Product Failures of the 21st Century
NEW PRODUCTS MANAGEMENT Essay :
According to Cincinnati based research agency AcuPoll, as many of 95% of new products fail each year. So product failure is a pretty common occurrence, but some are more memorable than others based on how much the public anticipated the launch of these products. Some products that were predicted as the next big trend but inexplicably failed represent the kind of famous downfalls we are talking about here. There has been many throughout recent decades such as Apple Newton, new Coke or the Delorean car. In this essay, we are going to analyse one of the biggest product failures of the 21th century the High Density Digital Versatile Disc (HD DVD). We will first present the product and the marketing strategy used for this product before explaining how and why it flopped. We will then discuss what steps could have been done in order for it to have become successful. In 1996, Shuji Nakamura invented the blue laser diode which enables to attain a higher quality of vision. Therefore, from this discovery the world could watch TV in « High definition ». Scientifically speaking, blue lasers have a wavelength which is shorter than the red lasers used in standard DVDs. Therefore, this new technology expanded the DVD's cpacity and allowed to have a higher image quality. In early 2000s, two projects were created in order to build a High definition DVD. Sony started a project called Blu-Ray which will later be the name of the product they would develop. Toshiba replicated with a project whose goal was to create a product which would later be called HD DVD. Its project was supported by Microsoft, NEC and Intel. On April 18, 2006 in the United States, Toshiba launched the first HD DVD players . It was priced between $499 and $799. The price varied depending on the quality of the image delivered . On the same
According to Cincinnati based research agency AcuPoll, as many of 95% of new products fail each year. So product failure is a pretty common occurrence, but some are more memorable than others based on how much the public anticipated the launch of these products. Some products that were predicted as the next big trend but inexplicably failed represent the kind of famous downfalls we are talking about here. There has been many throughout recent decades such as Apple Newton, new Coke or the Delorean car. In this essay, we are going to analyse one of the biggest product failures of the 21th century the High Density Digital Versatile Disc (HD DVD). We will first present the product and the marketing strategy used for this product before explaining how and why it flopped. We will then discuss what steps could have been done in order for it to have become successful. In 1996, Shuji Nakamura invented the blue laser diode which enables to attain a higher quality of vision. Therefore, from this discovery the world could watch TV in « High definition ». Scientifically speaking, blue lasers have a wavelength which is shorter than the red lasers used in standard DVDs. Therefore, this new technology expanded the DVD's cpacity and allowed to have a higher image quality. In early 2000s, two projects were created in order to build a High definition DVD. Sony started a project called Blu-Ray which will later be the name of the product they would develop. Toshiba replicated with a project whose goal was to create a product which would later be called HD DVD. Its project was supported by Microsoft, NEC and Intel. On April 18, 2006 in the United States, Toshiba launched the first HD DVD players . It was priced between $499 and $799. The price varied depending on the quality of the image delivered . On the same