Joe Sherlock: How To Succeed By Failing

Joe Sherlock: How To Succeed By Failing

Excerpts from Joe Sherlock:

Every successful company has some skeletons in their closet. Some turkey of a product, service or idea which didn't pan out. Sometimes the flop is so big that it drives the company right out of business. But, many times failure evolves into something very successful.

Everybody thinks of the Edsel as a big failure. The fact is, the Edsel was part of Ford Motor Company's plan to expand their car line into the middle-priced automotive field. The same management group which developed the Edsel also developed the four-seater Ford Thunderbird. While automotive purists bemoaned the demise for the little two-seater T-bird, the four-seat model quadrupled sales. It defined the emerging market for the mid-priced personal luxury coupe; it was a success for almost 40 years. And it gave Ford increased market share in the medium-priced field. By introducing the Thunderbird and the Edsel simultaneously, Ford hedged their bets. The Edsel was a loser, but the T-Bird more than made up for the Edsel's losses.

In the early 1970s, Hewlett Packard introduced the HP3000 minicomputer. The first version failed to deliver on the hype and failed miserably. Reintroduced a year later with improved working features, the HP3000 went on to become a commercial success. Hewlett Packard had learned from their failure and evolved a turkey into a successful product.

The Apple Lisa was an overpriced ($10,000) flop. But it was the first commercial use of the graphical user interface and featured pull-down menus and a mouse. It begat the next generation of Apple computer - the lower-priced Macintosh introduced in 1984 which became a commercial success and led to other Apple products.

Comments

[triticale]

Just thing what success Ford might have had if they kept the T-Bird as a two seat boulevardier, and made the 4-seat T-Bird instead of the Edsel.

The assertion that the Lisa begat the Macintosh is completely out of line with the Mac development histories I have read. The philosophies behind them were very different, and the Lisa faction of Apple attempted to block the Mac project.