, is that just an urban legend after all? The same story has been told about an early model of the telephone.)
I think Harley Davidson had this problem when they were owned by AMF, though I’m not familiar with the details. It wasn’t a particular product or feature but, the overall philosophy of how to make money caused them to cannibalize the brand for short-term gains. The company recovered when they were sold to private investors.
no–that article is the opposite of what the OP is asking .
The link is to a story about a manufacturer of heavy diesel engines who had to meet new pollution requirements. They took a chance on trying to invent a new technolgy (by improving some exisiting techniques), which-if it had worked–would have made them the brilliant star in the business. The engineers warned the CEO that they might not be able to do it. The CEO ignored them , and told his staff to solve the technical problems anyway.
The engineers were right: the product doesnt work, and now the company is facing bankruptcy.
But that’s not a case of “corporate blindness” (i.e. continuing to produce a product that nobody wants.)-
It’s a case of a betting on the wrong horse…a single bad bad decision to make something new, which then failed.
I’ll agree with you on Windows 8, but the ribbon control, while it took me a day or two to get used to, I find much more intuitive and easier to use than the menus that were in Office 2003. That was a good example of the company ignoring what consumers said in favor of something the consumers would prefer if they had to use it.
I don’t know the details of Honda’s new automatic bike or their previous attempts, but I suspect your characterisation of the situation may be a bit unfair - surely it’s more likely to be the case that they now have new technology available that will make their auto-bikes better than their previous attempts, so this time it will work and be successful?
I wonder how heavy the automatic tranny is? I’d worry that people that don’t want to ride a motorcycle because they’re nervous about shifting (which really isn’t that hard on a motorcycle, much easier then on a car) are going to have a issue with the weight. Most new riders aren’t looking to get on a 700 pound bike.
the Model T was an entry level auto. it was an upgrade from a horse. it was an auto that the non-rich could buy. Ford errored in not providing an alternative as auto ownership later became more common.
Maybe it is not a good example, but Kodak stubbornly held on to its film business and refused to focus (heh) on digital cameras when a half brain-dead monkey could see that was a dying strategy.
It’s only worse to consider that they invented digital cameras.
What kind of transmission?
New Subaraus have a continuously-variable transmission that’s really fancy.
Something like that on a motorcycle could be awesome if it worked right.